Warner Bloomberg, Jr. is not the only Jew ‘ who has ever worked in a steel mill; indeed, a number of Jewish fellow students from the University of Chicago have, for one reason or another, gone down to Gary to work in the large plants there. But that’s just the rub: they come to make some extra money, to get into union work, to get material for a novel or an advanced degree. They don’t come because they have to, and they don’t become, simply, steelworkers. This is the “problem” that Mr. Bloomberg—who has worked in eight factories —here considers, together with its implications for Jewish-Gentile relations in America.
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It was a late summer afternoon and the air inside the plant was thick with heat. Those of us who had come in for the evening shift a little more than an hour before began to pace ourselves slower than usual, and I welcomed an interruption when Old Mike waved to me across the packaging floor. A wide grin split his broad Balkan face as he called “Heyya! C’mere! C’mere!”
I walked over to where he stood, a short, stout man leaning on his broom. He had been in the mill for a long time, though he was still a laborer. His gray hair and slight paunch belied the powerful muscles of a man who had worked hard for too many years.
“Hey boy,” he said to me as I approached. “What you name?”
“My name?” I was a little puzzled since we had worked in the same department for nearly a year. “Bloomberg.”
“Bloomberg?” Old Mike cocked his head to one side, a habitual gesture of his to indicate deep thought. “Bloomberg? What you? Swede? German?”
There was a time when I might have replied with some pseudo-educational subterfuge like “We’re all Americans, Mike” or “My grandparents came from Russia and Austria.” But I had learned by then that this accomplished nothing but confusion. So I said, “It’s a Jewish name.”
Mike cocked his head still farther and squinted at me to show doubt. “No! You Jew-boy?”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe you just part Jew?”
“Nope. I’m a full-blooded Jew—all the way back as far as you can go!”
Mike shook his head in disbelief. “No Jew-boy in factory! Whats a matter, boy? You lost?”
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I did not try to explain the personal odyssey that had taken me from the University of Chicago into this Gary, Indiana, steel mill. Nor did I attempt to initiate any broader discussion about the historical and cultural pressures that have channelized the vocational choices of most Jews for so many generations. All that would have been equally incomprehensible to Mike. Reality is defined for him by the world he knows—the community he lives in, the few places he has visited or heard about from friends, the little he may read, and the much he has learned from the legends of his group. And it is true, by almost all he has seen or read or heard, that there are no “Jew-boys” in the factories.
I worked on the labor gang at a medium-sized Gary factory for a few months. “I can remember one Jew,” my foreman told me, “only one who worked here before you. He couldn’t hardly talk English and I remember once when he was hooking up rods, like you been doing. Ikey—we called him Ikey, I don’t remember what his real name was—well, Ikey was hooking these rods out of a railroad car and there was a skunk in the car. Ikey didn’t know what it was and he tried to pet it. I heard him shouting and smelled the damn thing.”
At this point the foreman began to laugh aloud, body-shaking gasps and chuckles. “When I ran over, he was chasing the skunk with a big stick from the timber in the car. ‘What happened, Ikey? ’ I shouted to him. ‘Oy! ’ he hollers back. ‘That damn pussy cat squirt all over me! ’”
The foreman had known other Jews in Gary, for the city has a small but lively Jewish community. But “Ikey” was the only Jew he had met in a factory before me.
“Listen, I know your people!” I was told by another foreman at a larger mill where I worked for nearly two years. It was a slow midnight shift and we had plenty of time for talk. (Few such interesting conversations occur on the day shift—too many bosses around.) “Why, I worked for Jews and even lived with them when I was a kid. Ate plenty of those fishballs you people make. They didn’t work in the mill, you can bet your life! Can’t get that old gelt in a factory. I can count on my fingers the Jews I know of who’ve worked here, and none of them stayed longer than it took to find a clerking job or save up enough to get a pushcart or open a little store somewhere.”
He pointed an assertive finger at me. “You, too, kid! You won’t be here long either. I don’t know what you’re after, but it won’t be in the mill. You tool You won’t stay in the mill!”
And, of course, he was right. I didn’t.
But the time I did spend in the mills gave me a chance to see myself as a Jew and my fellow Jews as we appeared to so many American workingmen. I began to listen, not only for the traditional anti-Semitic prejudices, but also for any accurate impressions of us that might be contained in what we call, with perhaps a little prejudice of our own, the American Gentile’s stereotype of the American Jew. I began to look about this Midwestern community to see what proof they thought they had found in that little world they knew well for their assertions that Jews would not work with their hands, that Jews all had money, that Jews possessed some shrewd cunning alien to the rest of the human race.
The evidence was surprisingly ample.
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As is true in most of America’s industrial cities, a great majority of Gary’s breadwinners “work with their hands,” although increasingly their jobs involve less onerous and more skilled manipulation of controls on machinery. While a Jew is rarely found in the many local factories, Jews are much more in evidence in downtown Gary than the gross percentages, two and one-half per cent of the city’s population, would suggest. Nearly a tenth of the community’s dentists are Jews and more than a tenth of its doctors and lawyers. Jews make up a larger proportion of the retail and wholesale merchants, especially in clothing (whether expensive haberdasheries or “workingmen’s stores” at the other end of Broadway) but also in furniture, household appliances, and building supplies. Gary’s Jews sell to its multitudes of workers, skilled and unskilled, service them, employ them—but they do not work among them.
One lunch hour I was arguing with Andy, a young Polish American, about the notion that Jews won’t do manual work. After he had taken note of the places where one encountered Jews in Gary, not counting myself and a few other rare exceptions, I decided the time was ripe for a little “educational” work. I explained the long history of oppressions and persecutions that drove European Jewry so long ago from the crafts and the land and established over the centuries a deep-seated cultural predisposition for business and the professions. “I didn’t know about that,” Andy said. I reminded him of the discrimination against Jews displayed by company hiring and promoting practices until recently. “You weren’t the only ones,” he said. I pointed out the host of Jewish farmers and factory workers in the land of Israel. “Is that right?” he said with interest.
But I hadn’t got too far when I was done. “Look,” Andy said, “I’m a Polack. My people never worked in factories until they came to this country—at least damn few of them—but they was mill hands right after they got here and they still are. You got as much chance now as anyone else to get promoted, the union’ll see to it, and you can’t tell me this outfit wouldn’t hire Jews or damn near anybody else they could get the past ten, fifteen years. Right?”
I agreed.
“Well then,” he demanded, “how come you’re about the only Jew in this whole part of the mill?”
Further references to history accomplished little—that was too long ago. Additional comparisons with Israel hardly weighted the scales—that was too far away, too special a case. In Andy’s world of here and now, in the spatial and temporal present of American industrial communities, Jews don’t work in the mills, apparently won’t work with their hands. The distinction between “don’t” and “won’t” is a little too fine to have any meaning. A Jew can walk into the employment office any time he wants to.
I have quite a few Jewish friends who plead guilty to the “charge,” and who seem to feel guilty about it. My wife and I have been building our home (while we live in it) since shortly before I first went to work in a Gary mill over three years ago. “You are both quite exceptional,” said a rabbi (not of Gary). “Jews usually are not inclined to work with their hands like that.” The wife of a local merchant exclaimed: “Why, I never heard of such a thing!” When I assured her that many people build their own homes, she replied: “Oh, I know that. But not our people!”
Andy had an explanation for this presumed Jewish aversion to physical labor.
“There’s one thing I’ve never been able to figure out about your working here,” he told me. “You won’t make any money in this place, not read money like your people always make.”
The history of Andy’s family, as he knew it from experience and hearsay, was like that of so many industrial workers, a long and not always successful battle with poverty— at least until the last dozen years. It seemed to these people that the American Jews almost never shared this fate.
During another lunchtime conversation among a group of us one of the men, referring to a fairly well-known Gary citizen, said, “Sure he’s got a lot of dough. He’s a Jew, ain’t he?” Several nodded but a few glanced in my direction as if expecting some retort. However, “Farmer” Harden (who as far as I know has never been a farmer) exercised his sense of humor on the situation. “How about that, Bloomberg!” he shouted at me. “When you going to dig into that million you got stached away and come to work in a Cadillac ‘stead of that crummy old Plymouth of yours?”
“Don’t worry about him!” the foreman boomed out. “You’ll get that old gelt, won’t you, ‘Bloom-in-berger’?”
“You mean,” I replied, “I won’t lose what I make growing a spaghetti and Dago-red potgut like you got!”
Joe patted his stomach. “Don’t insult that,” he said as we all laughed. “That’s a lifetime investment and I wouldn’t trade it for any fat Jewish bankbook!”
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Why are they so sure that Jews always have money? It is true that the Jewish community in Gary looks at present quite prosperous. More than a decade of economic boom has rewarded the Jews handsomely for their specialization in the goods and services the local community needs. Undoubtedly the inner and outer pressures which guide so many Jews into the professions and commerce have served them better from the standpoint of income than tendencies to become ditchdiggers, migratory farm laborers, or low-skilled factory hands. Moreover, the rather tightly knit ethnic community also offers a wide network of useful “contacts” for the young Jew “starting out.” The old Reform Sunday school hymn told us: “There is a mystic tie that binds the children of the martyred race.” However it may defy analysis, that tie can be most useful in opening a shop or office, from the standpoint both of location and clientele.
But even in less prosperous times than these recent years the Jews appeared to these workingmen somehow to have more than their share of wealth. The Jews seemed to escape poverty. “I can still show you poor Bohunks, Dagoes, Polacks,” one of my friends argued earnestly. “But you show me a poor Jew!”
As I sought to answer him, casting about for a truthful and understandable explanation, I realized that the poverty-stricken Jew in fact is seldom seen by most American workers. This is not only because the Jew often lives somewhat apart, not only because he is such a small minority, not only because his tendencies toward middle-class occupations favor him economically. It is also a consequence of the fact that American Jewry, for all the charges, from within and without, of being “careful” with its money, has done a remarkably good job of taking care of its own.
On a personal level this cultural impulse toward giving has yet another effect. My factory friends were often surprised when I told them of the extent of gift-giving that goes on among Jewish families, especially from parents to children. (Those workers who had a Jewish friend or two always volunteered the information that these friends were unusually generous.) They were somewhat more familiar with the “I can get it for you wholesale” that helps some Jews with less income to equal the possessions of the Gentile who earns more. Less a part of their experience, again, was the intense drive for education that pervades Jewish life and leads so many young Jews into more lucrative occupations.
It all seems a little mysterious to Joe or Andy or “Farmer.” Somehow escaping the life of physical toil, the American Jew appears almost magically to attract, if not wealth, then at least a material well-being that workingmen admire, envy, but often cannot attain. And vaguely to their minds from time to time come ancient warnings about the Jews and their dangerous talents.
“Don’t worry, I’d never try to trick you” a particularly obnoxious fellow from the Kentucky hills told me during a conversation about buying and selling used cars. “I’m pretty sharp,” he added, “but I know better than to try to get the best of a Jew. I’d be beat before I started!”
Whatever qualities they attribute to each other, the different groups in the factory work force have learned that they are all pretty much the same as far as their role in our daily economic life is concerned. The Italian American who feels that he has been overcharged by his German American doctor, his Irish American clothing merchandiser, his Polish American grocer, can find their “countrymen” on his shift in the mill and, if he wants, complain to them about the injustice. They may sympathize with him or they may tell him where to take his “Dago” troubles. But he knows that as a group they are blessed with no faculties more occult or powerful than his own.
But if he comes to work with a tale of corrupt practices by a Jewish professional or businessman, he finds no Jew who shares his own vocational and economic fate and can commiserate with him over the faults of some of the “race” or tell him where to get off. Above him, below him, and equal to him in the hierarchy of the plant he can find representatives of nearly every other American ethnic group, and of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority, too. Only the Jews are missing.
As I came to see myself and other Jews through these workers’ eyes, I saw also that their prejudices reflected not only the malicious and debasing hatreds of humankind’s emotional sewers, but also grew honestly out of experience. Then I began to feel more free to speak out to them, not as some near-anonymous, unidentifiable, somehow homogenized American, but as a Jew. And I found, to my delighted surprise, that they had been waiting for me to do this.
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I was working with the obnoxious Kentuckian early in the evening one four-to-twelve shift. (This was prior to the discussion about used cars.) The craneman for whom I regularly hooked was driving a tractor that shift and this fellow had taken his place. The conversation that went on between us covered the range of subjects which can occupy two men working together in a factory—sports, cars, women, family, travel, politics. We managed to disagree about all of them, sharpening the obvious conviction of each that the other was doing only half a job at best.
Then he got somehow into a long discourse on how he could always tell if a man was a Jew—the nose, maybe, or the hair, or “just something” about him. “Almost like I could smell him,” he claimed. I denied that he or anyone had such powers, adding weight to my declarations by telling him that I knew more Jews and more about them than he ever would.
He leaned over the edge of the crane cab a little. “You aren’t a Jew, are you?”
“You’re damn right I am!”
He looked a little surprised, sat back, and started to work the controls. Later, when he came down from the crane for lunch and we were talking again, he said: “I bet you thought I didn’t know you were Jewish When I began to talk about Jews.”
“Well?”
“Hell! I knew you was a Jew! Like I said, I can always tell. Even if you don’t never talk like you was a Jew. Least not till tonight.”
You’re a liar, I thought, but I did not argue with him further. I was preoccupied with his last remark, that I had “never talked like a Jew” until that evening. What did the so-and-so mean by that? Suddenly I knew. In that moment I realized that of all the men on our crew, I was the only one who really tried to be an “unhyphenated American,” who actually looked upon himself as brother to all men instead of a member of a specific “race” or “nationality.”
After that I began to talk about Jews from time to time, just as those of Polish, Italian, Irish, German, Greek, or Slavic extraction talked about their “countrymen.” As appropriate occasions arose, I found myself covering quite a range of subjects—Jewish cooking, Jewish religious beliefs, Jewish family life, Jewish vocational predispositions, Jewish business practices. I explained, defended, or merely added grist to the conversational mill in the same way as the Polacks, Dagoes, Bohunks, Micks, and colored would at one time or another rise to rebuff an assault on the reputation of their group, or would inform a curious listener about its traditions, or would merely relate some anecdote about what it means to belong to such a segment of humanity.
Whenever I spoke about Jewish matters, my fellow workers were interested. They listened, they expressed assent or disbelief, they argued, they inquired further. A whole new dimension in my relations with them had opened, and I found in turn that I was learning from them, that they were leading me to re-examine aspects of my life I had long taken for granted.
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I am one of that rather large number of “unreligious” young Jews, taking “religious” in the most conventional sense of the word. I inherited the neither-here-nor-there Jewishness of my father, which still characterizes much of my own family life today. In a home such as the one I grew up in, a child attends Reform Sunday school where he learns little because he is not much involved. The family goes to temple on the High Holidays but seldom in between. Christmas and the Fourth of July may get much the same kind of attention as the favored Jewish holidays that are celebrated. Yet there is never any doubt that one is and always will be a Jew.
I was aware even when young that there were other modes of Jewishness, ranging from the old Orthodox life permeated by piety and tradition, through the resurgent, consciously implanted “Jewishness in the home” that characterizes increasing numbers of families of Conservative or Reform leanings. I never considered myself any less “Jewish” than these others (and I still do not). And when we walked abroad among the Gentiles, we were the same. Most of us carried our Jewishness in our hearts but hoped it would not show on our faces. We were eager to be viewed by the larger middle-class community as part and parcel of its supposedly undifferentiated secular self. We were anxious not to be discriminated against, anxious to avoid embarrassment. Only the older, un-Americanized Jew still spoke as a Jew in public; but his public, even in the middle-sized Midwestern city, was a self-selected all-Jewish ghetto with neither the opportunities nor the dangers of the mixed world into which most Jews ventured in the course of their daily work and many of their pleasures.
No matter how fully the Jew recognized and designated himself as such within the home, he usually sought some all-American anonymity abroad. At work or in a public place a remark about Jews, whether in the covertly aggressive style of humor or as a baldly provocative assertion, brought him inner anguish but more often than not produced a poker-faced non-reaction on his exterior. He would wait tensely for the course of conversation to change, perhaps hoping that some friend, aware that he a Jew was among them, would adroitly alter its course. Cultural pluralism by the hearth, homogeneity in the streets.
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In the factory I found a new pleasure in being a Jew openly and, on the few occasions when I felt like it, aggressively. When Joe discussed Italian cooking, I compared kreplach with ravioli. Andy and I talked for nearly an hour about similarities and differences between Catholicism and Judaism. If the Negro Harry complained that he had been “done” by a Jewish merchant in Gary, I asked how many times financially delinquent members of his race had been aided and befriended by my brethren in the retail trades.
A Litvak named Steve was particularly a nuisance about my being Jewish. He was the only man in the department who called me a “kike,” I think not realizing that this was like calling an Italian American a “wop” instead of a “Dago.” Occasionally he would announce that he liked to watch me talk because I waved my hands around so much. He enjoyed telling the girls in the department that there were two Jews working with them—myself and the Negro tractor driver Morris with whom I worked moving piles of sheet steel, a man noted for the close guard he kept on his old-fashioned purse. “We got a white Jew and a black one!” Steve would exclaim.
I bided my time, waiting for the ideal moment that was bound to come sooner or later. One day Steve and Morris got into a heated argument over the way the work was being done. It was an important issue and Steve, good Slav that he was, soon was gesticulating toward the ceiling, the floor and the farthest walls. I stood beside them quietly repeating from moment to moment: “Steve, put your hands in your pockets!”
Each time I made this remark of obvious reference, his face grew more livid but his hands would not stay still. He became flustered and Morris began to win the argument, a real tragedy for Steve. Then, when he seemed almost on the verge of apoplexy, the good humor that characterizes the culture of the mixed factory society came to the surface. He started to laugh. “By God!” he roared. “There’s three Jews out here—you, Morris, and me!” He never again referred to my gesturing.
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Once I had dropped the guise of the unhyphenated American, which had so confused my fellow workers, I became the main source of whatever information about Jews they might occasionally desire. I think I did good service in the cause of mutual understanding. More important for myself, I began to sense more of the dimensions and qualities of this factory milieu as far as inter-group relations were concerned. It certainly was not based on any profusion of brotherly love, for I had heard every prejudice expressed with frequency—all the nasty stereotypes about each minority group that worked in the mill or lived in Gary. On the other hand, there was a profound respect for the common undertaking of the jobs we did, the common opposition to management, the common rights we had under the union contract. In these things we were equal-any differences were individual, unrelated to race or religion or national origins.
Here was a notion of equality in which the men could believe, which they could uphold in their actions—equality within the limits of a specific joint enterprise and equality before the law. But they never confused that concept with identity. In the milieu of the factory men are not the same, not required to love one another, are perhaps “cousins” but certainly are not “brothers.” They know they are different from each other, whether the differences are racial or traditional; and they are deeply loyal to their own group. Yet they will uphold a man’s rights on the job whether he comes from a segment of society they love or hate. Free from the onerous and unfair burden of pretending love for those they really dislike, of asserting a common nature when all of life’s experiences insist on the existence of crucial differences, they can yet work out an increasingly stable, effective, and happy association.
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A number of us, colored and white, were enjoying a round of joke-telling during our extra-long lunch one midnight shift. “Smitty,” a thin little white man with those natural talents that have carried more than one vaudeville star to fortune, rose to command the only stage on which he ever would appear. Atop a package of steel plate he announced: “Here’s one that I learned in the army.
“There was a big review, see, and when you go by the reviewing stand everybody’s supposed to look toward the commanding officer right when the order’s given—lots of snap and stuff, you know. And the officer in charge of this one platoon, he told ‘me over and over, ‘When I say Eyes Right! that’s just what I mean! I want every one of you mother’s sons to remember that! Remember! Eyes Right! ’
“Well, they go marching by the reviewing stand and this officer hollers ‘Eyes Right! ’ and everybody snaps their heads around so hard you can hear their tailbones click—all except a big colored fellow, Willie, right up in the front row where everybody can see him. He goes marching along, looking straight ahead. The officer hollers ‘Eyes Right! ’ again and Willie, he just keeps looking straight ahead.
“Soon as the parade’s over, the officer, he grabs Willie and he hollers at him: ‘What the hell is the matter with you? ’ And Willie says, ‘Mattuh, suh? ’ This makes the officer even madder and his face gets all red and he screams at Willie, ‘Didn’t you hear me say Eyes Right! ’
“And Willie, he says, ‘Yassuh, boss. And yo sho is! ’”
There was a roar of laughter. I flinched a little inside and glanced at the Negroes in our group. They were laughing too, loud and long—a genuine laughter, not a cover-up, not in the least strained. And why not? We recognized our differences, informed each other about them, argued about them, attacked and defended them. Why not tell jokes about them, too? “Smitty” has his quota of anti-Negro prejudices, but he wasn’t exercising them when he gave his performance that night. There was no malice in his mind or in the minds of his listeners. It was a funny story based on a difference in the normal speech of two groups, a difference everyone knew about and accepted as natural.
Later on four of the men started an Italian game, “chingo,” which is too complicated for brief description but which appears to the uninitiated like a hysterical waving of arms accompanied by a bedlam of Italo-English polyglot and curses in half a dozen tongues. “Smitty” and one of the Negroes teamed up against the Italian foreman Joe and a Welshman, also a crane operator, who grew the biggest tomatoes to decorate our lunchtime. The rest of us sat around them and chided and cheered. “Farmer,” also something of an expert in the game, turned to me. “Bloomberg,” he said, “you oughta learn this, only do your counting in that there Yiddish your people talk. You’d really have these guys buffaloed!”
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It is a year since I left the factory. The world to which I have in part returned, a society of publicly homogenized Americans, is uncongenial to my new-found freedom. I regret this. Somehow, for me, no amount of consciously contrived Jewish ritualism in the privacy of our home can substitute for the easy and spontaneous expression of my identity and cultural inheritance among the Gentiles. But the artifices of middle-class inter-group etiquette and the propaganda of brotherly love will not have it so.
Yet there are signs of change, hopeful change from my point of view. The long alienation of the Jews from the manual crafts is giving way, more slowly in the face of simple opportunity in America than under the impact of dire necessity in Israel. Of the Jews finding their way into the factories, proportionately more are engineers and technicians than hourly paid employees. But there is an increasing number who prefer to earn a solid (if somewhat greasy) paycheck with accompanying benefits and security than squeeze out a living as meager proprietors or common clerks.
It should be said, of course, that even a mass migration of Jews into the occupations of our factories would not utterly re-create the attitudes of the rest of the workers toward Jews. Anti-Semitic prejudices are much more than an exaggerated reaction to contemporary social realities; they are as deeply imbedded in their respective cultures as are the traditional vocational predispositions of the Jews. But it is equally true that the traditional hatreds of, say, the Irish for the English or the Poles for the Germans have been mitigated in great degree by their common experiences on the job and in the community.
Perhaps the workers’ antipathy toward the Jews is given a special quality by its very universality. Only toward the Jews and the Negroes does every other ethnic and national sub-culture in America have a specific and similarly antagonistic attitude. But Negroes work in the mills, all too obviously suffer poverty, and are stereotypically assigned qualities quite opposite to those which would beget wealth and power. If there are unique characteristics in the anti-Semitic prejudices of the workers that distinguish them from prejudices against other groups, there also appears to be an equally unique validation of those hostile preconceptions in the day-to-day life of a town like Gary. Though’ changes in vocational patterns among Jews obviously will not eliminate the traditional anti-Jewish feelings of the workers, neither will they leave them entirely unaltered.
Especially if, on the job, American Jews will come to feel less constrained to hide their qualities and accomplishments under an ill-fitting and little-concealing cloak of often embarrassed, often unsuccessful public anonymity. Any minority which has been as successful as the Jews in America is in no position to attempt to escape special designation, and I doubt that we really would want to exchange any part of our achievement for a more brotherly embrace from our fellow Americans. If out of our anxieties and fears we protest too much that we are all alike, we may find that we have neither allayed suspicion nor lessened prejudice. In the mill, at least, candor seemed the most effective technique for setting the Gentile straight about his prejudices.
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