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Wait: A Memoir of a Red Diaper Baby
66"|%/Tother is going to die soon and I will lose my job."
IVxThis was my father's bedtime announcement throughout my
high school years and maybe earlier. Then he would say, "I love you"
and feel my legs through the blanket to make sure they were fully
extended. He thought that sleeping with drawn-up legs would produce
some deformity.
Occasionally there was a gloss:
"Mother is dying of a blood disease; that's why she gets into bed
after work for a few hours before making dinner. I won't give names of
people that were at a meeting in the 1930s; that's why I will lose my
jobs both at the high school and the college."
1
As a youngster, I was constantly embarrassed if not humiliated
by my father. He would start talking to someone and suddenly that
person would be transfixed and chaos usually ensued. We got on a
crowded bus and my father said something or other to the bus driver.
Eorthwith, the driver stopped the bus and starting pulling out pictures
of his children to show my father. Cars around us honked and their
drivers shouted out of rolled down windows. The people in back of me
began to push. Everybody seemed mad but the driver kept on talking
to my father about his family.
Finally, our turn came in the line for the butcher. He started to
tell my father all about where on the cow's body the different cuts of
beef came from and how best to cook them, how the quality of meat
had declined and how the A&P was destroying the art of cooking. The
people in back of us started rumbling and then shoving me as if I could
turn off theflowinglecture. Both the bus driver and the butcher and
innumerable others I encountered with my father acted if they had
gone through their entire previous life with no one willing to listen to
them and were making up for it.
Another time was easier. We were in the pediatrician's office. As
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we started to leave, the doctor asked my father for "advice on where to
go in Europe with his new bride." An hour later we rapidly scurried out
through a waiting room full of coughing kids and their irritated parents.
During a visit to me in college, my father and I were lining up for
food in the dining room and I suddenly remembered to say urgently
to him, "Talk to the third serving lady along, the one serving potatoes.
You spoke with her when you visited three years ago and she asks after
you every damn single time I come to her on the line."
When he said "hello" to her, the plump, usually dour if not mute
lady suddenly erupted into such a joyous outburst one would think
she had just won the lottery. I couldn't quite hear what they were
talking about because the muttering, carping, and complaining of the
undergraduates in back of me was getting louder and louder and I was
backing away, trying to dissociate myself from the dialogue in frijnt of
me and melt into the pushing line behind me.
Sometimes my father would talk us into such interesting places
that I quickly got over my embarrassment. On a visit to Wall St. he
took me into the Federal Reserve Bank and told the guard and then
some official, "I'm an economics teacher and I would like to show my
son around the bank."
We were then whisked down sevenfloorsand saw large cages full
of gold bars and then upstairs to a big room full of money and check
sorting machines.
Another time we were on a train going through Connecticut. Kent
was announced and my father said, "Let's get off here and visit the
Kent school. It's a well known private high school."
There we were taken to the headmaster's office where my father
explained, "I am a high school teacher and would like to show my son,
who is in elementary school in Brooklyn, your school."
We were escorted by the headmaster to a classroom like one I had
never seen or imagined. About ten kids dressed in little tweed jackets
and striped ties sat around a large oval oak table. Then we left and
got back on the train.
He himself could be publicly humiliated. In a crowded shop he
perceived a woman being verbally abused while trying to return some
stale bread and proceeded to take her side. The enraged shopkeeper
pushed him out and the loose oranges in his arms tumbled onto the
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Charles Gross.
Street and rolled into the gutter as I followed.
My father used to make some sour milk concoction by letting milk
"spoil." One time something went wrong and he started to vomit it up
on a long distance bus we were traveling on. I urged him to tell the
bus driver to stop so he could get off and vomit in the road. He shook
his head vigorously, and put his finger to his stained mouth ordering
silence and then continued to vomit and the whitish stuff with dark
little bumps like peas in it poured out, ran down the length of the bus
until it finally reached the nose and then eyes of the bus diver. The
driver stopped the bus, evacuated the other passengers and handed
my father a mop and bucket yelling, "What are you an idiot baby...
clean up your fucken mess so we can load up and get out of here!" I
trailed after my father; the bucket was too heavy for me.
2
In my experience my father's sole political activity was in the
Teacher's Union. I would read about its activities in The New York
Teacher News that came each fortnight. This was not a bread and
butter conventional union concerned with wages and such. Rather it
was a politically active one particularly interested in improving the
educational and social programs of the school system. It introduced
Negro and Women's History week into the curriculum. Its News
often had large supplements full of essays and suggested reading
for these and similar programs which were distributed nationally. It
agitated successfully for more black teachers, more schools and more
educational resources for Harlem. It was thefirstteacher's organization
to advocate racial integration for schools long before this became a
national issue. It put out pamphlets to fight discrimination, racism
and prejudice. It took strong positions on such issues as progressive
education, classroom size and student rights.
As I later learned, the Teacher's Union was founded in 1916 as a
local of the American Federation of Teachers (AFL). In 1935, a group
of anti-Communists left the Union to form the rival Teacher's Guild. In
1941, the Teacher's Union was thrown out of the AFL as Communist
dominated, so then it joined the CIO. In the great purge of left-wing
unions in 1950 it was thrown out of the CIO for being Communist run.
Starting then, its leaders were gradually purged from the school system
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and its main activity became defending academic freedom and its own
members from being fired. Perhaps two or three hundred members
were fired and a similar number, like my father, resigned before they
were publicly exposed and fired.
My parents would go out many evenings a week to what they
described to me as "school meetings." After they died my Uncle Sol
explained, "Those meeting your parents would go to all the time were
actually Party meetings... on the way home, they usually stuffed the
leaflets they were supposed to distribute into the sewer. You used to
piss in your bed at night because they were out almost every night." I
didn't remember that I had ever pissed in my bed but I believed the
rest of his story.
In 1953 my father was called before the Feinberg Commission.
This New York investigatory body had been set up to free the New
York City school system of anyone "advocating the overthrow of the
Government by force, violence, or any unlawful means . . . and any
member of a society or group that taught or advocated such action,"
• When he faced the Commission's "trial examiner" my father, in the
parlance of the day, was asked to "name names." Naming names of
those seen at a Communist Party meeting decades ago was necessary
to establish "good faith" and thereby keep one's teaching job. Anyway,
this is the way he recounted it to me at the time, although I don't
remember if he said "progressive" meeting or "political meeting" or
just "meeting."
The accounts of other teachers summoned before the Feinberg
commission differed from my father's in one important way. My father
had omitted mentioning the initial, familiar question, "Are you now
or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party ofthe U.S.?"
A "yes" answer to current membership would terminate employment
as a teacher. If the answer was "not now" or "never," then as in my
father's account, good faith would have to be demonstrated by naming
names . . . names of attendance at some meeting that in most cases,
presumably, they already knew about.
At the end ofthe meeting with the trial examiner, again according
to my father, he made a successful plea to be allowed to finish out the
school year (he could even talk to trial examiners). When the term
ended, he quietly resigned, missing a full pension by one year, but
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Charles Gross-
avoiding the publicity of exposure.
I never asked him about his Party membership until, in 1960 when
we were driving along Loch Ness, near Inverness in Scotland, I asked
him, "When did you leave the Party?"
He answered, without further comment "In 1953, after Hungary."
Much earlier I had used that approach in asking him, "When did
you stop believing in God?"
He answered "When I was thirteen."
Just before his bar mitzvah he had gotten into an argument with
the rabbi and the rabbi's skullcap fell off. He went home and told his
mother. With nary a word, she then took him to a storefront synagogue
on the other side of town and he was bar mitzvahed there soon after
on a weekday.
3
My father's actual birthday was somewhat uncertain. He came over
with his parents from the Pale of Settlement to Hester St. in Manhattan's
Lower East Side when he was a year or two old. His birthday was on
the sixth Chanukah candle in 1900 or maybe 1901. When he entered
school this date did not suffice, so his mother took him to the local
rabbi. The rabbi calculated his birthday as Dec. 25, but declared
this unsuitable for a Jewish boy and so set it as Dec. 15, 1900. Later
we would celebrate all three December dates. Much later when my
father was in the New York Hospital Intensive Care Unit, surrounded
by oxygen tanks, my sister caused a stir by walking in on his birthday
bearing a menorah with six lit candles.
My father's father never held a regular job after being fired in a
furrier strike when my father was twelve, at which point my father
was sent out to sell chewing gum on the street in between household
duties like carrying coal to their sixth-floor tenement. Their two-room
apartment was filled with six siblings as well as various uncles and
aunts and more obscure relations on their way from steerage to a new
life. Success for my father had been predicted because when the
mattresses and blankets were laid out for the night, he hid his shoes
in a crevice under the dining table and thus was the only person to
effortlessly find their shoes in the morning chaos. Political argument
was the ubiquitous background: many of the transient relatives were
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of various anarchist and socialist persuasions.
About once a year, when I was a schoolboy my father took me
to his parents, then in the Boro Park section of Brooklyn. Like the
halls of their apartment house, they smelled of chicken fat as they
rubbed their stiff bristles onto my face and said something I could not
understand about "boychik." I tried to smile. My father spoke to them
in Yiddish, still their only language. I was struck by the absence of
books and magazines. The only decorations on their blotched walls
were my father's diplomas.
My father and his friends went to Townsend Harris High School,
a three-year high school attached to City College and taught by its
faculty. (He once said the only thing that Fiorello LaGuardia had. done
wrong as mayor of New York was to abolish Townsend Harris; he did
so because it was too "elitist.") As seniors he and some of his friends
were at risk of failing solid geometry so they traipsed around to each
other's parents to explain that they were transferring to a regular city
high school because it would be better. They were saved by World War
I: volunteering to work as farm laborers automatically passed them on
their solid geometry and other final examinations.
When I was a teenager, my father would relive this by going off for
two weeks in the summer with his best friend from childhood. Rogue,
to harvest tobacco in Connecticut. They would go in Rogue's 1927
La Salle, which Rogue would sleep in because he was afraid it would
be stolen for stock car races. Rogue had a little machine shop in his
garage where he made parts for the long defunct car. Once the car had
been owned by Rogue, my father, and two other friends. They crossed
the country in it one summer. The women, my father told me, were
worried about getting pregnant. Eventually Rogue bought out the other
owners and my father never owned any part of a car or drove again. A
larger group of my father's friends owned a wooden ketch, the Harpoon.
Once my father sailed on it to Bermuda. Later, Rogue was again the
sole owner and spent every weekend working on it. Sometimes when
I was a kid we would go up to City Island in the Bronx and spend the
day sanding the Harpoon's deck. Much later Rogue took my father, my
kids and me on a sail. We ate soup down below on a table suspended
from the ceiling. It swayed and the hot soup spilled onto the table and
rolled into my daughter's lap, but she had her coat on.
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Charles GrossHis friends had named Rogue "Rogue" when he married a
minister's daughter, Phyllis, who changed their name from Rogenstein
to Rogers. Phyllis alone called him "Billie." Rogue painted and
sculptured and made parts for his car and boat, but made his living as
a chemistry teacher. Phyllis was a biology teacher. It was hard to move
around their house because all the surfaces, including thefloors,were
piled high with every kind of book, especially non-fiction. Rogue got all
his meals from his mother each week and stored them in containers in
the refrigerator, but when we came the books on the table were pushed
aside and Phyllis cooked for all of us, even Rogue.
4
By the time my father was working on his doctoral thesis in history
at Columbia he was a Communist Party member. Then the Party asked
him to quit graduate school and go to work as a high school teacher of
history and economics. I guess it was lucky for me, if not for him, that
they did not send him out to organize in the mills or mines of America
as they did to so many of his Party peers. He spent 29 years (one less
than the number required to retire on a pension) at Seward Park High
School. Judging by his own accounts and especially the adulation
he received from his students when he would take me to his classes
(when I was so small that the students and their desk seats seemed
enormous), how affectionately he was greeted when we walked about
the school's neighborhood in the lower east side of New York (but
once an ex-student got hostile because my father could not remember
him), and the extensive trove of fan letters (later discovered in a black
binder), he certainly seem to have been a very fulfilled, successful
and beloved teacher.
In the evening, my father taught educational sociology in the City
College School of Education and economics in its business school.
Very much out of character, he once boasted to me how Jack and Phil
Foner (of the Party's academic and intellectual elite) had taken his
sociology course and steered others to it.
5
My mother was a Party member too. She was born in the States
but her parents also came from the Pale. Her father. Max, was an
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upholsterer for the Hotel New Yorker and his wife Becky was from
a slightly higher strata of shetle life. After they fired him at se\'entyfive, he spent his time making and repairing couches and chairs for
us and for his other daughter Ann, a school teacher who lived near
us in Brooklyn and was married to Sol, a dentist and serious amateur
photographer. When Max worked on a piece of furniture he had tacks
sticking out of his mouth, which seemed really weird. But when I could
read I understood why his boxes of tacks said "sterilized" on them.
Although my mother spent about seven years in and out of college
she never got a B.A. degree, perhaps because it was too bourge;ois at
that time in her life. She worked as a secretary in the public school
system and was active in the American Labor Party (A.L.P.), a far left
organization. Although Aunt Ann and Uncle Sol were Party members,
they were never called to testify or otherwise hassled, nor was my
mother. This may have been because they were members of "street
cells" whereas my father was a member of a "school cell." Or it may
have been because my father had been prominent in far left circles
before the war. For example, his name had been plastered on election
posters all over town as one of a list of supporters of Benjamin Davis,
a successful black candidate for the New York city council. (Those
were the days of proportional representation, PR, which elected
two communist members to the city council as well as a number of
Republicans and minor party candidates. To get rid of the Reds, PR
— viewed as a communist plot from the Kremlin — was abolished in
1947, making the city council overwhelming Democratic ever since.)
Or maybe it was just because he was a more active member of the
Teacher's Union or of the Party for all I knew.
6
Looking back, I see how my parents worked hard (and rather
successfully) to give me a "normal American experience" while, at
the same time, injecting their Marxist views on history, politics and
everything else, since Marxism had a line on everything from education
to art. The Marxist books had been removed from the house and stored
in someone's cellar before I could read. Only the novels from the leftist
Book Find Club remained among conventional classics to reveal the
family politics. However, my father systematically transferred his
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politics into my head by going over articles in The New York Times with
me. On Sunday I was sent out to get the Times and the Daily Worker,
then the Worker wrapped in the Times, and eventually the Times alone.
I.F. Stone's bulletin lay around, as did the Star and the Compass,
transient New York left newspapers. When I asked what words like
"dialectical materialism" meant he never answered but said, "ask
Ben." Ben Field who was a novelist and columnist for the Worker who
lived nearby. I was told never to mention in school Paul Robeson, whose
huge form had once towered over me at a concert, or indicate I knew of
Saco and Vanzzeti or Spartacus or Joe Hill or any of the left pantheon,
or even Pete Seeger. I was continually instructed to keep my politics
hidden, to feign ignorance ofthe Haymarket massacre, Harry Bridges,
the Lowell Mills strike, the Pullman strike and so on. This latter list
was easy: I never heard any of them mentioned until as an adult I met
American social historians (often from backgrounds similar to mine).
This anxious exhortation not to talk, let alone act, about politics actually
extended well into my adult life, "Don't jeopardize your grades," my
father said, "until you can get into college," He repeated the plea when
I was in college and then in graduate school: "Don't sign anything
too radical until you get a job." When I got a job, "Wait until you get
tenure." Wait. Wait, until you can be effective. Wait.
7
My father never regretted his Party membership or was bitter
about losing his job. He was always proud of the Party's role in the
United States in such things as helping organize the CIO, defending
railroaded blacks like the Scotsboro boys and political prisoners
like the Haymarket Massacre Martyrs and even his own small role
introducing Black and women's history into the New York school
system. After Khrushchev's speech in 1956, he accepted that he had
been very wrong about conditions in the Soviet Union but that mistake
never destroyed his belief in "social justice through socialism."
As part of their campaign to Americanize me my parents kept me
away from the numerous activities for Communist kids in and around
New York. It was only as an adult that I discovered them by reading
"red diaper" memoirs by children of the far left and by meeting real
red diaper babies at college. There were a number of Communist
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summer camps for kids like Camp Kinderland where Pete Seeger
was the music counselor and Paul Robeson often visited. In contrast,
I spent the summers from the year I was born camping on an island in
Lake George with my parents until they thought I should start going to
regular camps (invariably the antithesis of a Camp Kinderland).
8
Lake George is a narrow thirty-two-mile lake nestled in the foothills
of the Adirondack Mountains. In the central portion of the lake, near
the town of Bolton Landing and between Tongue Mountain on the west
and Black Mountain on the east shore, there is a cluster of about fifty
islands known as the Narrows. On their shores there were and still are
about 170 public camping sites, sometimes one to an island sometimes
up to a couple of dozen, almost always out of sight and hearing of each
other. My parents started camping there in the 1920s and according
to family legend actually met there. In the early days, in order to help
develop the campsites, the state issued permits to allow campers to
build a tent platform or dock on a specific campsite. The structures
became State Property, but the permit holders, "permanent campers,"
like my parents, had priority to use that site for the entire summer free,
until 1952, when a $3 weekly fee was instituted.
Our campsite. Big Burnt #10, being one of the earliest "permanent"
ones, was one of the best. It was a little peninsula sticking out of a
large island, extending over 1000 yards from north to south. Spread
out along the water's edge and facing the rising sun were three tent
platforms, one for my parents, one for my sister and me, and one for
the "kitchen tent" plus a little storeroom-playroom tent. The kitchen
tent had a sink and pump that brought up the water from the lake
(which was very drinkable), kerosene stoves, wooden shelves and a
table inside for when the weather was too bad to eat outside on the log
table under thefly.The rocks on the south end of the campsite were
ideal for swimming when the wind was cold and strong from the north;
a path through blueberry bushes on the north end led to a rock good
for sunning and swimming when the wind was from the south. There
was a dock in a cove for our little rowboat and our Old Town wooden
canoe, painted red with black gunnels. (Each family had its own colors
and designs.) Mr. Granger, the iceman, placed a block of ice from his
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Charles Gross.
motorboat in our wooden icebox in the ground each week. A farmer in
a rowboat brought around fresh vegetables, but most of our shopping
was on nearby Glen Island, which also had a post office and ranger
station, all built by the New Deal's "CCC boys."
By the start of WW II, The Narrows contained a community of
several dozen families of "permanent campers" mostly consisting of
Jewish school teachers, especially from New York City, there with their
kids for the entire school summer vacation. Most families had set-ups
similar to ours. The adults were radicals or left liberals who seemed to
spend their time reading books and newspapers and arguing politics
with each other.
The anti-communist arguments of the liberals usually involved
the eternal paranoia (a.k.a. historical memory) of being Jewish: even
in the Soviet Union they will "come for us first." The Reds spoke of
the Jewish "autonomous oblanst" in a far eastern corner of the Soviet
Union, that Jews could become doctors and engineers easily in the
Soviet Union, unlike America, and repeatedly cited Lenin's attack on
anti-Semitism: "Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can
believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. . . . It is
not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies
of the workers are the capitalists of all countries
" My father was
quiet during these often violent exchanges, just reading his Times or
Nation. Sometimes the participants would pause and turn to him with
a question.
"What is oligopoly?"
"Was Dostoevsky really an anti-Semite?"
"What does the labor theory of value mean today?"
"If William Jennings Bryan was such a great populist why was he
so opposed to science?"
The adults took breaks from arguing and reading to gather firewood
and burn garbage (cans were buried), paddle to Glen Island for food
and the New York Times, and yell at us, "Get out of the water now. Your
lips are blue already." Things may have been a bit wilder for them in
the early days. Or, at least, it looked that way to us kids, from all the
nudes in the family albums standing under waterfalls or sunning on
rocks, the adults looking much younger and with no kids around. In
my time, you had to get up really early to catch any of the mothers
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JiVait: A Memoir of a Red Diaper Baby
swimming nude.
Aunt Ann and Uncle Sol and their two kids, Ellen and Eiobby,
were on Big Burnt #9, the next site. Ann came up, like us for the
summer but Sol only came up for the weekends except for his twoweek vacation. In 1942, he enlisted in the army to "fight fascism,"
served as a battlefield surgeon in the Tank Corps, and wrote home
V-mail letters, one about capturing a nest of Nazis, which Ann sent to
the New York Post which published it. When Sol was in Europe, she
continued summers camping next door with Ellen and Bobby, who is
now professor of Political Science at Berkeley. Sol came back bitter
about the war but I never understood why.
Most of the "memories" of when I was really young come from
photos like one of an eight-foot diameter wire-fence enclosure about
two feet high, I guess to keep me from the poison ivy and water that
surrounded Big Burnt #10 on one side or the other. There I was sitting
happily in the middle of it in diapers playing with my father in shorts,
a hairy chest and glasses. In another picture I look about four and am
struggling in the front seat of our canoe with a paddle (no life jacket,
which was for sissies) while my father is in the rear of the canoe with
his double paddle. The best one, though lost, was a group portrait of
my extended family. Max and Becky, Sol and Ann and all the kids.
We were stiffly posed in front of a log table, the adults, especially the
men, in very skimpy bathing suits, and the kids nude. My grandfather
Max was in the center looking fierce and angry and his belted bathing
suit had slipped down below his belly and barely covered him. The
photo was badly out of focus and looked right out of an old National
Geographic magazine
Burt was my best friend and our family album is full of the two
of us playing in diapers or nude in the rock pools. His father Morris
was very gruff and once was furious and beat him with a stick when
he caught him reading a copy of the New York Teacher's News. His
mother Sophie was the only mother who did not work and they had
only a single burner Coleman stove.
Freddie was another close friend. His father Sam was a principal
and his mother Clara, an assistant principal who sometimes took off
her top in the sun. Sam and Clara changed their name from Levenson
to Levison and repainted their gas cans accordingly. Freddie tried to
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Chartes Gross.
explain this to me by saying, "We changed our names to avoid antiSemitism ... don't tell anybody." I remember being puzzled because
"Levenson" and "Levison" seemed equally Jewish to me. They
eventually got an inboard motorboat, the only one in the Narrows.
Gradually things changed. Most families gotfiveor ten horsepower
outboard motorboats and could buy food in Bolton Landing and go to
the movies there. Finally a lawyer showed up at another state camping
ground, was told that the only vacant campsite belonged to a permanent
camper arriving later that day, sued the State, and that was the end
of "permanent" campers. The ranger came around and broke off the
signs with Permit Numbers on each of our tent platforms and tossed
them on the woodpile. By the time I returned from graduate school
abroad, my parents' generation, in their 60s, had largely disappeared
either to cottages around the lake or to "peace" or "learning" tours
to places like India or Cuba. When I went back for a few days at a
time with my own family or graduate students, we would go in May or
October to make sure we could get we get Big Burnt #10, invariably
booked up for the regular season.
9
From the time I was ten I was spending only about half the summer
camping with my parents; the other half I was at regular camp, first
as a camper then as a camp counselor. Maybe my parents thought
camping on Lake George for the entire summer was not American
enough, or maybe they wanted to get rid of me for half the summer.
First I was sent to a Christian family in Connecticut that took in four
or five boys for a month. All I can remember is the other kids going
hunting without me and the family taking me to church on Sundays.
As my father explained, "This would be a good transition to a regular
summer camp." The next year I was sent to a settlement house camp
where it was not unusual for the kids to come for a month's stay with
only the clothes they were wearing. The theoretical basis for this was
never explained. Maybe it was to meet real Americans or maybe it was
just much cheaper than a private camp.
Elementary school was a disaster for me. I was often sent to the
principal's office and then to the kindergarten for being "disruptive."
"You are simply not a Christian gentleman nor will you ever be one,"
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Mrs. Jeffries said to me. My mother was constantly dragged to school
and yelled at because I "talked" (the sin that followed me at least until
college), did not do my work and generally was bad. My mother came
to school with pages of yellow legal pad sheets describing my reading
and intellectual interests but it was to no avail. On one of these visits
my mother was told I was playing with myself in class; actually the
buttonholes on myflywere too big and I kept trying to button them. I
was not allowed to get anywhere near the various programs for the smart
kids, and considered myself fortunate when I got out of playing with
blocks in the kindergarten and was sent back to my regular class,
I was saved by Baden-Powell's imperialist movement for boys.
Perhaps my Lake George experience made this a natural, or more
likely it was part of my parents' attempt to Americanize me in spite
ofthe Boy Scouts' militaristic and religious aspects. I joined (i.e., my
father placed me in) the Cub Scouts as soon as I was old enough. There
I wasfiercelyachievement-oriented and rapidly rose through the Cub
and Boy Scout "ranks," earning lots of Merit Badges and becoming the
youngest Eagle Scout in Brooklyn at the time. Much later, getting A's
in high school and college and publishing papers and getting grants
as a young academic felt just like getting merit badges in cooking,
civics and bird study.
My central experience as a Boy Scout was spending a month
each summer for four summers at Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camps.
We slept in open lean-tos, wore uniforms, had formal flag raising and
lowering ceremonies, and other than waking up, cleaning our bunks,
taking a dish washing turn and going to bed to "Taps," there were
no required scheduled activities at all. Most of my "troop" spent the
time hanging around the bunk, reading comics, or going down to the
baseball field, and maybe the afternoon "general" swim. By contrast,
I ran around frantically taking classes and exams to get merit badges
in every possible thing, even physical education and woodcarving. All
afternoon I took waterfront classes. The canoeing merit badge class
was a tough one, even for one brought up in a canoe. By the final class
day only a tall guy in a yarmulke and I had survived. The assignment
was to go out in a canoe fully dressed, swamp it in deep water, get
the water out and then J-strike back to shore. It was a cold and windy
day and on hearing the task, the other guy quit the class on the spot. I
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Charles Grossmanaged to pass, at least on effort, and the instructor signed my merit
badge card without demanding to see my kneeling pad stuffed with
pine needles, which in fact, I never did finish sewing. The guys in my
troop seemed unperturbed by my weird achievement intensity; they
elected me to the honorific "Order of the Arrow"; they took over my
turns at dishwashing when I was an Eagle Scout, as that duty seemed
to them below the dignity of such a station.
In the general swim we had "buddies," whose hands we had to
raise when the waterfront director up in a white tower blew his whistle;
if separated from our buddy we were "docked" from swimming. A few
years later I was the waterfront director. The high of standing on the
white tower blowing the whistle for "buddies" was only equaled when,
much later, I stood on the podium teaching physiological psychology
in the same classroom in which I had taken it as an undergraduate.
(Actually, I was only Assistant Waterfront Director. I hated the director's
guts, but luckily he broke his leg early in the season, so that tower
was mine, and my required ass kissing was restricted to the half hour
each day I visited him in the infirmary. He was not the last boss that
I had trouble with).
10
Again, in their insistence on turning me into a normal American
boy with the full range of "options," as they put it, my parents sent me
to the local after-school "Hebrew School." In the first year, we learned
to pronounce Hebrew words in a primer, but not what they meant. At
the end of the year everybody was promoted to the next class with a
textbook that had an English vocabulary... except me. I was left back
repeatedly. At the start of one year, in error, they gave me the new
textbook for a day before retrieving it. I still remember the Hebrew
words for yes, no and man from its first lesson. Eventually, as bar
mitzvah time approached, my parents pulled me out and put me in a
Reform Judaism synagogue in another neighborhood where on Sunday
there were lessons in Jewish history in English and private lessons
with the Cantor in preparation for the bar mitzvah. I knew that the
bar mitzvah was supposed to be, traditionally at least, an apprentice
disquisition on Biblical and Talmudic Law in preparation for entering
the world of adult Jewish scholarship. So I was a bit disconcerted that I
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had to stutter through Hebrew texts that were gibberish to me, and the
"speech" to my parents and grandparents (presumably what used to be
the dissertation part) was written by the Cantor. My two grandfathers,
placed on the stage wearing their yarmulkes (not a Reform Judaism
custom), and my Boy Scout friends from the neighborhood Conservative
synagogue looked puzzled by the church-mimicking atmosphere
(organ and all), but acted totally tolerant. My mother prepared a great
reception in our apartment, even with a cornucopia of fruit c;arved
from a pineapple.
As far as I knew my parents had no direct contact with synagogues
or Jewish organizations, even Communist ones, at least since their
college days. They were indifferent to religion, rather than antireligious like the really radical types that threw orgiastic banquets
on Yom Kippur, when religious Jews fast and pray all day. In fact, on
Yom Kippur my mother told me, "Don't ride your bike in torn jeans in
front of the synagogue, it's not nice." Later, my parents seemed a bit
embarrassed by having subjected me to the trauma of the bar mitzvah:
perhaps they realized that had carried Americanization too far. When
my own children approached thirteen, my father never brought up
the ritual, nor did my daughters or son. My son actually knew a lot
about Judaism and sometimes wore a Jewish star as an earring (among
many other things, including a dinosaur, but never a Christian cross
or Muslim crescent).
I lived on a Gentile working-class block immediately adjacent
to middle-class Jewish ones, but encountered relatively little antiSemitism there, other than having "Jew" written on my yarmulke in
chalk if I forgot to take it off after Hebrew school, or hearing often from
the Catholic School kids "how the Jews had killed Christ." A few blocks
in the wrong direction was different and dangerous. One winter, Ciitholic
School kids threw me through the ice into Prospect Park Lake, bringing
the police to our house for what I remember as a somber inquiry. In
elementary school, generalizing from what I saw in the neighborlfood, I
thought that Jews wore ties and jackets and non-Jews did not, therefore
inferring that Governor Dewey and President Roosevelt, pictured in
the newspapers in jackets and ties, were Jewish.
The closest I came to the world of Red kids was in my last year of
elementary school. My parents were evidently very concerned about
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Charles Grossmy abysmal failure in school. So my father asked me if I wanted to go
to Elizabeth Irwin High School. E.I. was a private progressive school in
Manhattan that attracted mainly the kids of middle and upper middleclass leftist parents. (I am not sure if I knew anything about it then,
other than it was a private school.) With no hesitation I said, "No, I
want to go to Erasmus Hall High School, with all my friends from the
Scouts." (Actually, I soon abandoned most of them for the intellectual
types I discovered in high school.)
11
I had been afflicted with a severe and long-standing stutter. It really
upset my father. When I stuttered to him, his face got distorted with
anguish as if a knife was being twisted in his gut, a response that made
me stutter more, which then twisted the knife even more. I remember
being pulled out of class in the sixth grade and sent to special stuttering
classes for a half hour a day and then another half-hour class for my
lisp. Nothing got better so my parents took the initiative and arranged
for me to go to weekly sessions at the Jewish Board of Guardians for
what they called an "indirect approach to my stutter." After a year a
new person was assigned to me and the first thing he said was, "Do
you know why you are here?"
I said, "Of course. This is an indirect approach to my stutter."
"No," he said, "you are here to discuss . . . " I don't remember
his exact words but it was something or other about working on my
emotional or personal problems.
So I went to my parents and suggested a "direct approach to
my stutter." They arranged for speech therapy with someone well
recommended by their friends, but after a few months he was called
before an investigating committee and had to leave town and start
a new life elsewhere. By now I was ready to start Erasmus, having
rejected Elizabeth Irwin, and fortuitously the stutter was very useful.
(Decades later, I went to a marriage counselor who actually dug up
my evaluation by the "indirect" speech therapist. I was described
as a "Wunderkind," which was ridiculous since at least by Erasmus
there were always smarter kids around, and as "hyperactive," which
reinforced my prejudice that the term was about teacher's incompetence
not a student disorder.)
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My parents went to the Erasmus authorities and successfully
argued that "because of my stutter," I should take be allowed to take
Latin instead of a spoken language. Only the very best students usually
took Latin as their first language, so in spite of my lousy grades and
terrible disciplinary record in P.S. 130 I got tossed in with them.
Actually, it was a pretty good idea since I never did learn to pronounce
foreign (and many English) words correctly, and never lost my Brcioklyn
accent, which was later called an affectation in view of the years I spent
in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England.
Erasmus Hall High School was then a very mixed school of about
6000. Except for putting the students taking Latin together, a creative
writing class and a few honors math classes, there was no "streaming"
by academic ability because streaming was considered to be antidemocratic. Rather, segregation by academic ability was done more
covertly and efficiently. Programming the classes of 6000 students was
a formidable challenge before computers. It was done by a program
committee of the students with the highest grades as freshmen. So
we put ourselves together in the same classes with the best teachers.
My father told me who some of the members of the Teacher's Union
were. They usually turned out to be among the best and most popular
teachers, and seemed to take a special interest in me. In that very
rich soil I suddenly flowered into a highly engaged and competitive
student, no longer bad (except in gym, which I almost failed, and in
art, for which my father often did the assignment). In that adolescent
memory, the top twenty or so boys and girls around me at Erasmus
seem among the smartest and most intellectual group I ever knew. In
high school I never knowingly met an athlete or a person of color, and
only one other non-Jew and he ended up at Yale.
I always asked for a seat in the front row, claiming vision problems.
Actually, I saw fine but realized that being in front would inhibit
my tendency to talk to my neighbors, which had been my undoing
in elementary school. In spite of my bad stutter I spoke up often,
especially in history, English and economics classes, which seemed like
dumbed-downed versions of what I had already read or learned from
my father. I did keep away from the honors math and creative writing
courses, which only the math whizzes or real writers respectively took.
In the summer of my junior year I carried a project in ecology
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studying plant succession in a one-acre plot near my family's campsite
on Lake George. "Plant succession" refers to the orderly temporal
progression of plant communities starting, for example, from bare rock
and proceeding to the "climax" forest for that region. Each new stage
changes the environment, making it more adapted for the plants ofthe
next stage. Plant succession, it seemed to me, was actually a better
example of dialectical materialism in nature than many ofthe examples
given by my heroes, the Marxist scientists J.B.S. Haldane and J.D,
Bemal, although I never breathed a word of this in my report.
As a high school senior, I applied to several Ivy League colleges.
I still have the application drafts; they are covered with suggestions
and corrections in my father's handwriting. The financial aid forms to
be filled out by my parents presented a problem. My father had just
been called before the Feinberg Commission which was rooting out
subversives from the school system. So he put on the form that he had a
school teacher's salary now but had no income prospects for the future,
since everyone in the city knew why the many highly rated school
teachers were suddenly unemployed and therefore unemployable, at
least as teachers. In the middle of our dealing with these financial aid
forms, my father suddenly got up and rushed from the house. My mother,
very upset, explained that I had said something really bad to him,
apparently crushing him with the complaint that his political actions
might be a barrier to my education. It was perhaps myfirstrecognition
that my parents were humans and had feelings that could be hurt.
I was offered small scholarships at several good places, and
somehow my father was able to get them to bid against one another
until Harvard finally gave me enough to go.
I didn't get into Yale, At the interview the interviewer pointed to
my trench coat and asked, "Is that a Burberry?" And then, "Are you
Jewish?" At that time, the Jewish quota at Yale and other Ivy League
and similar places, except for Columbia and Harvard, was 12,5%, My
Harvard class was about a third Jews,
12
I tried hard to follow my father's advice to lay low, wait, wait and
not reveal I knew who Pete Seeger was, let alone Rosa Luxemburg,
Sometimes some slippage occurred. At college some other Red Diaper
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babies and I infiltrated the "Harvard Society for Minority Rights"
and managed to sponsor a Pete Seeger concert on campus. (It was the
period that he was totally blacklisted from performing.) Somebody
in the audience was taking notes; we thought it was the FBI. A dean
complained about "meat packers putting their feet on the seats."
On one occasion my father visited me, my Red Diaper friends
peppered him with questions about achieving the "unity of theoiy and
practice" and similar matters. We were standing in a semicircle in front
of him in Harvard yard and it was windy. He looked very anxious and
seemed reluctant to say much. After he left one of my friends said to
me, "You'll never be as cultured a man as your father."
I wanted to major in history: my father had revealed the allexplanatory Marxist pattern of history to me, and everything I read
had deep meaning because it conformed to this pattern. But my father
had also taught that this insight must be kept disguised. For reasons I
don't understand at all, something had been driving me to achieve, first
to get scout merit badges, then 99s in high school and A's in college.
But now belief and desire clashed: I realized I was not smart enough
to both get A's and reveal my politics, if indeed that was possible. I
began to trim to sail into Phi Beta Kappa.
"I am glad to see how well your papers have progressed from the
Marxist jargon that characterized your earlier paper this term ... A"
wrote a teaching fellow on one paper.
I got another A for arguing that Burke was a great liberal and
Victorian England approximated heaven on earth.
I sidled up to an Anglophilic teaching fellow in his 23''' year of
graduate school (better Cambridge as a TA than Iowa with tenure) and
discovered he thought the BBC Third PA programme (now defunct:
too much Euripides in the original) was the savior of civilization. Got
another A by pointing out how correct he was. After a year of this I
decided to major in biology . . . which my father also thought was a
safer idea. Within biology I edged toward social issues by becoming
what is now called a "cognitive neuroscientist."
13
As a 56-year-old unemployed and unemployable schoolteacher,
my father was in a fragile place with a dying wife and a son at college.
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Some of his fellow purgées got on TV and in the papers when a
congressional committee came to town. They had to change their
names and flee to another part of the country or to Mexico (there was
a colony of them in Guernivaca) or Canada. Many got really depressed
and one killed himself. Others did OK. Abe Diamond founded an
ultimately successful school for mentally retarded children and kept
his politics. Moe Swartz started writing arithmetic workbooks which
sold. Joe Levy became a bond salesman and changed his politics
totally. The "comrades" who stayed teaching crossed the street when
they saw my father coming.
My father had a friend, Pildes, who founded the veryfirstdiscount
eyeglass store and quickly became a millionaire. He was a Party
member and so were most of his staff. In the early days they resented
him so much that they often made prescriptions intentionally wrong
so that Pildes himself tried to check every pair before they went to the
customers.
Eirst Pildes gave my father a job as a receptionist in his mega
eyeglass store. My father stood near the entry and told customers
where to go for eye examinations, to submit their prescriptions, to
choose frames or to pick up finished glasses. Then Pildes got one of
his lens suppliers to give my father a job as a lens salesman. Carrying
two heavy sample cases, my father went by subway and bus across the
four boroughs from one little store-front, one-person eyeglass store to
the next. He had little technical knowledge about the contents of his
sample cases.
It looked like Death of a Salesman, and indeed his visual profile
setting out each morning with the two large sample cases looked just
like the ads for the Miller play. But reality was rather different. A few
times I went with him. When he arrived he was greeted like a long
lost relative and the store owner began boasting of his kid's grades,
complaining about his wife's spending, questioning some political
article in the Daily News and on and on. Eventually my father's body
language threatened that he was leaving and then the owner quickly
gave my father a pile of orders. And so it went from shop to shop like
some series of homecomings. Pildes had arranged for the lens company
to pay my father a straight salary so there was no commission to interfere
with my father's relaxed "selling technique." On some days my father
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just stayed at home and the stores would give him orders by phone.
After a few years, when the peak of teacher firings had declined,
my father got a job teaching history two hours a day at the Rabbi Jacob
Joseph Yeshiva. In the morning the students did Hebrew and Talmud
and in the afternoon secular subjects. The afternoon teachers seemed
to have been mostly rounded up from Greenwich Village coffee shops.
My father got very friendly with them, especially with an English
teacher called Tom Kelley. My father was then married to Sylvia, and
I would always hear about the three of them going to the opera, the
ballet, concerts, movies — everyplace together. It was so many years
before I met Tom that I was sure he was imaginary, like Harvey the
white rabbit. Finally, I met him and Tom turned out to be obese and
flamboyantly gay.
My father would regale us with tales from the Yeshiva. In the
morning the students would spend hours intensely debating, citing
the Talmud, over whether one could wear wool and linen in a labric
("shatnez"), whether shaking the hand of a female non-blood relative
was as bad as doing that with a strange woman, how many grains would
defile a Passover dish and so on. My father's locker was constantly
broken into and his grade book stolen so that he took to carrying it
around with him. He and his afternoon colleagues were paid in dimes
and quarters from collection cans broken open in front of them. Years
later I met an academic who had gone to Rabbi John Jay. It turned
out this was considered a distinguished Talmudic Academy that even
put out a scholarly journal about the problems of applying ancient
Hebrew law to modern life.
My father continued as a receptionist at Pildes on Saturdays,
teaching history at the yeshiva Sundays to Thursdays and selling
lenses partially by phone and partially in person. Maybe all of this
had something to do with "Depression" mentality.
14
When I finished college I didn't know whether I wanted to be
an academic or a medical doctor. My father couldn't resist gently
advocating the MD route as politically safer. I postponed the decision
by going abroad to England, to Cambridge University for a few years.
My father had been sure I would never get a passport but obviously
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I was not as important as Paul Robeson or, later, Muhammad Ali. In
England I felt strangely liberated. Communists were treated like any
other eccentric: like gays, Jews, women—more or less accepted. In that
finely stratified culture, most everybody had his or her place so nobody
was particularly threatening, from the village idiot to the mad lord.
Woman had positions of power in the university and the government
then unheard of in the States. They just dressed in mannish tweeds,
cut their hair short and rarely married their lovers. The Communist
dons relished their Havana cigars and college wine cellars, and easily
went to and from high table and Central Committee meetings. It took
radical American students fresh from the "Movement" struggles to
shame them into opposing the ban on strollers on college grounds,
and letting representatives of the college servants as well as students
onto the college councils. I savored the political freedom so much (not
that I ever did anything with it) that I stayed long enough to get my
Doctorate before returning to the states.
15
While I was abroad, my mother's "smoldering" leukemia finally
flared up and she died. She did not want me to return to see her
before she died because she looked so terrible because of some last
ditch "experimental treatment" by a close friend of my father's from
Townsend Harris who was on the Harvard medical faculty. I flew back
on my first airplane flight ever for the funeral.
For the five years after my mother died, my father went out with
various women. He so vehemently rejected all of them as a possible
mate that I was sure he would never remarry.
Natalie was a liberal Jewish schoolteacher with a car and a house
on Long Island. My father never owned either. "She is nice," he said,
"but I don't feel comfortable with her house, car and politics... they
seem to contradict my whole life."
Miranda was Black and working class. "I really like her but I am
afraid she won't be able to talk with my friends."
Vera was a Brooklyn College English professor. "She drags me
off to hypermodern poetry readings," he complained, "where I can't
understand a thing and get a headache."
Silvia was purged as a high school English teacher, got a Ph.D. in
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clinical psychology from Columbia and was a totally unreconstructed
Stalinist who showed signs of extreme pain and anguish at the slightest
criticism of the Soviet Union, "She is always being stopped by the
FBI on the street and told they would meet her in some restaurant if
she didn't want to come to their office to talk," my father groaned. "I
don't think I want that."
In the end he married Sylvia. At their wedding everybody
danced the hora waving red napkins, and my four-year-old daughter
Melanie stood on a chair and made a speech, Sylvia remained a rigid,
hypersensitive Stalinist. (When I was teaching in China and gorging
on the banquets once "only for emperors" — now the lifeblood of lowlevel corruption — she sent me a post card saying she "was proud that
I was building socialism.")
At family gatherings everybody wanted to hear telles and anecdotes
from my father. Sylvia bitterly resented the way we all ignored her and
focused on him.
16
After I returned from England I had another slippage from my
father's quietist mantras that was nearly a serious fall. I was an assistant
professor at Harvard. At about noon on April 9, 1969, a group of
students led by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) "occupied"
University Hall, central home ofthe deans. They and their staff left or
were pushed out. Many students milled around the occupied building
or entered it out of support or curiosity. At 4:15, the dean of the faculty
announced over a loud speaker "anyone failing to depart will be subject
to criminal trespass," When I had entered in my tie and professorial
tweeds, someone rushed over and yelled, "Get this faculty member
out: he will report our names,"
Somebody with more clout, apparently, said, "Don't worry. He can
stay. He's just a "CP liberal."
And so, after all these years being semi-closeted as a clandestine
red diaper, I was suddenly a "Communist Party liberal," the SDS
leadership being then so far left that the difference between the "old
left" CP and a liberal was insignificant.
There were about 400-500 students and a few faculty members in
the Hall. Assembled in a large, packed room, Robert's Rules barely
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Charles Gross.
managed to contain the shouts and excitement. Eventually, the group
voted non-violence toward the police, decided to leave the doors open
and set up various rules and committees to get food, keep things clean
and other housekeeping. The general assumption seemed to be that,
as at Columbia University the previous year, the occupation would
go on for many days. Finally, the meeting was over and most of the
crowd started to drift away to the undergraduate dining halls. I had a
lecture to prepare for the next day and rushed out to my car to drive
to the suburbs and have dinner with my wife. I vaguely planned to
come back the next day, after my lecture, to the occupied building,
now "Che Guevera Hall." About 150, including a dozen teaching
fellows and one faculty member, an assistant professor of anthropology,
stayed overnight.
At dawn over 500 helmeted, faces — shielded and un-nametagged police — came in swinging. About fifty students required
medical attention, some for serious fractures. The campus convulsed
for the rest of the term: strikes, meetings, posters, leaflets, almost no
classes, no finals at all. During the summer, when no one was around
to protest, fifteen SDS leaders were expelled or otherwise punished,
and the one faculty member who stayed in the building was fired. I
never told my father much about the strike or how close I had been
to being fired myself.
Eventually, I got tenure at another university, Princeton, and
almost immediately got arrested at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration.
Two hundred and twenty-five demonstrators, including seven faculty,
were charged with "interfering and molesting." As we filed into the
courthouse, one cop, on seeing me said, "Hey, there's an old one." We
were released after paying $100 bail. Leonard Boudin, the doyen of left
lawyers, had come out to Princeton (with his pacemaker we were told) to
advise the assembled bailees what to do next. Most of us eventually paid
$100 in fines; a few, not me, instead went to jail for ten days. When I
told my father about it all, he asked a bit nervously what my department
colleagues thought of my arrest but he seemed more proud than anxious.
I reminded him that my chairman, Leo Kamin, had been driven out
of Harvard and the U.S. by McCarthy himseK, and after an exile in
Canada had returned to head my department and hire me. He seemed
a bit relieved; in any case, he never asked me to "wait" again.
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I am embarrassed to say, that when I later obtained my EBI file
under the Freedom of Information Act, it was very thin. That arrest in
Princeton was the major item. I guess I had taken my father's advice.
17
At about this time the U.S. Supreme court declared the Feinburg
anti-subversive teachers law unconstitutional saying inter alia that it
"can have a stifling effect on the free play of the spirit which all teachers
ought especially to cultivate and practice . . . [and that] Academic
freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not
tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom ... [the
Feinberg law] which makes Communist Party membership, as such,
prima facie evidence of disqualification for employment in the public
school system is 'overbroad' and therefore unconstitutional."
Justice Brennan, in delivering the opinion of the court, noted
further, "Our experience under the Sedition Act of 1798 taught us
that dangers fatal to First Amendment freedoms inhere in the word
'seditious.' And the word 'treasonable,' if left undefined, is no less
dangerously uncertain. Does the teacher who informs his class about
the precepts of Marxism or the Declaration of Independence violate
this prohibition? . . . The result must be to stifle that free play of the
spirit which all teachers ought especially to cultivate and practice...
The classroom is peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas.' The Nation's
future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that
robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of
tongues, rather than through any kind of authoritative selection Our
Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which
is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers
concerned."
As a result of this court decision, a group of teachers who had lost
their jobs under the Feinberg law, including my father, went en masse
to apply for reinstatement of their teaching positions. Given forms to
fill out, they loudly protested at the question on the form, "Are you
now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, USA
or any subversive organization?" The clerk looked puzzled at their
vehemence and quickly said, "Oh, don't worry about that. It no longer
applies. Just cross it out and fill out the rest."
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18
Soon after my father had a basilar artery stroke, which left him
cognitively intact but with a near total articulation dysfunction. He
went from a brilliant raconteur and teacher to someone who smiled,
grunted, and used his hands a lot. It was much better for Sylvia, since
he no longer was the center of every gathering of family and friends.
She did take good care of him, even though their apartment was so
inundated with publications from every left and do-good charity that
it was difficult to walk around without slipping on them.
He could hot take up his restored position at Seward Park High
School and had to stop being a receptionist at Pildes, teaching at the
yeshiva and selling lenses. Instead he read the Times and the Nation,
watched public television and went to the movies with Sylvia and Tom.
He died of a massive stroke six months later.
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