Lux et Veritas: The Facts about Me
Thursday, August 8, 2016
An article about Glennon Doyle Mellon in today's Style Section of the Washington Post stimulated this post. What also excited me to lay out my life was the absurd and embarrassing display on the Intrepid last night by the two Presidential candidates. I will admit, though not in the cause of honesty, that Trump was his predictable self. But Hillary, on the other hand, could not present herself as both qualified and psychologically fit to be present in any convincing way. Yes, she lies, too. I decided to come forth with as much light and truth as I could muster on the eve of my 80 birthday next month. This is part one of my story, as my energy and time for the whole story take more than one sitting.
Here I go about myself. Nothing terribly unique but only because I represent myself as a whole individual, finally.
I am a born but fallen away Jew, the son of a distant and angry father and a loving mother so depressed and unsure of herself that she could not defend me from my father and from my "angry child" sister. She was the "sick child" who garnered my parents' constant consternation, worry and attention. It was 1936, the tail end of the depression and a time of little progressive child rearing, especially by a foreign born but thoroughly American father and a mother who suffered life long as the child of a suicide father. For whatever the reasons, I became aware in my later teens that they were of no use to my dealing with the world and any guidance to my future, and I secretly divorced them.
I came into a world rife with anti-Semitism. Neighborhoods and high schools were either legally or informally closed to Jews. Even as a pre-ten, I can remember always waiting for an anti-Semitic remark in any crowd where I found myself. And it happened every time as I recall.
Ironically, my, father, an upstanding and moral man and an attorney, had an unceasingly hate of the Catholic church, but not Catholics. His beef was the deal Pope Pius XII made with Hitler not to bomb the Vatican, while the Pope, according to him, let Mussolini round up Jews and send them to the death camps. His facts were mostly on target, but I thought it more than untoward that a Jew whose history of oppression and murder by others would turn around and foist hate on another religion.
My Jewish education was severely ethnocentric. We were history's victims and "the chosen people". Nothing about the important history as the Jews, or whatever they were called BC, moved from polytheism to monotheism. And no education as who how all of the rules of orthodoxy came into being and why they are important to the Jewish faith today that should deal with the positive business of human-kind. In that environment as a pre-teen, doubt began to form as to how much aggrandizement I was hearing and how little truth was being imparted. Other than following the moderate insistence of my family and the temple, I found myself bar mitzvah at 13, certainly in my mind nowhere near adulthood.
I was brought up through high school in Yonkers, NY, close to New York City, but far away from its sophistication. New York City was a "trunk line" long-distance phone call. The public schools reflected this distance and, because a great many years in them were during WW II, we had shortages of current text books and the lack of inspired teaching from older, mostly cranky, overly harsh, single women.
Perhaps because I was very bright and somewhat more doubting than my classmates, I found elementary school a crashing bore and a waste of time. Had I the awareness of my almost 80 years, I would have reduced elementary school to three and maybe four years, preceded by a pre-school that taught reading, writing and elementary arithmetic of one, possibly 18 months. Elementary school would start at age 7.
End of Part I, Lux et Veritas
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