XIII
The year I started at this college, we lived in a three-or four-room flat on West 65th Street. Mother did the cooking, and father would put an apron over his little round paunch and wash the dishes; there was much family laughter when father kissed the cook. When the weather was fair, I rode to college on a bicycle; when the weather was stormy, I rode on the Sixth Avenue Elevated and walked across town. I took my lunch in a little tin box with a strap: a couple of sandwiches, a piece of cake, and an apple or banana. The honorific circumstances of college life were missing. In fact, so little did I know about these higher matters that when I was sounded out for a “frat,” I actually didn’t know what it was, and could make nothing of the high-sounding attempts at explanation. If the haughty upperclassman with the correct clothes and the Anglo-Saxon features had said to me in plain words, “We want to keep ourselves apart from the kikes and wops who make up the greater part of our student body,” I would have told him that some of the kikes and wops interested me, whereas he did not.
About two thirds of the members of my class were Jews. I had never known any Jews before, but here were so many that one took them as a matter of course. I am not sure if I realized they were Jews; I seldom realize it now about the people I meet. The Jews have lived in Central Europe for so long, and have been so mixed with the population, that the border line is hard to draw. Since I became a socialist writer, half my friends and half my readers have been Jews. I sum up my impression of them in the verse about the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.
About this time, I threw away another chance for advancement. My uncle, Terry Sinclair, who was an “old beau” in New York and therefore met the rich and had some influence, brought to his bright young nephew the offer of an appointment to the Annapolis Naval Academy. This was regarded as my birthright, but I declined it. I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a lawyer, having come to the naïve conclusion that the law offered a way to combine an honorable living with devotion to books. This idea I carried through college and until I went up to Columbia University, where I had an opportunity to observe the law-school students.