THE MILITARY ACADEMY
My introduction to military school was hardly auspicious. I was now sixteen years old—nearly seventeen. I did not look that old, however; the commandant of the school, in examining me, took me for much less and assigned me to a room with a boy of twelve.
At seventeen, our age is a most important item. We think so, anyhow. And this incident dampened my spirits most disproportionately. Especially when I discovered that this roommate was to be the only other Jew in the school. It seemed to me a very pointed and personal insult.
He was a meek little boy, though—meeker even than I. And all through that first night he wept aloud, smothering his tears upon his pillow and crying for his mama—and for kartoffel salat. It was a Friday night, I remember, and it must have been a Sabbath custom in his house to have potato salad for supper. At any rate he kept me awake long into the night.
And once, taking savage pity on him, I got up and went over to him in my bare feet and nightgown, and told him brusquely how satisfied he ought to be to have a mother at all; that both my father and mother were dead, and I should never see them again, no matter how homesick I grew or how long I waited for their coming. This silenced him on that score, but he went on whimpering for the kartoffel salat.
The next day I screwed up my courage to complain to the commandant. He was a very tall, majestic figure of a soldier who had fought through the Spanish and Boer wars and now, in times of peace, was reduced to teaching the manual of arms and simple drill formations to young sons of the rich. He was the most pompous, mean and utterly selfish man I ever met. One could see it on his handsome face.
He heard my complaint through. Then, because, being an ignorant "plebe," I had forgotten to salute him, he made me perform that act and retell the whole story word for word. But he could not change my room until I had agreed to take a cot in the general dormitory—this being reserved for students who paid less tuition.
"You may write your aunt," he said stiffly, twirling his long mustaches, "that we did all we could to make you comfortable. We purposely put you in a room with young Private Ornstein because we thought it would be more—er, more congenial."
I saw what he was driving at, and went away miserable. So they knew it up here, too: I was a Jew, and must be separated from the others as if I had the plague! I felt sorry for myself.
I was not particularly homesick, though I had never been able to develop much love for my Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. But the unaccustomed severing from all that was mine: my room at home, the street that I saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who stood on the corner and passed me an occasional lofty jest—and a thousand other things, intimate and absurdly unimportant I missed with dull emptiness.