Nor did the little romantic flight end there. For the next day, after sister and brother had been comparing notes, the former marched straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and for all, from the true American daughter of a true American family, and to confine my sentiments to "some little Jew girl!"
I knew none of that sort. What few boys and girls of my own race I had met at playtime or at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I thought, if I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it!
Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and infinitely more in the building up of my character.
There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am grown to man's estate I can know these things of myself—but how could I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world recognize, then, his own needs and cravings?
It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor.
Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She never rose again. The shock killed her.
I remember that the funeral services were conducted by the rabbi of our synagogue. They were according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought them dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I felt. The Hebrew that was in them was mockery and gibberish to me. I am afraid I was glad when it was over, and I was alone with my aunt with whom I was to live.
This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. Her husband had been a devout Jew of the most orthodox type. She used to tell me with great amusement how he would say his prayers each morning with his shawl and phylacteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning a loyalty to these worn old costumes of the past. But she said wistfully that she thought he had died a much happier man because of his religion ... and that was what was hardest of all for her to understand.
Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She put as little stock in Christian Science, though, as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an escape from the hindrances which connection with the Jewish faith would have entailed. I think she had an idea that people would forget she had ever been a Jewess and would accept her for a Christian without her having to go through the extremer forms of proselytism. Like me, she lacked spirit for either one thing or the other. Like me, she dreaded to be classed among her own people. But in this we were unlike: that her dread amounted to a vindictive and brutal antagonism towards whatever and whoever smacked of Jewry. I think she even objected to adopting me for a while, because my name was a distinctly Jewish one, and because it would leave no doubt in her neighbor's eyes as to my race—and hence, no doubt as to hers.
Aunt Selina lived on Central Park West in the City. She was full of social ambitions. She had a good many friends from among the intellectuals of Washington square: Christians, of course, most of them. Her closest companion was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be a Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, she had married a Mr. Fleming who had made necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen lunched together very often, and I suspect they had a tacit but inviolable agreement never to mention to each other that bond of race and religion which, stronger than their professed tastes, drew them instinctively together.