My life in Aunt Selina's apartment was a lonely one. She was hardly the sort of woman to whom young folks would go for sympathy. She did not mistreat me, of course, but left me entirely to my own devious ways. For the ways of a boy of fourteen—especially of an orphan of somewhat shy and melancholic disposition—are bound to be devious.
I had much to fight out with myself. I lacked any help from the outside—and though I won over my impulses, my doubts and inner conflicts, the struggle left me a weak, shy, shunning boy.
For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina I went to a nearby public school. There were a good many Jewish boys in my class—many more than there had been in the whole Brooklyn school—but I kept away from them as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles—not many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of conferring their friendship upon me.
"It will be different when I am in high school," I told myself. "It will be different because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older there, will be more sensible and broadminded, and I shall be less nervous about the difference between us!"
The difference ... I did not know what it was, but I felt it all the time. I tried to hide it, to disregard it—but I knew that it was there, in my blood, in my face, in my name ... and it held me apart from my class as if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace.
So it was that I looked forward more and more eagerly for the change and liberation which I thought high school would bring me. Half a year, two months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My public schools days were past. I had graduated into high school with high honors and with an equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish.
If Aunt Selina had been different ... but no, I am not going to blame it on anyone excepting myself.
The summer after I graduated from public school I went with Aunt Selina and her friend, Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White Mountains. It was one of those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management, if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that fact. They were constantly raising the price of our rooms, but the two ladies seemed content to keep on paying what was asked for the rare privilege of dwelling in forbidden places.
It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The other guests snubbed us continually, left us to our own devices. I used to have to go walking every morning and sit on the porch every afternoon in the company of the two ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even among the children there was a rigorous boycotting—and I was the sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course, because at that time I lacked entirely the spirit to be indignant—just melancholy, and hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed of the things I should have gloried in, hating the things I should have worshiped.
Well, I told myself, it would all be different in the fall: it would all be different when I was at high school. For then I was to begin those seven years which were to be my real education. So far it had been naught but childhood's prologue. And what a shabby little part I had played in it!