The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American Jew

by Gilbert W. Gabriel

I thought it over carefully. I wanted to be fair to myself as well as to them. That same old repugnance of being identified with a distinctly Jewish propaganda troubled me and made me turn from them. And yet it wasn't only that, either. For when I thought it out, I knew that, according to my point of view, theirs was not the proper solution. Fire can fight fire, perhaps—in proverbs, anyhow—but discrimination is not to be overpowered by a like amount of secularity. If Jewish college men objected to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they contended that fraternities should be democratic; if they wanted equal rights in those fraternities ... how, then, were they justified in standing apart and founding a fraternity of their own—a brotherhood which should be open only to Jews?

That is what I thought. I may have been wrong—and the excellent records of the Jewish fraternity chapters in various colleges and universities do perhaps prove me wrong—but I could not bring myself to join them. I was heartily glad the whole heated question of race and race prejudice was abated. I asked, for myself, only that I be given something of the fair-play that other men had. I was working hard for the college. I was doing all that my talents enabled me to do and I was sure that, sooner or later, there would be the reward.

This reward did come, definitely. It came at the end of May when, at the height of the reaction against the whole year of prejudice, I was chosen for the college senior society. It was a public election, held on the afternoon of one of the most important baseball games. There were crowds to watch the ceremony—students and graduates, young girls and parents ... so that the memory of the green campus and the banks of pretty gowns and parasols, the sunshine and the cheering will be with me till I die. I remember that there were tears in my eyes as I was chosen ... and that there came to me, with all the cool freshness of the spring winds, the thought that this was the end, the salvation from out of all the year's mean, squalid troubles. Here was I, a Jew, raised above all the other Jews who had ever entered this college ... raised among the highest, to be a power in the land, to be the champion of all those who had suffered, the winner through hardship and handicap, a vindicated Dreyfus, an example to all the lower classes.... For, at twenty-one, alas, we are our own best heroes, and none can take our place!

College closed in a blaze of glory for me. There was even a note from Aunt Selina Haberman, wishing me well of this new honor and informing me that "Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, when she heard it, was green with envy!" Aunt Selina wanted to know, was I going to be a wicked boy, however, and stay away from her all next year, too. She was sure that, now I had won out, we could get along much more smoothly than we had.

I fear I began to think a little too highly of my position in the community. I was now capable of going to no less a person than the dean of the college and talking over with him, as if man to man, the possibility of an anti-Jewish agitation, the next year, and demanding in none too deferential tones that, should it come, the college authorities must do their share to stamp it out.

"Really, Mr.-er-er-,—what's your name?"

I told him very slowly, but it did not mean much to him. I rather pitied the old gentleman for not paying more attention to the undergraduate contests and triumphs.

But he did hear me out, and gave me information which I thought worth acting on. The large majority of the Jewish boys in the freshman class had prepared for college at one school—a large private preparatory school in New York City. Perhaps it would be as well, suggested the dean, for me to go to the principal of this school and talk things over with him.

"Do you mean, I should warn him against sending so many of his boys to our college?" I asked.

The dean appeared dreadfully shocked. "Oh, no—dear me, no. That wouldn't do at all. Only—well, it seems that this school caters almost entirely to the sons of wealthy Jewish men—and that this principal is very fond of our college ... and so he grievously sends us all the boys that he can. You know, so many boys don't know where to go to college—and the principal often has a chance to suggest one, don't you see!"