Dream Catcher: A Memoir (9 page)

18
. “Bringing Up the Child,”
The Menorah Journal
28 (winter 1940): pp. 29–45.

19
. Wenger,
New York Jews,
p. 85.

20
. Wenger,
New York Jews,
p. 184. Another contemporary survey found that in 1935 more than 75 percent of New York Jewish youth had not attended any religious service in the past year. Before the Depression, a minority of Jews was affiliated with a synagogue, and even fewer attended regularly. When synagogues tried to attract new members during the Depression, Jews were appealed to in ethnic rather than specifically religious terms: membership, they were told, was “essential to fortify Jewish self-respect in the face of anti-Semitism.”

21
. The 1943 Office of War Information report found widespread anti-Semitism in half of the forty-two states surveyed and described intense anti-Semitism and “unreasonable hate” particularly among the middle class in Pennsylvania (Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 136).

22
. Ibid., p. 87. See also Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen,
Rickover
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 51, 52–53; Robert Wallace, “A Deluge of Honors for an Exasperating Admiral,”
Life
45 (September 8, 1958): p. 109.

23
. See also
Zooey,
pp. 73 and 75, for similar language of intrusion. Here, Bessie Glass is perched on a closed toilet seat while her grown son Zooey is trying to take a bath. He looks around the shower curtain and sees that she is holding a package that “appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment. . . . Mrs. Glass had undressed the package and now stood reading the fine print.”

24
. From 1933 to 1941 over one hundred anti-Semitic organizations were created, as contrasted with perhaps a total of five in all previous American history.

25
. Another study, of twenty-seven thousand openings, also found that 90 percent went to non-Jews. Discriminatory newspaper ads for jobs proliferated, reaching a peak in 1926. Public utilities, banks, insurance companies, publishing houses, engineering and architectural firms, advertising agencies, school districts, major industrial companies, civic bodies for art and music, hospitals, universities, and law firms routinely rejected Jewish applicants. Humble Oil, Eli Lilly, and Western Union, for example, developed official policies of zero acceptance of Jews (Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 89).

26
. It is difficult, I think, to underestimate the intensity and depth of the meaning of this word,
landsman,
in its historical context. When I read in Joyce Maynard’s memoir that during her first visit to Cornish, meeting my father in person after months of correspondence by letter, he took her hand and said, “We are landsmen, all right,” I wondered if she understood the weight of this declaration.

27
. He was, however, a bit out-of-date in his view of opportunities for Jews to become professionals. Doors were slamming shut. From 1920 to 1940, for example, the percentage of Jews at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons fell from 46 percent to 6 percent. At CCNY, the percentage of Jewish graduates admitted to any medical school dropped from 58 percent to 15 percent. Law schools followed the trend as well. In 1935, 25 percent of all American law students were Jewish; by 1946, that number had fallen to 11 percent. When New York State passed a law in 1948 banning tax exemptions to nonsectarian colleges and universities that employed racial or religious criteria in selecting students for admission, the number of Jewish students in New York medical schools rose from 15 percent in 1948 to approximately 50 percent by 1955 (Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
pp. 158–60).

28
. Frederick Paul Keppel, Dean of Columbia College, 1910–18; Assistant Secretary of War, 1918–19; President of the Carnegie Corporation, 1923–42.

29
. Ernest Martin Hopkins, President of Dartmouth College, 1916–45.

30
. Quoted in Harold S. Wechsler,
The Qualified Student
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977), p. 135. Also Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
chap. 5, “Erecting Barriers and Narrowing Opportunities, 1919–1933.”

31
. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard, 1909–33.

32
. These included Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Rutgers, Barnard, Adelphi, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Penn State, Ohio State, Washington and Lee, and the Universities of Cincinnati, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington. New York University discriminated on its Bronx campus but not at Washington Square (Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
chap. 5).

33
. Jews were barred from most clubs and fraternities.

34
. Dinnerstein,
Anti-Semitism,
p. 88.

35
. Diana Trilling, “Lionel Trilling, a Jew at Columbia,”
Commentary
67 (March 1979): pp. 44, 46.

36
. See JDS story “A Girl I Knew,”
Good Housekeeping
126 (Feb. 1948): pp. 37, 191–96.

37
. See also “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” reprinted in
Nine Stories: “Brains!
Are you kidding? She hasn’t got any goddam brains! She’s an animal! . . . You want to know who I’m married to? I’m married to the
greatest living undeveloped, undiscovered act
ress,
nov
elist, psycho
an
alyst, and all around goddam unappreciated celebrity-genius in New York. . . . Christ it’s so funny I could cut my throat. Madame Bovary at Columbia Extension School. . . . Madame Bovary takes a course in Television Appreciation. . . .
Brains.
Oh, God, that kills me!”

38
. Like young Seymour, who throws a rock at a beautiful girl in the sunshine (scarring her for life) “because she looked so beautiful” (
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,
pp. 41, 89).

I
N THE SPRING OF
1942, Jerome David Salinger was drafted into the United States army. He, along with thousands of other young men from all over the country, reported for induction and began the metamorphosis from civilian to soldier. For the entire time I lived with my father, I saw no going back, no discernible return from soldier to civilian. His civilian occupation as a writer was, at best, a distant concept for me when I was growing up. I still have the note my piano teacher wrote home about how amused she was at my not knowing. The teacher said that before our recital, to ward off nervousness, the children were all talking about what their fathers did for a living. When my turn came, she said, “Peggy spoke up proudly, ‘My Daddy, he doesn’t do
any
thing.’ ”

What I was never in doubt about was that my father was a soldier. The stories he told, the clothes he wore, the bend of his nose from where he’d broken it diving out of a Jeep under sniper fire, his deaf ear from a mortar shell exploding too near, the Jeep he drove, his oldest friends such as John Keenan, who had been his Jeep partner throughout five campaigns of the war, the guns we used when he taught me how to shoot, his GI watch, the army surplus water and green cans of emergency supplies we kept in the cellar, the medals he showed my brother and me when we begged him to, nearly everything I could see and touch and hear about my father said soldier.

He wasn’t the only soldier in the house; I did my best, as a little girl,
to be just like him. When I was a teenager and had moved on to boys, I’d forgotten how much a part of his world I had been. Though born in the fifties, I was virtually a child out of time: the forties were far more a present reality to me than whatever the real date was. I was reminded of this when I was sixteen and brought my boyfriend Dan over to Daddy’s house for inspection, and my dad took out an old reel-to-reel tape and said to him, “Dan, you have to hear this, it’s marvelous.” It was a recording of me, age four, singing my entire repertoire: “Mad’moiselle from Armentières”—hasn’t been
kissed,
rather than f’d, in forty years, the only nod to my age, . . . hinky dinky parlay voo. The first marine jumped over the fence, parlay voo, the second marine jumped over the fence; “I’ve Got Sixpence”: Happy as the day when the army gets its pay, as we go rolling rolling home; “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”—with anybody else but me till I come marching home; “Abdul Abulbul Amir”; “There’s a Tavern in the Town.” I emerged from World War II when I entered kindergarten and learned a few eensie-beensie spiders and I’m a little teacups. My teacher, Mrs. Perry, was not acquainted with “Mad’moiselle from Armentières.”

While the war was often in the foreground of our family life, it was
always
in the background. It was the point of reference that defined everything else in relation to it. When Daddy took pleasure at being warm and dry and cozy by the fire, it was the pleasure of a man who has been truly cold and wet and miserable in his life. There is a quality, among those who have suffered, of not taking things for granted the way the rest of us do. As long as I’ve known him, my father has never taken being warm and dry and not being shot at for granted. Once, when my mother asked him to join us on an overnight camping trip, he said, outraged, “For Christ sake, Claire, I spent most of the war in foxholes. I will
never
spend another night outdoors again if I can help it, I promise you.”

The constant presence of the war, as something not really over, pervaded the years I lived at home. Even as a teenager, when I came home for a visit and he was bugging me about
some
thing, the way parents of teenagers seem to do, I said graciously, “Dad, will you quit interrogating me already!” He said, “I can’t help it, that’s what I am.” Not in the past tense, but in the present as though he were still in counter-intelligence uniform, interrogating prisoners. “That’s what I am.” Scary. He still
drives his Jeep like a nutcase, or a sane person being shelled, same regulation haircut, only gray now.

P
RIVATE
S
ALINGER
, ASN 32325200, age twenty-three, reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey, on April 27, 1942. From there he was sent to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, for a ten-week instructor’s course with the Signal Corps. He applied to Officer Candidate School, and Colonel Baker, head of Valley Forge Military Academy, wrote him an excellent recommendation. He was accepted, but not called up. By July, most of the Signal Corps class were transferred to Signal OCS at Fort Monmouth. He was assigned, instead, to an instructor’s job with the Army Aviation Cadets and posted to the U.S. Army Air Force Basic Flying School at Bainbridge, Georgia.

My father told me a number of stories about being stationed in the South. The one that came up most frequently—or perhaps, being a kid, I just remember it best—was about bugs. He told me that, in Georgia, there are these bugs called chiggers that burrow under your skin, and they itch like madmen. The only way to get them out is to burn them out by holding a cigarette near the surface of your skin. The trick was to find the exact spot where it was too hot for the chiggers but not hot enough to burn your skin. They itched so badly, though, that the men often settled for burns.

I collected useful information, such as how to get out chiggers, the way most kids collect marbles or dolls or other precious objects. My dad seemed to know all the best stuff, like the fact that jewelweed grows right next to poison ivy and is a natural antidote. On our long walks together, times I treasured, he showed me which mushrooms were poisonous, such as the beautiful
Amanita muscaria,
and which were delicious in an omelette, such as morels and boletus. Big soldier to little soldier, practical tips for survival were passed on. Like the fact that anyone could turn out to be a Nazi—your neighbor, your baby-sitter, the man at the post office—anyone. And anyone could be a hero; you never knew until it happened, who would be a hero and who would be a coward or traitor.