Steven Spielberg (8 page)

“Being we weren't Jewish, we didn't know the people,” admits Anastasia Del Favero, an Italian-American Catholic with three children who lived next door to the Spielbergs. “They were nice people, mostly all Jewish, but we didn't really know them. There was a family there with a baby, but I was so busy—I had three children, my husband was working—I didn't have time to socialize.”

“It's a shame that I do not remember [Steven] at all, but as a teenager, I don't think I bothered much for two-year-olds,” says Anastasia's sister-in-law, Dolores Del Favero Huff, who also lived in the house next door to the Spielbergs. “I did not baby-sit for him—they were Jewish. When I grew up in Avondale, as a gentile, I had no Jewish friends. The Jewish children stayed with their own kind. They didn't bother with the gentiles. I just think it's the breed—I believe that—I guess they feel they're different from us. They'd say hello, but as far as playing or going to a movie—I did not make the attempt.”

Meyer Singerman, a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Forces who lived two doors down from the Spielbergs, had worked for the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League. Although he recalls Avondale residents sharing Cincinnati's exclusionary attitude toward African Americans—“I don't think blacks could have moved between us and the Spielbergs”—he also says, “I don't remember any anti-Semitic incidents there involving me and my family. When you lived in a Jewish community and you're very young, you don't see the real world.” Steven's cousin Samuel Guttman, who was born in 1949 and has a younger brother and sister, says that whatever anti-Semitism Steven might have encountered in Cincinnati, it would have been “no more than us—having fights as kids.”

There were not many children of Steven's age in the immediate neighborhood; most of the people there were middle-aged. Steven, as a result, spent most of his time around adults, his parents and grandparents and their family and friends, Jennie's pupils from overseas, and the people at the shops and synagogues. Living his first two and a half years in a neighborhood that Peggie Singerman characterizes as “culturally advanced” and Millie Tieger describes as “a hotbed of brains,” Steven no doubt acquired some of his sense of otherness, his precocious reserve and gravity, from learning to deal at an early age with people much older than he was, many of whom regarded him (benignly or not) as “different.” A child who seldom spends time with other children learns to speak when he is spoken to, and he learns to live with solitude and his imagination, finding his sense of play not so much from others but from within himself.

What Steven experienced of Cincinnati, aside from his vividly remembered encounters with Holocaust survivors and his mother's music, may lie mostly beneath his consciousness. His family's devotion, especially that of his mother, no doubt fostered his early belief that he was a special creature,
that his differences from other people were something to be cherished. Such a belief may have helped shield him from any conscious awareness that his more conventional and bigoted neighbors saw him as “different” in a negative sense. But he could not have helped internalizing the effects of their isolating gazes.

L
OOKING
back from the perspective of 1994 and her born-again Orthodoxy, Leah felt that, aside from the family's observance of the Sabbath and Jewish holidays during the years when Steven was growing up, Judaism was “a very nothing part of our lives.”

“Leah's parents, while they were Orthodox, attended a Conservative synagogue,” Arnold relates. “But they obeyed the Sabbath. They did not do anything on the Sabbath, except during the worst times in the Depression, when Mr. Posner just had to work. When Leah and I got married, first we were observant, then she said, ‘I've got to get off the kosher standard. I want lobster and things like that.' So we'd go off the kosher standard, then her conscience would prick her, and we'd go back on the kosher standard. We'd go in and out of it. But when she married [her second husband] Bernie Adler, he was very religious, so she stayed totally Orthodox.”

After leaving Cincinnati, the Spielbergs tended to observe the laws of
kashrut
(kosher food preparation) only when their rabbi or Leah's parents came for visits. As Steven put it, they were “storefront kosher,” Leah once was preparing to boil three live lobsters for dinner when they heard the rabbi's car pulling up in their driveway. Steven hid the lobsters under his bed until the rabbi departed.

If Leah and Arnold felt limited, and perhaps even somewhat stifled, by the traditionalism of their decaying hometown environment, and were willing to brave alienation and loss of identity by leaving it, they were typical of their generation of Americans who were starting families and careers in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

“In the years following the traumatic experiences of the Depression and World War II, the American Dream was to exercise personal freedom not in social and political terms, but rather in economic ones,” David Halberstam wrote in
The
Fifties.
“Eager to be part of the burgeoning middle class, young men and women opted for material well-being, particularly if it came with some form of guaranteed employment. For the young, eager veteran just out of college (which he had attended courtesy of the GI Bill), security meant finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs. In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society.”

Arnold Spielberg, thirty-two years old and newly graduated from the University of Cincinnati, was hired by RCA in June 1949 to work at its manufacturing plant in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from
Philadelphia. “I thought RCA hired me to work on television,” he recalls. “When I showed up there, no, they didn't have a job in television: ‘You're in military electronics.' I was doing circuit development, then I got involved in advanced circuit development leading toward computer technology. We were trying to prove, ‘Do we use tubes? Do we use magnetics?' Transistors were just beginning to come in. ‘Do we use transistors?' We had contests to see which design would win for the technology to be used in designing computers. It was that early. I hardly even knew about computers at college, other than about analog computers. I only became interested in computers while I was at RCA.”

Arnold's chosen field of electronics at that time was still a profession dominated by WASPs, although the fact that RCA chairman David Sarnoff was Jewish helped make that company more hospitable to Jews than others. As the Cold War and scientific competition with the Soviet Union intensified in the 1950s, many of the long-standing barriers against Jews in American science and higher education began to fall. Arnold was one of the beneficiaries of that change, and he became a stellar example of achievement in his newly developing field. But his family paid a price in rootlessness and instability as he moved them around the country, responding to career opportunities and the eventual westward migration of the computer industry.

“Just as I'd become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend,” Steven has recalled, “the
FOR SALE
sign would dig into the front lawn…. And it would always be that inevitable good-bye scene, in the train station or at the carport packing up the car to drive somewhere, or at the airport. Where all my friends would be there and we'd say good-bye to each other and I would leave. This happened to me four major times in my life. And the older I got the harder it got.
E.T.
reflects a lot of that. When Elliott finds E.T., he hangs onto E.T., he announces in no uncertain terms, ‘I'm keeping him,' and he means it.”

The anxiety caused by the first of those moves may help account for the fact that, as Spielberg has said, “I've been biting my fingernails since I was four”; the move from his hometown of Cincinnati to New Jersey took place the year he turned three.

Explaining why he nevertheless has always felt a basic optimism, Spielberg said, “I think growing up I had no other choice. I guess because I was surrounded by so much negativity when I was a kid that I had no recourse but to be positive. I think it kind of runs in my family, too—my mother is a very positive thinker. One of the first words I learned, when I was very, very young, one of the first sentences I ever put together—my mother reminds me of this, I don't consciously remember it—was ‘looking forward to.' And it always used to be about my grandparents. I loved it when they'd come to visit from Ohio to New Jersey, and my mother would say, ‘It's something to look forward to, they're coming in two weeks,' and a week later she would say, ‘It's something to look forward to, they'll be here in a week.'”

During their first three years in New Jersey, the Spielbergs lived in a huge
complex of identical red-brick buildings at 219 South Twenty-ninth Street in Camden, the Washington Park Apartments. Although the complex looked like a barracks, it had the consolation of being considered the place where, as family friend Miriam Fuhrman put it, “All the young Jewish couples lived” (it is now populated largely by African Americans and Hispanics). While the Spielbergs were living in Camden, Steven's oldest sister, Anne, was born in Philadelphia on Christmas Day 1949
.§

In August 1952, the Spielbergs moved a few miles to suburban Haddon Township, adjacent to Haddonfield, an affluent, quaintly picturesque village of seventeen thousand settled by English and Irish Quakers in the early 1700s. Many other RCA employees and people who worked in companies doing business with RCA also lived in the Haddonfield area. Although the Spielbergs were part of a migration of young Jewish families from Camden to Haddon Township, their move to the suburbs was a momentous step, culturally speaking, because it meant entering a more heterogeneous community in which Jews were expected to assimilate in order to be accepted.

“After 1945, the social and economic profile of American Jews was transformed into one that closely approximated the American ideal,” Edward S. Shapiro wrote in
A
Time
for
Healing.
“… The most important aspect of the postwar mobility of America's Jews was their relocation to the suburbs and their movement into the middle class. While mirroring national currents, these demographic trends were more intense among Jews. Historian Arthur Hertzberg estimated that, in the two decades between 1945 and 1965, one out of every three Jews left the big cities for the suburbs, a rate higher than that of other Americans. Jews tended to cluster together in suburbia, but some brave pioneers moved into suburbs that contained few if any Jews.”

Throughout the United States, the decade of the 1950s saw the old urban patterns of vertical, tightly packed dwellings exploding kaleidoscopically into sprawling rows of look-alike suburban houses, with lawns and backyards and sprinklers and play sets for the rapidly arriving children. There was a numbing conformity in this rush to replicate Levittown, an intellectually arid, unimaginative, and ultimately illusory sense of safeness that would be increasingly decried and mocked and challenged by the end of the decade. The rise of the civil rights and feminist movements would shed an even harsher light on the exclusionism and patriarchy of middle-class American life in the Eisenhower era, which the suburbs came to typify. Many who grew up in 1950s suburbia, as a result, look back on that milieu with an unresolved mixture of nostalgic yearning and embarrassed distaste, and Steven Spielberg, “the poet of suburbia,” has captured that ambivalence in his film.

It is impossible to imagine John Ford never having seen Monument Valley, or Martin Scorsese never having walked New York's mean streets, and it is equally impossible to imagine Steven Spielberg never having grown up in suburbia. “I never mock suburbia,” Spielberg has said. “My life comes from there.” And yet, despite his expressions of affection for suburbia, Spielberg does not entirely believe in it, share its values, or depict it in quite such glowing terms on screen. In such Spielberg films as
Duel
and
Close
Encoun
ters
and
E.
T.,
the suburbia to which his upwardly mobile parents escaped in the early 1950s becomes a place of entrapment from which his dissatisfied middle-class characters yearn to escape.