The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (12 page)

Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY

February 1945

At school I always limit myself to drawing pictures of typical American children, though seldom blondes: portraits, largely, rarely landscapes. I am something of an expert when it comes to portraits of Chinese people and Negroes. At home, however, I draw only Arabs. Not from life, Nana, because I have never ever seen an actual Arab, but from the
National Geographic
photographs I’ve seen in the Central Elementary library.

Mother and Daddy hate my drawings of Arabs. They imagine I draw them the way I do so everybody will feel sorry for them. I once spent an entire afternoon painting a huge mural of Arab village life, using poster paints and crayons. When Daddy came home from work that day, he came into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed. He told me that the Arabs were a low people. They were backward, dirty, and evil. They had supported the Nazis during the war and were constantly rioting and massacring the Jews of Palestine. They treat their women like slaves, he added.

As soon as he left, I got out of bed and destroyed all my sketches. I promised God that I would be a good Jew and wouldn’t write the novel I’d been planning about Palestine. Three days later, I broke my vow by going to the Larchmont Public Library to read everything I could find about the Arabs so that I could prove to Mother and Daddy that they were just prejudiced. I felt certain I could change their minds. Of course most of the books in the public library were by Christian missionaries and Zionists. They had exactly the same prejudices against the Arabs as my parents had. Mother said perhaps I was just trying to prove that I was right. Why couldn’t I accept any evidence that challenged my own views?

Was I simply being stubborn, Nana? It seems perfectly clear to me. When Grandfather tells his stories about Negroes, referring to them as darkies or niggers, he always laughs at Mother’s discomfort. At Smith College, Mother learned to abhor race prejudice. Not only does she believe that Negroes deserve complete equality of opportunity, she also feels that social intermingling is acceptable and to be encouraged. Even racial intermarriage is not a mortal sin in her eyes.

So why are the Arabs any different from Negroes? Grandfather’s life revolved around the secret meetings of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Daddy, too, keeps a red felt fez with a silk tassel on his dresser. When I asked him what they did at Shriner meetings, he said they wore Arab robes and bowed in the direction of Mecca before sitting down to crack jokes over dinner. They could play at praying to Allah, play at being Arabs, but the real Arabs mean less than nothing to them. God means nothing.

Jews like us have become just like the Christians. We really don’t know what we believe. When I grow up, I plan to live in Palestine or Egypt as a painter and a missionary to the Arabs. Not to convert them, but to make sure they stay just as they are.

It seems very odd that such an idea would occur to an eleven-year-old. It was striking, too, how Peggy seemed to treat the events and characters of the storybooks she was reading with as much seriousness as she did the events and people in her own life. It was as if she had been born in the wrong place and time and was looking for another that would suit her better. She surrendered herself to her books in an unusually intense way, providing elaborate plot summaries in her childhood letters. A set of cloth books, each set in a different country and featuring a child with whom Peggy invariably identified, was described in great detail.

Her favorite was the story of a little American Indian girl living in the time “before the white men came and ruined everything.” There was
Boy of the Desert
by Eunice Tietjens,
Camel Bells: A Boy of Baghdad
by Anna Ratzesberger,
The Forgotten Village
by John Steinbeck, and
Theras and His Town
by Caroline Dale Snedeker. Even before she could read, she told one correspondent, she made her mother read the
Just So
stories so many times that she memorized every word. Thereafter she would lie in bed, turning the pages of Kipling’s book as if she could read the stories to herself, reliving every twist and turn. The book eventually fell to pieces.

After a series of uncharacteristically joyful letters to her parents from the Noyes Camp for Modern Dance, Peggy recounted a grim exchange with the camp director. When Peggy told her how happy she’d been and that she looked forward to returning the following summer, the director looked at her coldly and said that was impossible. Admitting her had been a terrible mistake. You have no talent, absolutely no promise at all, she said. Certainly you
are the queerest child I have ever met. The next time they come here to visit you, Margaret, I will advise your parents to send you to a psychiatrist. While the camp director was describing Peggy’s lack of physical grace, she seemed to be offering a devastating appraisal of her femininity as well. It was the last camp she ever attended. Peggy told her parents that they were wasting their money.

Her letters gave the impression that Margaret could make sense of something that had happened to her only by writing it down in every detail. It didn’t matter if she was rehashing incidents of family history her parents or sister or grandparents were no doubt well aware of; the important thing seemed to be getting in every particular, as if she were a storyteller not entirely in control of her material. Perhaps the letters were just another manifestation of her tone-deaf and autistic sort of talkativeness. Or perhaps they were the only means she had of making herself heard in the face of a suburban milieu intent on pretending that this awkward, socially inept little girl didn’t exist.

Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY

September 1948

Until my periods started, I dressed like a boy. It was perfectly clear to me that boys’ lives are vastly more interesting than the dull routine of my mother’s life as a housewife. I wanted to be good at sports, particularly football, but I wasn’t any better at them than I was at ballroom dancing. Outside school, I was a different person. Karen Wanberg and I would organize hunting expeditions to the forests and perilous cliffs of Westchester County, risking bloody knees and bruised shins in heedless pursuit of game and adventure. As an Arab raider, swathed in bedsheets, I added Barbara Kenny to my collection of wives. As a Japanese samurai, I would commit hara-kiri rather than allow myself to be taken prisoner by an American soldier. As a noble Indian chief, I would raid settlers’ cabins, scalping left and right; I save only a little girl who, after a time with my tribe, will refuse to return to her people.

Once I started to develop, I had to give up all these games. I now wear saddle shoes and skirts and sweaters and cotton blouses with ruffles just like every other high school or college girl. I also abandoned my fantasy of living life as a boy. In sixth grade Karen Wanberg insisted upon throwing a Valentine’s Day party, complete with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra records, which I was obliged to borrow from Betty. This was never music I took any pleasure in. Music should be transporting, not nerve shattering. I spent the entire party sitting outside on the steps in my party dress and winter coat, counting the hours until I could go home. Karen accused me of ruining everything and thereafter refused to speak to me.

The whole project of being a teenager, with its incessant talk of boys, dates, dances, parties, clothes, and film stars is too silly for words. I think Julia Bustin and Barbara Kenny feel the same way, but they go along with it all because they don’t want to stand out. I refuse to and pay the price for that. My whole life has moved indoors with books. This is just as well, because from day one of seventh grade none of my friends from elementary school wanted to have anything to do with me.

The summer before eighth grade my counselor at the Noyes Camp for Modern Dance found
The Lance of Kanana: A Story of Arabia
by Harry W. French at the public library in Provincetown for me. Though I like just about any story about children in different countries, I asked her to look out for anything with an Arab theme. By then I’d begun my drawings and paintings of Palestinian Arabs for the novel I am planning to write. In the story, Kanana is a Bedouin tribal boy of thirteen, scorned by everyone as a perfect coward and misfit, all because he will not participate in mindless tribal warfare. I know all about tribal warfare.

Only when the Byzantines descend on Arabia and capture his beloved father does Kanana join the army of General Khalid ibn al-Walid, pledging to fight on behalf of Allah and Arabia. When Kanana is captured as a spy and brought before a Greek general to negotiate for his elderly father’s release, he is told that the price of his father’s freedom will be the life of an Arab soldier. Plunging a lance into his own breast, Kanana shouts, “Here is your Arab!” and swiftly expires, the savior of Arabia and a martyr in the jihad. It is a most thrilling story. The Arabs really seem to know what they are about. This is in perfect contrast to the Jews of Mamaroneck and Larchmont.

Eventually, my mother withdrew us from Bible school because Betty hated it and refused to leave her bed without a screaming match. Nineteen forty-five was pretty much the end of Judaism for the entire family, and the beginning of my adolescence. After Betty went off to college, my parents and I started attending the Ethical Culture Society of Westchester, where I was put in the most advanced class with a bunch of other ex-Jews. The founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, Dr. Felix Adler, rejected organized religion altogether. He wrote that ethics had nothing to do with God and that you could be perfectly good without the fear of damnation hanging over your head. Most everybody in Ethical Culture has embraced agnostic humanism, but our teacher that first year was an out-and-out atheist. His name was Dr. Shoop.

Dr. Shoop was convinced that soon the very idea of God would be regarded as superstitious nonsense arising from a simple fear of death. Eventually, he promised, science would do away with death altogether. His ideas were terrifying to me, but even the most badly behaved classmates were mesmerized by the gleam in his eyes. There was no fidgeting or comic book reading in this class. The following year we had a different teacher and it was only much later that I discovered Dr. Shoop had been hounded out of his job in the public schools for teaching the theory of evolution. No one would hire him after that. He became convinced that everyone was out to get him and had to be committed. There was little hope for his recovery.

After three years at Ethical Culture, I am now scornful of all religion and don’t believe in God at all. Judaism is still, in essence, tribal and has retained its tribal nationalistic character. Even if there is a God, what sense did it make for Him to restrict His truth to a single people? Truth by definition has to be universal.

However, like nearly every other Jew and ex-Jew I know, I am excited by the prospect of the new state of Israel. Living in New York seems almost like living in Israel. There are Israeli flags flying from nearly every window on Fifth Avenue, and everywhere radios blare advertisements urging everyone to contribute to the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs. We can’t even eat dinner without being interrupted by the doorbell and some lady asking for donations. At the Larchmont railway station there are UJA advertisements on the platform billboards featuring photographs of starving Jewish children from Europe waiting to immigrate to Israel. Even the Larchmont Public Library now has a special exhibition of Israeli books depicting all the blessings the Jews are bringing to Palestine.

I am convinced that the Jews and Arabs will cooperate and together create a new golden age such as occurred in medieval Spain. Under Arab protection from Christian persecution, Jews will become real Jews and their lives will once again be filled with meaning.

One afternoon I drove up to the town where Margaret grew up. Larchmont is a wealthy suburb of mock-Tudor homes with wraparound porches and carefully landscaped yards. But the streets were empty. No one seemed to be home. I drove by landed estates, country clubs, golf courses, and two different yacht clubs on Long Island Sound. None of these are mentioned in Peggy’s letters. Margaret’s world consisted entirely of Central Elementary, Mamaroneck High School, the playgrounds, and the Larchmont Public Library. At the center of this world was the Larchmont Acres apartment complex where Herbert and Myra Marcus lived for thirty years, raising their two daughters, in a modest two-bedroom.

The move had been a comedown from the little house in White Plains where Margaret was born. Herbert Marcus regretted the social slippage, though Margaret wouldn’t become aware of it until middle school. The six-story apartment complex, with its concrete pathways and sloping lawns edged in bushes, was actually in Mamaroneck, its nomenclature a transparent sleight of hand by a property developer. Its proximity to Larchmont, however, gave the address some necessary social stature, straddling the divide between Larchmont’s detached homes and the Italian working-class enclave of “the Flats” in Mamaroneck.

I got out of the car only once. The Larchmont Public Library was packed with mothers and strollers and children, bereft of the silence and old book smell it once must have had. Its shelves were a fruity cornucopia of Disney DVDs and movie videos; computer terminals lined a wall in the back room. Margaret’s treasured book, Muhammad Asad’s
The Road to Mecca,
had been deaccessioned. The shelves of
National Geographic
magazines that had given her a window on the world outside Larchmont were gone. Immediately behind the library was Saint Augustine’s Church. The parochial school had long been closed, its playground also gone.

Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY

November 1949

After I heard Umm Kulthum on one of those tiny radio stations for immigrants, Betty, I wouldn’t let Mother be until Daddy took me to the Syrian section of Brooklyn. At Rashid’s record shop on Atlantic Avenue I spent all my allowance on a stack of her recordings. I immediately lost all interest in the Wagner and Verdi operas and Beethoven symphonies I’d been listening to since I was four. Mother detests Umm Kulthum so I wait for her to leave the apartment before I take out the records. Then I play them at top volume with all our windows open. The ancient sound of her voice transports me. I so like to watch the response of the people walking on the streets below.