The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (13 page)

After art, music has always been my second-best subject in school. I could read music in the second grade. But it wasn’t long before my choir director began complaining that listening to Umm Kulthum had ruined my singing. He had often praised my strong clear voice to Mother, but he always chose Sally McArthur for all the solos. Every year she completely monopolizes the school program of the annual Christmas pageant. I have now outgrown all of this. I only have ears for Middle Eastern music.

I had once imagined that with the founding of the state of Israel the Jews would rediscover their faith and reconnect with their Semitic roots in the land of Abraham. I even attended a meeting of the Zionist youth group Mizrachi Hatzair. Yet as soon as they discovered that I was raised in a liberal nonkosher household, they wanted nothing to do with me. The coup de grâce was the screening of a pro-Israeli propaganda film in which the Arabs were once again grossly misrepresented. I got into a terrible argument and soon realized that Israel would not mean a return to the golden age of the tenth-century caliphate of al-Andalus. It would be something else entirely. Still, when the hostilities broke out between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, I was devastated.

New York has now become the center of Zionist propaganda, to which Mother and Daddy all too readily subscribe. Not one of the Zionist leaders who pass through New York to address the Security Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations seems to feel the least twinge of conscience for the terrible wrong being done. As soon as I get home from school I race to listen to their speeches on WNYC.

What possible justification can there be to deprive an entire people of their homeland and rights as human beings? Hadn’t the Jews just suffered such a crime based on equally specious propaganda? And what was Palestine to them? Moses received his revelation in Egypt. The most important part of the Talmud was codified in what is now Iraq. But for the Zionists and their sympathizers, the “backward” fellaheen of Palestine now constitute a grave obstacle to the march of progress. The more I read of the Zionist project in the
New York Times,
Betty, the more I realize that the rubric of “progress” has blinded everyone, even our parents, to the bleak fate of the fellaheen. Are they not human, too?

Last night Eleanor Roosevelt, a member of the Commission on Human Rights and chief delegate of the United States to the United Nations, came to Mamaroneck High School to give an address to commemorate the first anniversary of Human Rights Day. I went with Mother and was shocked when Mrs. Roosevelt spent nearly all her time extolling all that was going on in Israel. The Jews had every right to the whole of Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River, she said. Where there once were only sand dunes and swamps, there are now farms and thriving industry. Should Palestine be returned to the Arabs, she warned, the country would relapse into medieval poverty. She contrasted the corruption of the Arabs with the idealism and vigor of the Jews.

I couldn’t help but wonder what any of this had to do with human rights. During the question and answer period I was tempted to ask her about the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 and the expulsion of Arabs from their villages all over Palestine, but Mother stopped me. She said I’d be lynched. We argued all the way home and continued the argument in the apartment until midnight. Why don’t the Arabs just make peace and be willing to live and let live? Mother asked me.

What if a robber came into our house and forced us out into the streets, penniless and starving? I replied. And then to ease his conscience, the robber asked us to sign a peace treaty that would essentially legalize his seizure of everything that was once ours. Would you do it?

But Israel had been recognized by the entire world. The Arab world should accept it as a fait accompli.

I said that this was injustice, plain and simple.

It was the way of the world, she countered, where the strong triumph over the weak. If one demands that Palestine be returned to the Arabs, then one must also demand that America be returned to the Indians. America could not have been created without the seizure of their land and the killings of large numbers of them. Now we are the most powerful country in the world! Compare modern Tel Aviv with medieval Jaffa and that alone justifies the Zionist cause.

I no longer consider myself a Jew.

CHAPTER 5

Paagal Khanaah

There was a vogue in those years to blame the undemonstrative mother for whatever difficulties beset the child. Myra Marcus had often wondered how much she was responsible for her daughter’s difficulties. In the years Maryam lived in Pakistan, it was Myra who devotedly filled her stream of requests for American books and magazines, as if to compensate her daughter for whatever she had failed to give her as a child.

A month before Maryam received the threatening letter from Mawdudi, she asked her mother to write what she remembered of her early years in White Plains and Larchmont Acres. It was as if Maryam suddenly needed to look elsewhere for answers to her troubles and had again turned to her mother for help. Perhaps she had already sensed a storm was brewing. In her reply, Myra answered her daughter as best she could. She did not shy from reliving the struggles they’d faced. Maryam included her letter in the opening pages of
Quest for the Truth.

Betty was the first to fall sick, Myra began. The strep infection spread to her ears, accompanied by a desperately high fever. With Peggy on the way and only a modest savings account, suddenly they found there was an expensive mastoid operation to pay for. Eventually, they all were stricken. Myra couldn’t help but compare the fever to the Depression that had gripped the country, bringing down her father-in-law’s tie factory, throwing her husband and his brothers out of work. The whole country seemed to be caught in its terrible grip. Yet though economic conditions were worse than ever, there was nothing in the world she and Herbert wanted more than another child. Peggy was born in the spring of 1934 out of their shared faith that the future would be better.

The string of illnesses, like the Depression, eventually subsided, but from the beginning Myra worried. As a baby Peggy was easily startled by loud noises and laughter. The sound of crumpling paper made her cry. Standing in her crib, she would chew up the wood railings like a trapped animal. And long after she learned to walk, she was intensely fearful of falling. Facing a slight incline, Peggy would get down on her hands and knees rather than risk losing her balance. The hisses and knocks of the radiator alarmed her, and the sight of a machine spewing insulation into the roof of the house next door was a vision of such terror that she awoke screaming in nightmares for weeks afterward.

Perhaps because Peggy had such a difficult time of it, she was especially loved. But her parents’ love was never enough. As Peggy grew older, Myra noticed how her daughter found it increasingly difficult to make and keep friends her own age. She often ended up playing with younger children. She was thin skinned and high strung and stubbornly resisted advice and criticism. “Were we too overprotective, too permissive,” Myra asked, “or too anxious and concerned?” Yet it seemed that there was nothing Peggy wanted more than to be liked. “Perhaps because you found that impossible, you would rebel.”

If she were given another chance to raise her daughter, Myra wrote in February 1963, she couldn’t say what she would do differently. Were the doctors they sent her to at fault? Clearly something in the Bible stories Peggy had read at Temple Israel had struck a chord that no one else in the family seemed to hear. Betty had never felt the lack of spirituality in their home that Peggy complained of. On the bright side, she told her daughter, her teachers, relatives, and close friends all considered her an exceptionally gifted young girl. Her paintings were always praised in school and she had a beautiful singing voice. These were tremendous assets.

Myra had always marveled, too, at Peggy’s capacity for joy—in music, in family outings, picnics, walks in the countryside, holiday meals. Beyond these thoughts, however, Myra felt too close to her to analyze the reasons for the difficulty of her adolescence. “We loved you dearly,” Myra wrote.

Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY

December 1956

My life is at a complete standstill. Did Mother tell you about Dr. Harper? After my nervous breakdown, I began seeing a psychiatrist. I never even made it to the classroom before the college authorities at the University of Rochester sent me packing. Dr. Harper was the third psychiatrist I tried, and the least upsetting. He is soft-spoken and has only recently begun a private practice. Psychoanalysis involves lying down on a couch and launching into an hour-long monologue while your doctor sits in a chair behind you taking notes and asking irrelevant questions.

Not long after we began, I became exasperated with the entire charade. Dr. Harper explained that his aloofness was part and parcel of the way the therapy is meant to work. I told him that our sessions made me feel worse instead of better. He insisted I continue. Such symptoms were the result of bringing to light the painful memories from my childhood, he argued, memories my subconscious mind had done its best to suppress. I had no idea what he was talking about. He couldn’t even prescribe sleeping pills to help me sleep because relieving my symptoms would prevent me from gaining insight into the primal conflicts that were at the root of my troubles.

The insights he was looking for eluded me, but I couldn’t help but come away with a thorough grounding in the orthodoxies of Dr. Sigmund Freud. For example, if I told Dr. Harper how much I detested social dancing, jazz, modern art, and musical comedies, seeing them as no better than commercialized sex, he would parrot Freud’s dictum “Fear is the wish.” This meant that I was repressing my sexual impulses and that was what was causing my nervous condition. I often heard Daddy criticize the narrow-minded thinking of the Larchmont Catholics, but I found that these Freudians were more rigidly doctrinaire than any Catholic.

I took a copy of a famed work on Islamic jurisprudence to one session, reading aloud the Islamic laws regarding the proper relationship between men and women. Then I began to describe what my idea of an Islamic utopia would be like. First off, I said, Arabic would be the official language. I wouldn’t make the mistake of outlawing Western dress, I told Dr. Harper, but no one would want to wear it. Instead men would don the traditional dress of Saudi Arabia and women would be completely veiled. The sexes would be strictly segregated, attending separate schools. There would be no courtship, only arranged marriages.

In addition to these constraints on social life, there would be no tables or chairs or beds in the homes, and people would eat with their fingers instead of forks and knives. Pork, alcohol, and drugs would be outlawed. There would be no machines or factories, just small shops where traditional craftsmen made everything. In large extended families, the very old, the mentally afflicted, and the handicapped would be lovingly looked after. There would be no need for mental hospitals or old age homes. Everyone would say their prayers five times a day and observe the month-long fast of Ramadan intent in their every action to please God and attain salvation. In such a society everyone would be compassionate and just rather than wholly focused on the accumulation of riches and material comforts. There would be no race prejudice. I told Dr. Harper that I would like to devote the rest of my life to making this dream come true.

This wasn’t the kind of dream Dr. Harper wanted to hear about because he broke his own rule to interrupt me. Why are you avoiding confronting your root problem, your fear of men? As if he hadn’t heard a word I had said. Why at the age of nineteen are you still a virgin? You live like a nun, he said, in a tone of accusation. If I had had a gun at that moment, Betty, I’m sure I would have shot him.

Instead I took off my shoe and shattered the glass-fronted bookshelves in which he proudly displayed his volumes of
The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.
I pulled out his issues of the
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
and tore them in half. Only when he shouted at me did I return to my senses and of course I apologized. He was really rather nice about it. Naturally Dr. Harper found in my behavior a confirmation of all his theories.

I can’t help but feel that Freud’s estimation of what it means to be human is incredibly depressing. In his view, the highest expressions of art and religion all get boiled down to one’s base animal instincts. At the same time, Betty, I had been reading Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of the Qur’an. I found this work deeply truthful and inevitably totally at odds with Freud. But if I don’t accept Freud’s theories and act accordingly, I am told that I am at fault. Should I be so arrogant as to question the validity of his doctrines, I am supposed to be in denial. This passed for medical treatment, for science, for logic.

What never ceases to amaze me is the fact that in all my time under his care, going to his White Plains office five times a week, Dr. Harper never took any interest in my real problems. Instead, he is intent on identifying problems that have never even occurred to me. Ones Dr. Freud insists have to be there. Among the problems I face that seem far more pressing is the question of my future. I have always given a great deal of thought to what I wanted to be when I grew up. Unlike you, Betty, I never had the slightest desire to be a housewife.

On your suggestion, not long after I left the University of Rochester, I wrote to Margaret Mead about becoming an anthropologist. She told me that I had first to finish my degree and then plan to spend several years living among savage tribes of the Amazon or New Guinea. As I was only interested in the highly developed and literate civilizations of Asia, the idea of living among headhunters and cannibals was unappealing. Still, I applied and was accepted to New York University.

Then, last June, a year after I matriculated, I was asked not to return in the fall. Mother probably told you what happened. The dean of women suggested I resume my studies when Dr. Harper could attest to my complete recovery. I wasn’t asked to withdraw because of poor grades, Betty. I was an exceptionally diligent student and my work was never late. But for his final lecture the professor in my course “The History of Russia and the Near East” decided to extol the virtues of Turkey’s president, Kemal Ataturk. He cited Ataturk’s enlightened secular reforms and denounced Islam as backward and medieval.

Of course I know now I should have taken issue with his remarks in a more respectful manner. Instead I argued with him in front of the whole class. And then when the chair of the sociology department expressed her hope that within a generation the entire world would embrace Western values, that modern technology would soon erase cultural difference and the traditional civilizations of the East would be eclipsed, it was the same story. Both professors had called Dr. Harper to complain. I knew then I would never get my college degree.

So how can I support myself? As a child, I wanted to be an artist. So I took a course with George Grosz at the Art Students League at Cooper Union. Though he was a very good teacher, encouraging even the most mediocre talents, I soon realized I painted to please only myself, not the art market, and so I was unlikely to make a living painting. I had also explored the possibility of procuring a pilot’s license and, as I always had a number of ideas, becoming an inventor. Unfortunately, I lack the skills for these professions. I like reading history books, but you can’t do anything with that but teach. I know I wouldn’t be able to tolerate a single day of the monotonous routine of an office or assembly line. The summer after I graduated from Mamaroneck High School, I worked at the plastics factory, making tiny plastic crucifixes in different colors. It was impossible for me to stand on my feet all day.

But Dr. Harper only wants to talk about my virginity. Naturally I find the prospect of dating nerve-racking. How do you draw the line between experience with boys and going all the way? I know you managed just fine and Walter is a respectable husband, but I can’t quite seem to. Mother would be furious with me if I lost my virginity. The only prudent solution for me seems not to risk it, which leads to Mother’s accusation that I am a prig. With every year that passes and every cousin’s engagement party, I despair of ever getting married. So this is another of my dilemmas.

Finally, living at home is growing increasingly difficult. I had proposed moving to Aunt Helen’s more spacious house in White Plains, as I often stay with her when Mother and Daddy go off on holiday. Sometimes, too, when their bridge parties go on until late, with twenty or thirty guests drinking cocktails and smoking and keeping me from sleeping, I go to Aunt Helen’s to get some rest. But Aunt Helen pointed out that our cousin Jim also likes to throw parties. Jim and his friends dance with wild abandon, playing Elvis Presley records at top volume until early in the morning. I couldn’t well expect her to keep her son’s friends away, she says. It would cause strife in the family and Jim would end up resenting me. “Just as your mother and father now do,” she added pointedly.

I should tell you that this past summer and fall I became utterly absorbed in following the Suez Crisis in the Middle East. Every morning before Mother and Daddy woke up I would go to the door of the apartment to retrieve the
New York Times.
I read every single page, feeling as if my own fate hung in the balance of the contest between Israel and Egypt playing out in its pages. After Nasser bought weapons from communist Russia and proceeded to nationalize the Suez Canal, there was pandemonium in Israel, England, and France. In advance of the presidential elections, the Democrats were falling all over each other in defense of Israel, calling for arms and troops to force the Arab states to recognize Israel and sign peace treaties.