Chapter 5: Giving Failure a Try

Cleveland Heights, Ohio
Detroit, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Berkeley, California

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. (Emerson, “Experience”)

Armed with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, I still thought the most valuable and useful official document I owned was my driver’s license. So I ignored the degree for a time and drove to Cleveland to spend the summer near my first serious girlfriend. Thanks to the influence of a distant relative, I got a summer job at the Campus sweater factory that paid a princely $35 a week, exactly five dollars more than I needed for room and board at the Goldschmidts’, a healthy walk away from Natalie’s. In the days of the 20¢ gallon, we made five dollars go a long way by spending lots of time parked.

Even after three years, there was not enough time all summer to get acquainted. Late one night, Natalie’s father walked partway down the stairs to investigate a noise. It was us, on the couch. He stood, listened for a few seconds. He turned around, went up one step, stopped again, and muttered over his shoulder, “Why don’t you kids get married already and get some sleep?” He was curious to know what kind of family I came from, and he often asked me about our customary way of observing holidays or other celebrations. When he had heard enough, he turned to his wife and said, “What did I tell you? Everybody’s got their own religion.”

I did have another official piece of paper, a Michigan teaching certificate, and my father was eager for me to follow him into the Detroit school system. Even if I was ignoring my future, he was not. He asked around, and in mid-August he called to tell me that there was a position available at Garfield Junior High School if I wanted it. So I went back to Detroit.

The car pool would get me there before eight every morning, when the halls were still and spotless, and I would go straight to my classroom to prepare for the day. Soon, recorded sounds of baroque majesty filled the building, Handel, Telemann, Bach, Albinoni, almost moving me to tears. At half past eight, a bell, a distant shout, then the clanging of lockers and approaching laughter and shrieking. A raucous chorus of contending voices arguing, hands clapping. Into view came bodies jumping, dancing, punching. One or two boys would head straight for their seats and fall asleep. The first time I tried to awaken one of them, he snarled at me like a cornered beast and the other students told me that he could not sleep at home—too noisy. It was hard to see how it could be more chaotic than the classroom, with a general melee of shoving and rearranging of furniture. I usually had to herd the students to their proper places when the late bell sounded. When fights broke out, as they often did, girls were as likely as boys to be rolling on the floor and I did not know what to grab.

Nobody in the education faculty at Wayne State had ever hinted that there might be students like these, even though Garfield Junior High was within walking distance of the university. In the staff room, battle-scarred women would counsel me to sit on the students, especially when they were fighting, and not to allow them to get away with anything. “Give ‘em an inch today and you won’t have anything left tomorrow,” one said. I could see that public school teachers in the inner city were as important to American society as the police or the army, and I thought they should be excused from the draft and jury duty, and any other distraction from their work. But I did not have much time to think about or advocate this change: a guillotine was mercifully descending, and the principal called me out of a class in the fourth week to tell me that enrolment had dropped, and sorry, last one in, first one out.

If Garfield had made me wonder why I was being punished for becoming a teacher, my next assignment could have made me feel guilty for being unjustly rewarded. I spent most of the year at Cass Technical High, a downtown school with a bizarre mix of neighborhood students and would-be artists who were admitted only after passing a screening examination. During scheduled breaks, in my private office on a landing between the third and fourth floors of the school, I would listen to music classes just below me, flute quartets and wind serenades wafting up the staircase. But the cultural elevation of the school did not keep my fellow teachers in the car pool from discussing the specials in the supermarket almost every day.

Yunck sits stupefied, holding a copy of The Mentally Disturbed Teacher, his eyes fixed in front of him. Next to him, Kearis looks ahead as well, but not absently, rather expectantly; and Kraft, standing to one side, huskily, in a half-slouch, using all his strength to hold himself partly erect, sneers under a crew-cut, “What’re we going to do tonight, fellas?” Nobody moves. All is atrophy except for Yunck’s eyes opening wider. Kearis, in a spasm of action, grunts “I dunno,” then returns to his intent blankness.

Into the room comes Betty Nolan, hips swinging one after the other. Kraft snaps to full attention. Kearis mumbles, “That old bitch—if it’s not her ass, it’s her mouth that’s wiggling.” Yunck laughs until the tears roll down his face. I feel myself turning red, but Betty turns to me and says, “Don’t be embarrassed. Those boys are so clever when they put their minds to it.” Kraft tries to retain his dignity, but with his mouth closed the laughter gushes out in a flow. “Pssshht!”

Betty has come to borrow the book Yunck is holding. She waves it in their faces and, with a suggestive twitch of her upper lip, leaves. Kraft tries again. “What’re we going to do tonight, fellas?” Kearis continues to stare, impatient disgust written all over his face. Yunck is frozen, a convulsive grin on his lips, congealed tears on his cheeks. They’ll probably still be there tonight, I think. I’d leave, but they’re the only men in the world and Betty Nolan is past 60. The world is so small, and insane—how can I make the best of it?

(January 6, 1964)

While I was limited to an assigned curriculum in three of my classes each semester, I was given free rein in the other two. My artistic students had a full diet of utopian literature, Brave New World, Walden, Gulliver’s Travels, and I considered my $5,200 salary that year to be an unearned windfall. Teaching was better than working. Lulabelle McLin, my department head, could see that students enjoyed my classes, but she was not so sure of what they were learning. About halfway through the year, she observed that I seemed to care more about what I was teaching than who I was teaching, and didn’t I think I would be happier teaching college? I did not know.

We always find creative new ways to construct a private hell around us. My way that year was to go to night school to begin working on a masters degree. Work all day, go to school for three hours three days a week, try to grade papers and do my own homework. It didn’t take me long to decide that I couldn’t do all of those things at the same time and that I would have to focus on what I thought I could do well. That year, the student newspaper at Wayne State had a report about a student who held two full-time jobs and got by on three hours of sleep a night. No, thanks, I thought.

At the end of the year, an inspector from the Board of Education came into one of my classes. He was miffed by the fact I was using the class period to help the students prepare for an examination and that I had chosen not to tailor my lesson to impress him. When we met after class, he tapped his pencil eraser on the table and nervously offered, “If Miss McLin hadn’t told me that you were a good teacher, I never would have known.” My only thought was, “If Miss McLin hadn’t told me you represented the educational establishment, I never would have known.” And I thought, maybe I’d be better off teaching college after all.

I found it hard imagine what would become of my life if I stayed in Detroit to deal with adolescents and ego-mad bureaucrats with advanced degrees in education. So I resigned and decided to go to the University of Michigan graduate school. With his connections, my father went to my personnel file in the Board office, removed my resignation letter, and substituted an application for a year of absence. “Never burn bridges behind you,” he warned me. And when I protested that having a safety net would take away some of my motivation to succeed, he just shook his head and sized me up and down. I barely heard him mutter, “You’re the only person I ever met who seems to want to burn his bridges in front of him.”

The one thing more than any other I stand to gain in marriage is integrity. To marry on their terms, to kowtow to outside pressures just because they’re there is to deny the strength of my self.

One of the most amazing things about Carol is that almost-crudeness I love so much, putting a wall between her desires and those of others. There’s also her ability to say exactly what she means. It’s got nothing to do with tact, just with being true to herself. Am I not marrying her partly because all my life I’ve been true to others at the expense of the self, and I now find that with her I can reassert my self again? Haven’t I been sick of the family long enough? To begin marriage with them would be to throw away that freedom of self right from the start and invalidate that aspect of our life. Look at life, a long life, and make the choice in those terms. It’s even worthwhile telling the whole bunch to go shove it, just to get rid of them. It’s worth parting on bad terms if they’re unwilling to let us live as we see fit. There’s a whole lifetime at stake, not just this one stupid incident [our wedding], and we’ve got to show everybody that we’re going to live with each other, not with them. (Journal, March 22, 1963)

One Sunday afternoon in May, I drove Larry to the airport, and one of Cherna’s friends came along as company on the way home. For the next month, she and I spent every available moment together, until she went to Colorado for the summer. I found her warmth and tenderness a bonus next to the qualities I found most attractive: She was outspoken, brash, and frank. She could not tolerate hypocrisy or bullshitting. She wanted to preserve the simplicity of a life with single-minded liberal values. Struck by Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” she wished to remain unburdened by unnecessary material goods—in her words, she hoped to be a bum. Carol looked to me like a perfect means of escape from convention and humdrum prospects in Detroit.

By the end of the summer, after we had come to know each other through almost daily letters, Carol and I met in Chicago, drove back to Detroit, and agreed that we never wanted to leave each other. And we worked out some ground rules. Carol knew that I was eager to step out on my own, and she gave me a goal to work toward: she wanted to be a professor’s wife. For my part, she was familiar enough with my family to be apprehensive about how much of the apparatus of Judaism I wanted to follow. I told her that I wanted to be able to observe Shabbos and the holidays, and I wanted to keep a kosher kitchen.

Any one with common sense ought to consider forbidden food as though it were poison, or had some poison mixed with it. Suppose poison were put into one’s food, would one look for some legal subterfuge to sanction the eating of that food, if there remained the least apprehension of the presence of poison in it? Surely not. Whoever should act thus were rightly looked upon as an arrant fool. Forbidden food is . . . actual poison to the mind and soul. (Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, transl. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Chapter XI)

Our engagement took everybody by surprise. My friends, my parents, especially my father, were disturbed by Carol’s lack of formal religious training. Her attachment to Judaism was a connection to her family (mostly in Windsor, Ontario) and an emotional tie to a few celebrations—a far cry from my background. One evening in Windsor, some of her relatives offered us some cake. It was not kosher by any standard, and my father told me so (in Yiddish). I insisted on having a piece. This was going to be my life. With her, not them.

My father gave me no illusions about marriage. “You don’t realize what you have to give up until you’ve already done it,” he told me once. “Just to be with somebody else takes compromises and self-sacrifice that young folks don’t know about. And then kids—” He raised his eyes and rolled them, never finishing his sentence, as if I were supposed to guess about those sacrifices when I couldn’t imagine the others. (Letter to Catherine Cunningham-Huston, September 4, 1981)

Dad pursed his lips and rocked his head. God sees the truth, but waits. For the next sixteen years, he and I carried on a dialogue about Judaism. It was a tug-of-war and I was slipping, and he would rather have been pulling in the same direction that I was. Dad would argue that the survival of Judaism could not be explained in physical terms—that the Jewish people would have been wiped out centuries ago if not for some larger, cosmic protection. And I would argue just as hard that survival is no proof of legitimacy—that anti-Semitism and bigotry seem to be as lasting as Judaism. At length, he got me a copy of The Guide for the Perplexed, by Maimonides, and told me to read it. It is a series of letters from a major medieval philosopher to his son, who had been derailed by rationalism.

But my problem was not infatuation with rationalism so much as impatience with those closest to me, and, by extension, disillusionment with the canon of received religious knowledge they represented. How could Maimonides have known what might perplex a young man in the middle of the twentieth century? How could he have known the tensions that would arise in a country like the United States, where individuals were free to work out the consequences of any freedom they envisioned, where Judaism was becoming as much a political movement as the sum of its history, where everything was possible, nothing was forbidden, and the old guidelines for life were creaking under the strain?

Thoreau tries to give habit a bad rap. He talks about how after two years he could see the path he always followed to the pond (the thoreau-fare, some people have pointed out). How much deeper are the ruts of conformity, he complains. It's ironic that, in a certain sense, he went to Walden to develop a life of habit, to make everyday things so habitual that he wouldn't have to think about them. Then he would be free to think about the things that deserved thought. Like Thoreau, I believe that habits of action can be okay but that habits of thought are the shits. I have moved away from the overintellectualized life of my youth to one in which experience no longer supports much tradition, solidity or consistency. Change and surprise are the constants of my being. Everywhere I see variety, flux and change — in the physical and intellectual spheres, in my appetites, responsibilities, and joys. It leaves me open to the possibility that evolution might also be a guiding principle in the moral development of humanity and in the ways that people can (should) express their relation to the spirit of the universe. (Letter to Steven Bodzin, September 1994)

At that time, teachers in Michigan with a master’s degree received more money than those without it. As a result, the state’s universities were inundated with teachers who coveted the degree but who had no academic ambitions beyond it. To satisfy this substantial clientele, a number of departments at the University of Michigan offered master’s degrees that did not require either a thesis or a comprehensive examination. Under these conditions, many teachers gained an impressive degree from a prestigious university just for passing courses. It was one of the steps in the conversion of higher education during the sixties from an elite institution to the more democratic morass it has become. But that concession was as far as the Michigan English department was willing to go. It drew a new line in the sand and opened its the doctoral program only to applicants with an A average.

At Ann Arbor, it took me a few weeks to find roommates who would keep a kosher apartment. Many friends tried to help me find housing until I told them what I required. During the Cuban missile crisis, I ran into an old high school buddy and tried to catch up on the last four years because we did not know if there would be another four years. When the word “kosher” came up, her jaw dropped, dragging her eyes down into incredulous circles. “Why, Gene!” she gasped. “You’re an anachronism!”

When I finally settled into an apartment three blocks from the main campus, I had two roommates. Mark Schlussel, a friend from Detroit in law school, spent long hours poring over arcane books with small print. Mark and I rarely saw our other roommate, Leon Waldman, a distant cousin of my mother. Leon lived the nocturnal existence of a bar-hopping undergraduate away from home. On the day students attained legal drinking age, they would go to the Pretzel Bell, where they could get unlimited beer for one day. They would stand on a table and guzzle while everybody else sang Happy Birthday. Many of Leon’s friends used the occasion to drink their friends under the table.

Leon observed Jewish law with a great deal of latitude, and Mark and I sometimes took advantage of his lax approach. At sunset on Saturday, for example, as we waited for the traditional three visible stars to end the Sabbath, Leon would claim that his superior vision allowed him to see the stars long before we could. Leon treated God as a familiar, invariably referring to the divine presence as KBH, an abbreviation for the Hebrew words kadosh baruch hu (holy one, blessed be he). Leon eventually became a rabbi and joined KBH as a business partner.

As an undergraduate, I had said so little in classes that few of my professors knew who I was. One of the requirements for an A in a geography class I took was an oral exam, and the professor did not recognize me when I showed up in his office. But I knew I would have to speak up in the big leagues. The mythology I had always heard about graduate school was that there were seminars instead of lectures, that there was more independent study and less spoon-feeding. So I made an effort to speak up. And it was painful. After I described George Eliot as “romantic” in a seminar, I was taken to task by a student who knew better than I that the term had a multiplicity of meanings. In fact, I had used the term as innocently as a high school student might have after finding it in an encyclopedia. The big leagues were no place to make offhand or unsupported remarks.

But I also found that even a major university can harbor narrow horizons. One of my professors was Arno Bader, an elderly man who had not left Ann Arbor since he enrolled at the university as an undergraduate fifty years before. He had taught at Michigan ever since he received the last of his three degrees there. But when I say he had not left Ann Arbor, I exaggerate slightly. Once, as a sop to his children, who wanted to travel, he had put them on a train toward Detroit and had driven all the way to Ypsilanti (four miles away) to pick them up.

My most important insight that year came from what Leon Edel called the ghostly tales of Henry James. From them I learned that a ghost is whatever haunts us, including the baggage of the past—regrets, plans gone awry, and especially unlived lives—perhaps none more frightening than our regret at not having taken a path that once lay in front of us, a path that now lies buried under the shards of all the other rejected would-have-beens. I was especially impressed by James’s insight when he explored the concept in such stories as “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner,” which showed that the ghosts we carry around are more real than any external ghost can be.

Part of my baggage, of course, had always been the question of definition, a parody of the philosophical question of what is me and what is not me. Carol and I were trying to define Us and what would represent Them. I was still trying to define others, still intrigued and mystified by however I as an individual might differ from others. But I was becoming more detached from my family and, as vague as the reasons were, I was becoming more determined to break with them. I harbored at least some of Portnoy’s complaint in feeling that I could never outgrow the family’s image of me as I had been at fifteen. In Ann Arbor, on my own for the first time, I could cherish and nourish my separateness. I did not want to be predictably known as a Bodzin, a Jew, a Detroiter, or anything else. I plotted with Carol to become something unique and outside the experience of the family.

I’m so fed up with what other people have been telling me about their lives for the past 20 years that I want to get away from all the associations of my youth who look at me as an adolescent—altogether—and live my own life, free of unwanted, unlistened-to lectures. I want to marry out of a family, out of a childhood, out of a city, out of a whole outlook and a whole frame of mind. I fear my inability to establish a life of my own if I am anywhere near the old life. I must get away from here and make Carol the only center of my existence instead of continuing in this terrible elliptical orbit around two focal points. To divorce my family I will need far more courage than I have ever known; it would be foolish to retain a useless, nominal relationship with the family at the expense of my own happy home. (Journal, April 1, 1963)

Just play their game for a little while longer, Carol and I said to each other. We’ll have our own life soon enough. I was far enough from home to be able to start creating that new life because the family treated the thirty miles between us as an unbridgeable distance. I had no visitors all year. I went to Detroit when it was appropriate, but I did not have to live through the battles that Carol was fighting every day.

Surely you are interested in a report of family club. Everyone was noisier than everyone else. The lemon tarts were delicious and the meeting conducted with its usual good taste, politeness and parliamentary procedure. Then your Uncle Marvin made me very ill. He went on and on about not going to the next family Bar Mitzvahs because, shame of all shames, they are in the unholy of unholies—a conservative synagogue. Cherna and I finally left and while we were getting into the car, Uncle Marvin and Aunt Esther called me over to their car to ask where we were getting married. I told them at Young Israel of Northwest Detroit by Rabbi Prero. “Well, we will be there at least.” But then, “Oh, no . . .”

I am so glad he cannot come because it would be something to throw up afterwards. As Cherna ‘suspicions,’ part of their warmth toward me is not because I am so perfect but because I am accepting the tenets of orthodoxy while Cherna’s fiancé is not. They do not realize that your orthodoxy and mine is not theirs. They leave no room for something called tolerance. (Letter from Carol, Valentine’s Day 1963)

I was admitted to a number of doctoral programs (Michigan not included—too many B’s), and we decided to go to the University of California at Berkeley. Dad had often said there’s no such thing as useless knowledge, but the advanced training I sought was as arcane to him as the kabala, esoterica in a code he did not understand. He heard me out, smacked his lips, and asked, puzzled, “Why would you want to do that?” He took me to all his friends, even those with doctorates, to discuss my plans. I remember only Zaidy Taitelbaum’s response as we sat at his dining room table. “Lemme understand—you got a good job teaching, and now you want to stay in school? Will you be something else when you get out? You wanna be a preacher? This gonna make you a better person?”

Our family had moved into a neighborhood without a shul; but we already constituted half a minyan, and we banded together with other families for services every week, meeting in a succession of houses until a new shul building could be erected. On a June morning in 1963, friends and family walked miles to join us in the basement of our house. It was truly a community celebration for me, for my marriage to Carol the next day. I was finally moving into a new phase, in which a Jewish community would accept me for myself, not because I belonged to a family but because I had freely chosen a path.

Immediately after the services, with the entire congregation gathered around to offer congratulations, Uncle Marvin tactlessly, and perhaps thoughtlessly, ambushed me by asking when Carol had been to the mikveh. She never had; despite the relative depth and breadth of my education, I had never learned the guidelines for everyday married life. As everybody else shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, Uncle Marvin informed me that Carol and I could not consummate our marriage until she went to the mikveh.

In the Ann Arbor apartment for the two months after we married, Carol and I listened to as much Delius as we could, filling our hearts with Brigg Fair, Summer Night on the River, Over the Hills and Far Away. I studied the fiction of Henry James five days a week while we waited for Cherna’s wedding to Eugene Kowalsky. The night of the wedding was the last time I saw both of my Taitelbaum grandparents. Zaidy’s final advice to me was never to forget that everything Jewish was good. Bubby didn’t want us to go west, and she made a point of telling us to come back. “The family needs you,” she said. Carol laughed and reminded her that both she and Zaidy had left their own families to come to America.

The trip across the prairies and the mountains was a voyage into the unknown for me. Carol found it amusing that I wanted to take pictures of every geographic feature higher than the Ozarks, but a quarter of a century in Detroit had not prepared me for the grandeur of open spaces and majestic heights. Our covered wagon was a small French car loaded to the roof with a custom-made box holding our clothing and bedding. Luckily, we had no furniture to ship. But we wore out the clutch taking a side road through the Medicine Bow range of the Rockies, and we had to sell our car shortly after we got to Berkeley. Even the fifty dollars we got for it barely stopped us from going broke as we paid tuition, rent, and normal living expenses. We were down to six dollars when Carol finally got a job in Oakland.

By exposing me to men of unrestrained desires, my army experience showed me that the only rich life is one of principled behavior. In my search for principles, I began to seriously investigate Judaism for the first time as a system of action-guiding principles, and found to my surprise and delight that there was more to my religion than a body of rigid rituals to enact and a collection of irrelevant tractates to study. There could be actual joy in religion, if only my study and my behavior could be brought more sharply into line with each other. The religion of the rabbinical college had to be replaced by the religion of everyday life. (From an application for the Kent Fellowship, 1966)

We became part of an Orthodox community of mainly university people who helped us see that it’s those around you who make you want to belong to a community—or not. Our rabbi was Saul Berman, about my age, recently ordained, and even more recently married to a woman who wouldn’t stop talking in shul. (The Sabbath, according to tradition, mingles elements that give us pleasure with some that give God pleasure. More than once, walking home from services with the Bermans, I heard Shelley saying, “Well, that was for me. I guess I’ll have to go home now and eat for God.”)

For the first time, I was impressed by the humanity of Judaism. Law and tradition did not exist in a vacuum. Everybody knew, for example, that milk and meat are never eaten together. But what if milk accidentally falls into a pot of meat? According to traditional Jewish law, the meat remains kosher as long as there is sixty times as much meat as milk. There is a margin of error—no absolute principle forces families to throw out what might be their only meat meal of the week. And if somebody brings a questionable chicken to the rabbi, wondering if it is kosher, there are times when the rabbi does not focus on the chicken, but on the woman—when the question is not “What is the condition of this chicken?” but “What is the condition of this woman?”

I found for the first time that the observance of Judaism need not be an uninformed, copy-cat, my-way-or-the-highway system; that prayer could be more than crooning Hebrew or Aramaic words without knowing why, or what the words meant; that ritual not be intellectually vapid. For the first time in years, I could get away from abstract learning for its own sake and benefit from intelligent discussions about practical and meaningful issues. In study sessions at the shul, instead of rehashing an unlikely talmudic discussion about our neighbor’s ox or about divorce, we would talk about what makes a dish or a pot kosher. Or, even more interestingly, we would talk about holiness. What is it, and how can we attain it? One great revelation for me was that holiness depends not so much on what God thinks as what people think; that anything could be holy, if people agree to use it as a link to the divine. Otherwise, how could the ritual killing of animals be justified?

We would meet thorny dilemmas and paradoxes head-on, such as seem to be posed by the people who regularly go to shul but who are known to be unfair or nasty to employees and stingy in the community. One evening, Saul came in full of excitement. The Livermore Laboratory had been studying the susceptibility of a number of combinations of fabrics to radioactivity. To everybody’s amazement, the most dangerous combination turned out to be linen and wool (which Jews are forbidden to wear; see Deuteronomy 22:11). What did it mean?

But there was a down side to Judaism, even in the Golden Kingdom. There were two rabbinical boards in southern California, each of which would certify certain butcher shops as kosher and would excommunicate anybody who ate meat prepared at a shop approved by the other board. I disgustedly shook my fist at both of them. But a few blips notwithstanding, whatever philosophical basis I have been able to attach to Judaism had its origins in Berkeley:

Judaism can be a connection to history and family and people. There's a magical strength about eating matzo on the same night when every Jew has done so for almost 4000 years, and something warm about even weird and wacky things like not touching the light switch on days when it's not the Jewish thing to do. All this stuff seems trivial until you realize that nothing is inherently holy—it's only attitude that makes actions good, bad, or indifferent. Why do orthodox Jews say so many blessings? And why is the language of so many of those blessings the same: "who has made us holy with his commandments and told us to do this or that"? The more you think about it, the more it becomes like more meditative religions. Jews remember God when they see a rainbow or wash their hands or eat bread so that, by an automatic intellectual connection, every physical event can eventually be related to the divine.

The Jewish tradition is more than habit; it establishes immediate links to people in communities that no longer exist and those that are far away. Lena used to be amazed at how the Jewish community here took an interest in her as a Soviet refugee, because being Jewish was not a positive quality in Kiev. Imagine: If you come into a new town late on Friday with nowhere to stay, the rabbi will find you a place, get you two cholesterol-laden meals, and take you to a synagogue full of people who want to know your life story. If you're into things like that, it can be a real trip before you are free to travel again on Saturday night. (Letter to Steven Bodzin, September 1994)

Luck had put us into a dynamic, young, friendly, intellectually stimulating community that helped us grow as a couple and as Jews. I led services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and helped the rabbi write his newsletter. I was asked to speak to a congregation in San Francisco about how Jews should react to a performance of The Merchant of Venice that was being staged in Berkeley. (In my conservatively esthetic approach, I explained that art was art. I pointed out that there hadn’t been any Jews in England for 400 years before Shakespeare; that the word Jew didn’t mean any more to him than the word Hottentot means to us; that, while a stereotype, in many ways Shylock comes off as a sympathetic character. They were not convinced.) For her part, Carol was putting a rational foundation under many of the practices I had not been able to explain to her. She even made an effort to go to the mikveh, but backed away when, ironically, the pool itself was not as clean as she thought it should be.

While we were developing as Jews and gaining strength as a couple, sharing our efforts with congenial friends who made those efforts worthwhile, I was entering a long period in which my dreams reflected a serious internal struggle:

I was in a house on the Albania-Russia border, working to help prisoners escape. Armed guards were all around the house, ready to shoot any white man. From time to time, I would peek out a basement window and out a trap door to see if the way was clear. Two boys came down the stairs to tell me that I was to report outside. I saw a hangman who looked like Adolf Eichmann and a uniformed guard, a rabbi and my father, a lineup of good and evil figures from a morality play. The hangman said, “You have been seen disobeying the rules and you must be executed. You may choose how.” I protested: “But I was doing something good. Why should I be handed over to the powers of evil to be killed?” The rabbi said, “Death is neither good nor bad. If you are to be killed by the agents of evil, you have no cause to complain. Even if you acted out of conviction that your actions were good, the fact remains that you were disobeying the rules.” I threw my tallis at him and screamed, “The hell! If Good and Evil are meaningless and arbitrary, why do I need this?” And I started running. I could hear the hangman behind me saying, “Let him run. He can’t be executed unless he understands the rules. The execution would be meaningless.”

(June 8, 1964)

At school, the year was such a washout that it never found itself onto my résumé. To begin with, shortly after I arrived on campus, I discovered that I would have to pass the English department master’s exam before I could be admitted into the doctoral program. It was annoying—remember, the master’s degree in English Language and Literature at Michigan was little more than a reward for attendance and perseverance, and I thought it might take me a year or two of independent study to prepare for that exam. Once again, I found myself facing a wall that I did not want to surmount.

That wall was built of inscrutable, unyielding medieval and Renaissance materials. The English Department bulletin board was weighty with announcements from study groups for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Shakespeare. The pre-Restoration writers were demigods, frequenting the halls and informing the atmosphere. One faculty advisor, who told me that John Milton was the most modern writer he ever wanted to read, referred to Joseph Conrad as an avant-garde upstart. For anybody familiar with the history of the sixties at Berkeley, it may be a strain to imagine how in September 1963 I felt as if I had landed in a bastion of retrograde conservatism. But I did.

My professors made the understandable mistake of assuming that all the graduate students in their classes were already somewhat familiar with the subject matter. When Louis Simpson told jokes about Coleridge and Wordsworth, I was at first lost, then bored. And my lecture course in seventeenth century English poetry was even worse. I was there only because of the master’s exam; sitting with between two and three hundred other victims through uninspired lectures delivered in a monotone from poorly constructed notes, I thought long and hard about other courses that had animated me. Was this my future?

The part of a semester I spent at Berkeley convinced me that if education is not a dialogue between teacher and student, it fails. A year of teaching high school and engaging myself in the lives of my students was more conducive to my development than was any year I spent as a student. (From an application for the Kent Fellowship, 1966)

I thirsted for far more inspiration than most graduate students needed, and the English department was not prepared to provide primitive guidance to novices. I felt most inspired when I played wide-eyed tourist, sitting in a eucalyptus grove on a Berkeley hillside, sniffing the air or staring toward San Francisco Bay, marveling at the angle of the sun and the wisps of fog materializing under the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was one year before Mario Savio shook Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement, and tinder for social change lay everywhere. There were injustices to change in the Deep South and foreign policies to question, and everywhere around me people were agitating for a better world. Protesters were sitting with linked arms on sidewalks and in streets, on private and public property, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Madame Nhu spoke in Berkeley when she came from Vietnam to appeal for American help for her husband, even at that moment sitting in the crosshairs of history. The campus also had room for constitutionally protected lunatics. When the head of the American Nazi party came to deliver a lecture at the university field house, he kept fifteen thousand students waiting for half an hour. As soon as he began to speak, the power went out. A voice not far from me shouted, “We have witnessed God’s judgment on this unholy assembly.”

And then came the gloomy day when the radio at home announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Ignoring class assignments, I started toward the campus, following the developing story all along University Avenue, listening to reports from an endless succession of open car windows. After the shocked tears and the inconsolable wailing, mainly from foreign students, I took the elevator to the top of the campanile and looked out at the campus and the city. I was on a collision course with failure: how many suicides had the Golden Gate Bridge attracted, I wondered, and how many students would have jumped from the very spot I was standing if not for the reinforced windows? The next week, I left the university.

During several exasperating weeks of looking for work, mainly in San Francisco, I broke up my tedium by going to the American Automobile Association office, to collect strip maps and plan trips to anywhere—anywhere seemed better than where I was. To collect maps as if they could show me a path through life. To study the uneven dark line that dominates each strip map, representing the general direction of life. To wonder at the side roads that feed into that life—other lives, other directions, other possibilities, noticed only when they touch our own, or seem to, appearing from nowhere, eventually receding into the distance, where we lose sight of them.

We each take a unique route from a shared starting point to our common destination, exploring many paths, sometimes for only a moment. We join other lives for months or years, or experiment with novel ways of living for a few miles. And the more side trips we take, the more tortuous is the route back to our own way. The University of California was a dead-end road.

The direction taken by some lives is so convoluted that many people mistakenly believe other lives, the byways of experience, to be more significant than their own. In those weeks on the streets in San Francisco I passed thousands of people every day and knew none of them. I knew I was not one of them and I thought every one of them, even the lost souls, had a reality that I lacked. Seeing them, talking to some of them, made it easier for me to understand lives following paths that seemed to be going nowhere, such as the life behind the voice that approached me on Market Street in 1964 and asked, “Who’s got a cigarette, you or me?” Eventually, these meetings would help me sympathize with students overwhelmed by my own classroom demands. Since backing away from UC Berkeley, I have seen people—especially, but not exclusively, academics—who had never known the dry, bitter taste of failure, people who thought that effort and reward are inevitably related, people without empathy for the underprivileged. I could not help seeing these people as a new kind of Them. With my own false start, I felt closer to lives that were struggling than to people who seemed to float through, buoyed by fame, success, fortune, or bravado.

I subjected my shaken pride to a battery of tests to see whether I was in the right field. By and large, the findings were not surprising. The line-graph printout showed that my occupational choice was reasonably appropriate to my temperament and talent. Teaching scored in the high 60s on a scale of 100. Only one other occupation scored above 30. It nearly knocked the top off the chart at 92, and it turned out to be missionary work.

Unfortunately, the test had failed to ascertain that I was not a Christian. The morality I professed, and which utterly confounded the test analysis, had its roots in a tradition which never believed in missionary work, but which taught instead that individuals affected others more by personal example than by sledgehammer methods. Thus lacking a traditional sense of mission, I shrugged the whole thing off and stuck with teaching. (Excerpt from a report to the energy conservation office of the Canada Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, summer 1978)

As far as work was concerned, only one thing was certain: I was not very good at looking for it. By the end of January, I had spent six weeks looking and four weeks in constant hope that success was imminent. When I ran into an employer who refused to consider me because I was a writer, I seemed to have jumped off the tracks altogether. Eventually, a crew reorganizing a Montgomery Ward warehouse in Oakland had no problem hiring a writer and took me on.

I also turned inward and made some feeble, preliminary attempts to write stories. I was becoming obsessed with confidence men and other fraudulent characters, who have since dominated much of my fiction. The setting for most of my stories was a yeshiva, even though I thought it would be difficult to create believable fiction with the caricatures I had known in real life. I could see instinctively what Mark Twain would later teach me, that fact differs from fiction because fiction is limited to what’s possible. But if I never finished a story, it was because excuses were too easy to find:

I used to write Carol long letters . . . . But now ideas and problems don’t get a chance to turn to vinegar inside me because they’re intercepted and directed here at home. I never get a chance to erupt the way I did before, because as soon as I start simmering she asks me what it is and I never even come to a boil. . . . (Letter to Yudi Gellman, April 16, 1966)

Evenings, I studied university catalogues to find graduate programs that did not force students through the kinds of hoops I had just walked away from. If the catalogues gave no clues, I would write a letter and ask whether they had any reason why I could not use my master’s degree from Michigan to enter their doctoral program. Most graduate schools were indulgent with my inquiries, but the reply from Indiana began with a snarky comment about the vanity of human wishes. After some weeks, the University of Wisconsin offered me a teaching assistantship and the University of Washington offered me a tuition scholarship. A familiar voice inside me said, “I want to teach,” and I chose Wisconsin.