Where did you grow up?

I grew up in White Plains, New York, which is a fairly affluent suburb slightly north of New York City. I grew up in the fifties, a time of frenzied conformity, following the disruptions of WWII, and White Plains was as conformist as it gets.

Religious household?

My family was an anomaly in White Plains, since we were (1) Orthodox Jews and (2) decidedly not affluent. We lived in this little section, carved into the commercial downtown, some three-square blocks which were demographically different from the rest of White Plains. It was populated mostly by immigrant families from Sicily, and their kids were my neighborhood friends. But in school it was different. Because of the districting I went to a school that was almost solidly well-heeled WASP.

What was your family like?

My father had come from Poland—well, it was Poland when he lived there but it’s now the Ukraine. His father had been the rabbi in their little village. My father’s getting out of Poland in time—most of his immediate family did, except for one married sister and her children, my first cousins, all killed by the Nazis—formed the backdrop of my life. I think the strongest emotion of my childhood was wanting to protect my father, who was the most extraordinarily gentle person. He came from another world and never really adjusted to American values. He’d been ordained as a rabbi but never practiced as one. Instead he became a cantor. He lacked the confidence to be an American rabbi, which was something so different from being a rabbi in a little village in Poland. He fell back on his beautiful voice to support his family, although pretty meagerly, especially in the context of the wealthy community where we ended up living. He also prepared boys all over Westchester County for their bar mitzvahs, especially difficult cases, kids with all kinds of cognitive and emotional problems. He was a master teacher; his gentleness had a magical effect. But he didn’t charge families for the lessons. You see what I mean when I say that he never really adjusted to American values. Sometimes people would pay my father as they saw fit for the year or more that he had put into preparing their sons, but often they didn’t. I remember my mother, who was American-born, getting furious when some families didn’t pay him anything. I remember one occasion when she exploded when one such family, “from Scarsdale yet!” whose child had presented particular problems, gave my father a gift of three fancy clothes hangers. She hurled them into the trash, which was a gesture whose drama I admired, though I also thought it was a shame. They were very pretty hangers.

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