True, his tweeds were as rumpled as theirs, his ties were knit and his shirts were buttoned down. But there was something else, most vulgarly expressed, I suppose, in a dialogue between two of his confreres I happened to overhear one day when I was an undergraduate. I had stopped off briefly in the men’s room of the humanities wing and was minding my own business inside a cubicle when the outside door opened and two Professorial Voices proceeded to the urinals.

“Ah don’ know where he gits ’em from,” the First Voice boomed and echoed in the tiled chamber. It was the voice of the head of the English Department, who had an untidy penchant for ending sentences with prepositions. “Don Joo-an, indeed.”

“Ah fear,” resounded the Second Voice (it belonged to an instructor of freshman English), “Dr. Breslau’s Joo-an is a Jew-ism.” They shared a roupy chuckle.

That, essentially, was the problem, but there were complications. My father could have accepted anti-Semitism with the sort of superior forbearance that made him say “rice” for “rise.” He would not have felt like a failure in the ugly face of discrimination alone, but he harbored the suspicion that there were other elements that undermined his success. He was a lousy teacher and a dubious scholar, and he knew it. He was no worse than the rest of that dismal congregation, but those his age were full professors and he was an associate; they had tenure and he did not.

Had Morton Breslau’s discipline been other than English Literature, in those days a WASP monopoly, or had he lived in a country with a long history of hard-core anti-Semitism—Poland, for example—there possibly would not have been a problem. Jews in Poland knew where they stood—on thin ice to be sure—but their position was defined and unambivalent. A Jewish teacher had simply to embrace Catholicism, no more than superficially, and his academic permanence was assured. But here in democratic America, religious relationships were more subtle, and seldom discussed by gentlemen outside toilets, so to speak, and to endorse the reigning faith in America would not have helped. In America we pretend to take pride in the melting pot which only simmers, coming to a boil now and then; the juices seldom assimilate. We like Jews to be Jews, to attend their exotic synagogues and pursue their alien customs and traditions, and let the rest of us the hell alone. I think my father’s associates would have accepted him with a faint, bemused tolerance if his accent were Yiddish. It was his goddammed superior phonetic dandyism that so sorely afflicted them.