PROTESTANT CHILDREN WERE different from Catholic and Jewish children: Protestant children didn’t talk about what went on in their homes, had few visitors, didn’t have to be doing something all the time, and got along with their families; Protestant parents smiled but were not friendly. He liked Protestant children but did not get so close to them as to Catholic and Jewish children. Although he lived in a Jewish neighborhood there were few Jews in his apartment house; this, he thought, was because his house had a garden and no elevators. He knew that the Jewish children were Jewish but did not bring the subject up with them or they with him. No one objected to phrases like “Jew down” for getting a lower price or “Jew Boy’s” for a local candy store run by a stupid birdlike man with an accent. His best city friend said one day, “I guess I’m Jewish, my mother’s Jewish”; he then thought he knew why there was always the smell of cooking in the friend’s apartment. His father and his father’s family were Protestant and glum; his father’s brothers and sisters never had money, were too proud to take menial jobs, and more or less lived off his father. When he was expelled from Catholic high school and went to public school all the friends he made there were Jewish. He found this out gradually: for instance, he went with one friend to another friend’s house, where he saw Hebrew books. He later asked the first friend whether the second friend was Jewish. “Yes, and I am too,” the first friend said. When this happened the friends did not have to be taken so seriously and their virtues were partially discounted because he thought Jews worked hard at developing themselves, whereas he kept discovering hidden talents in Catholics. More and more of his friends were Jewish; he told them everything about himself, and they seemed to tell him everything about themselves. They were knowing, bookish, funny, and admiring of him while inwardly he could be condescending to them. To meet a Jew in the army was a great treat, especially if the Jew came from a big city. His closest friend at one post was a tall, thin, small-headed, thick-lipped Jew; one night while drinking beer with the friend at a picnic table behind a PX two country soldiers exchanged loud anti-Semitic clichés. He seemed more upset than the friend and said to the friend that he thought Jews were warm-hearted, open, and intelligent people, which he believed but later realized were also clichés. He had never heard anti-Catholic sentiments until once after the war at a bar a Protestant student told him about wanting to get married, “but my mother keeps breaking it up.” One of this student’s romances had been with a Catholic girl, “but Mother was right about that one, I would have been a fool to get mixed up with that Catholic business.” “Like what?” he asked. “Oh, you know,” the student said, but at the time he didn’t. A few years after his father died he, his brother, and his mother were having lunch at a restaurant, as they did every month, and his brother told of having sent to the United States Archives for their paternal grandfather’s Civil War records, which told how the grandfather had been AWOL for two weeks, lost an Austrian rifle, and been docked pay for the offenses. “Also there was something that would interest you,” his brother said. “In the form he filled out for a pension he gave his mother’s maiden name, place of birth, and occupation. It was Caroline Isaacs, London, milliner. Your grandfather was a Jew or half a Jew.” They asked their mother for more information; she said, “Well, Daddy and I knew something about it, but we never said.” That evening he called an expert in Jewish things to ask how he would have fared in Germany in the thirties. The expert said, “A fourth you were a Jew, a sixteenth you were not, an eighth it depended on whether you played ball.” He told his daughters they were probably part Jewish; they told their friends, some of whom threw a party with Jewish food and wine. It then occurred to him that the only anti-Semitism he had heard at home had come from his father, who had worked resentfully for a Jewish company and had not gotten along with the presumably Jewish or half-Jewish grandfather. He thinks that Jews want to remain inwardly different from gentiles while becoming outwardly similar, thus increasing advantage; that Protestants want to be good without forgoing the things of this world; and that Catholics want to believe that the world can be changed, thus relieving themselves of the urge for self-improvement. As he ages he will notice that his contemporaries mix more with their own kind and seem to be glad to be done with outsiders. This will not be so easy for him because his own kind will be a kind of outsider; but he will seek them out because he will enjoy talking about childhood and youth and will want to be readily understood; the other parts of life, he will feel, were discussed enough while being lived.