The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American Jew

a book of his school days. My own years of secondary school

n. There were two of them at high school, one at a militar

h now as I look back and am chastened and strengthened by their memory. Each is as a lighted candle in the dark of the past that I look back upon. And I

ool days which ga

tudy the lore, that I might be confirmed into the religion of my fathers. That they did not absolutely insist upon it was because they wanted me to come to my God gratefully, voluntarily, considering his worship an exercise of love, of

xcuse for my falling asleep, or for my sitting uneasily, squirming, yawning, heavy-eyed, uninterested, unmoved ... hungry only to be

anyhow-seem to set much stock by their early settling ancestors. Near our house was a preparatory school for girls and another for boys; they were hotbeds of snobbery and prejudice, these schools. The students who attended them had to pass down our block on their way home from school. Often, when they saw me playing there,

d, being ashamed of my cowardice, I grew quickly ashamed

race, whether I could not look with true contempt and easy forgiveness upon those rowdies who had taunted me. I tried to take that attitude ... but I was not big and strong enough for it. I tried it only once-and then one of the big b

y fond of her. I remember how, on St. Valentine's day, I stole into her class room at lunch time and, while she was absent, stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her desk. I didn't understand, then, why the teacher tittered so nervously w

otes, the former marched straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and for all, fro

osely shunned. I thought, if I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my only way to e

to me. Had I had the pride, the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would have

ssed agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am grown to man's estate I can know these things of

But even then I did not know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable loneliness and help

ilroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another child, was in bed at th

and I thought them dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I felt. The Hebrew that was in them wa

cteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning

n a Jewess and would accept her for a Christian without her having to go through the extremer forms of proselytism. Like me, she lacked spirit for either one thing or the other. Like me, she dreaded to be classed among her own people. But in this we were unlike: that her dread amounted

was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be a Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, she had married a Mr. Fleming who had made necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen l

go for sympathy. She did not mistreat me, of course, but left me entirely to my own devious ways. For the ways o

he outside-and though I won over my impulses, my doubts and i

been in the whole Brooklyn school-but I kept away from them as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles-not many, because they were

t because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older there, will be more se

de it, to disregard it-but I knew that it was there, in my blood, in my face, in my name

bring me. Half a year, two months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My public schools days

... but no, I am not going to bl

those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management, if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that fact. They were constantl

wo ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even among the children there was a rigorous boycotting-and I was the sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course, beca

at high school. For then I was to begin those seven years which were to be my real education. So

not know t