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Why (as in yaverbaum)
Yahrzeit candles would be lighted a few times during each year; my parents would go to the Concord, the Nevele, Kutscher’s, or other hotels in the Catskills for a weekend now and then—but only in the warmer weather; my mother never served ham or pork and did not serve milk during a meat meal; my father was bar mitzvahed, could read Hebrew, and was hit by a trolley car on the way to what he identified as his Hebrew School; there was a great deal of concern about the public reac- tion to the Rosenbergs and certain other Jews who had been labeled as atomic spies; J. Robert Oppenheimer was railroaded, my parents said; the then Vice President Nixon was surely anti-Semitic and continued to be when he was the president, his relationship with Henry Kissinger to the contrary notwithstanding; although my mother was a big supporter of President Kennedy, she was very concerned about the influence that his father, who she was sure was an anti-Semite—when he was our ambassador to the Court of Saint James, he had tried to keep the United States from going to war against Germany—had exerted and would exert over him; the word goyim would clearly be applied to people who were somehow seen as not being like us—and it did not seem to be a compliment; my parents abhorred Senator McCarthy and never ever would vote for a Republican; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was not a favorite read in our house; and we did not have a Christmas tree or colored lights on the outside of the house—although it should be con- ceded that many Jews, some related to us, did have what they felt constrained to refer to as “Chanukah bushes”), and I did get multiple small gifts starting right before or during Christmastime (depending upon the lunar calendar).
On the other hand, my father seldom wore a hat or a yarmulke, nor did he lay tefillin; my mother certainly did not wear a sheitel (she fre- quented beauty parlors, and I doubt that she even knew what a sheitel was); and my parents were not noticeably embarrassed by the fact that they did not have ten children. Moreover, my parents did not say, “Shab- bat shalom,” or even “Good Shabbos,” which, given my father’s Eastern European roots, would have been more likely. On a Saturday, if my parents did observe the Sabbath, it was merely by watching others going
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