The Great Good Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

unlearn it. He and my mother passed this speech training onto their sons with a passion. No closed vowel or dropped g that escaped our lips went uncorrected. We were told to repeat the phrase, “My family is in a class by itself,” not just so as to incorporate the truth of its meaning (as I later realized), but to drill us out of anything that sounded even remotely like, “Muy fehmly is in a clehss buy itself.” To this day, my children tease me because I say chahklet and dahnkey rather than chocolate and donkey , having worked so hard as a lad not to say chawklet or dawnkey. Often as I’ve tried, I find I can’t make the adjustment.
    All this attention to gentility had its benefits, of course. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having good manners. Good diction comes in handy too. And no one ever died from having understated tastes in decor and clothing.
    But my parents’ commitment to our elegance as a family was always stated in opposition to the perceived inelegance of the families around us—the families of our friends, the only people we knew. Ultimately, I think, this contributed to an insular and contrarian misanthropy in us boys. We developed the absurd sense that we were somehow superior to “ordinary people.” And given our circumstances, that meant we were superior to ordinary Jews.
    This snobbery—and its underlying racism—emanated mostly from my mother. Despite his hostility toward the world in general, my father was a democratic fellow at heart. He knew where he came from and had no pretensions to aristocracy. For him, I think, teaching us genteel behavior and uninflected diction was a matter of show biz more than anything else. As a performer, he wanted us to be presentable to the largest possible audience.
    In my mother, however—my tasteful, elegant, and sophisticated mother—for whom taste, elegance, and sophistication were qualities of the utmost value—the whole training program smacked of anti-Semitism. She did have . . . not pretensions exactly. Aspirations would be closer to the truth. She had spent long hours of her unhappy youth playing hooky, ensconced in movie theaters, watching sparkling, chic stars swan across the flickering screen. Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers. That was who she wanted to be like, I think. Upper-crust Englishmen and WASP college professors—they were as gods to her. And, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With his four terms, he was president for her entire girlhood. Even when she was well into her eighties, you only had to mention his name—you only had to mention his initials—to evoke her Pavlovian gasp of admiration: “Ah, he spoke the King’s English!” She loved that sort of thing.
    She would have sent us to fancy private schools, if my father would’ve plunked for it. She would have had us wearing tennis-anyone whites and country-club blue blazers with crests on the pockets, though what the crests would have been I can’t for the life of me imagine. To her, Great Neck was not just a town full of nouveau riche . It was a town, specifically, full of nouveau riche Jews. The fancy cars, the jewelry, the brash voices with their Guyland bray: Jew stuff. Loud, garish Jew stuff and she detested it.
    She was an anti-Semite. It’s true. She was just as Jewish as the rest of us, mind—only not. Not in her own imagination anyway. For one thing, she had some Austrian blood. I’m not sure how much, but enough, I guess, to give her bragging rights over Ashkenazi or Eastern European Jews who are traditionally regarded as lower class by the upper-class Germans and Austrians. Her uncle—her mother’s brother—was actually named Adolf! He went missing in action fighting for the Austrian empire in World War I. When Hitler rose to power in the thirties, my Ashkenazi grandfather is said to have remarked, “Well, I guess now we know what happened to Adolf.” Still, Mom was very proud her family had given one up for the