Great Neck Jew

The town I grew up in is named Great Neck. It is situated on a peninsula on the north shore of Long Island, about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan. It was, in my boyhood, as it is today, a wealthy town, a well-tailored suburban refuge from the swarming city.

The riches here weren't inherited, they were earned. Great Neck had been associated with new money at least since the twenties, when F. Scott Fitzgerald used parts of it as the inspiration for the West Egg of his novel The Great Gatsby. In my teens, I dated a girl who lived in a mansion that sat pretty near where Gatsby's sat, if not on the very spot. I remember chasing her once through the high grass on the flatlands below her hilltop home, breaking out into the open to catch her on the shore of Manhasset Bay. "There" she said breathlessly, as I wrapped my arms around her. Pointing across the dark water, she told me: There was Sands Point, the East Egg of the novel, where the green light had shone. Gatsby, a self-made man, a bootlegger with aspirations toward elegance, would often gaze across the water at that spot, as we were doing now. He would dream of finding his lost love Daisy and of entering her world of old money and sophistication and class.

Great Neck had changed since those days, but in many ways, Gatsby's dream was still alive there. After World War II, the sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants who, like their gentile predecessors, had made enough money to leave the city, began to move out to the luxurious suburb. By the late fifties, when my father — a rising New York disc jockey with a popular morning show — brought his young family there, the town was a haven for newly rich Jews. And like the newly rich Gatsby, they were in love with the dream of WASP American elegance and wanted to become an accepted part of the mainstream and the upper rung.

The result was the town I grew up in — to all appearances a high-end version of the classic 1950s suburb, a place that could have sprung to life from one of the popular television situation comedies of those days: Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet. The Dick Van Dyke Show, in fact, was written and produced by two old friends of my father's and involved a character like the comedian Sid Caesar, himself a Great Neck resident. The show's central family, while not based on my family, bore similarities to us, with its mixture of showbiz temperament and suburban normalcy.

These happy-go-lucky sitcoms edited every trace of dysfunction out of the world I knew. That was a distortion obviously — an ideal. But the ideal and the reality played off each other. The TV shows looked like Great Neck and, consciously or not, Great Neck modeled itself on the shows. Maybe in our real families, Father didn't always know Best. Maybe he wouldn't have known Best if Best rose up and bit him on the leg! But he caught the train to the city every morning. He paid the bills and kept the lights burning, mowed the lawn and fixed the car and backed up mother's discipline with his fearsome presence: he was a father. Maybe real-life Mom didn't vacuum the house flawlessly arrayed in pearls and a pleated skirt like the mother on Leave It to Beaver. Maybe she flirted with the milkman or waited for the kids to go to bed so she could hammer back a couple of mugs of vodka pretending it was tea. But she was there to greet us when we came home from school in the afternoon. She made us dinner, kept watch on us through the kitchen window, put Band-Aids on our scrapes and bruises. She was Mom and that was no small thing, not to us. Likewise big brothers who hit you with a pillow on television, hit you in real life so hard with their fists you saw stars and bluebirds. And little sisters who were virgin princesses on the small screen were harpies from hell on a bad day in the big world. All the same, they were brothers; they were sisters. They did what siblings do: drive you crazy, hurt you, love you, show you the way. The ideal suburbs of TV sitcoms were a fiction, but there was enough truth in that fiction to allow us to recognize our lives.

So Great Neck was a suburb, like all the other suburbs around the country that inspired the television shows that, in turn, inspired us. But in Great Neck, the Great Neck of my childhood, there was one central difference. In those other towns, and in those TV towns that represented them, when Sundays came, the moms and daughters in their best dresses and the dads and sons wearing suits and ties and slicked-back hair would head for church. In Great Neck, the Sabbath was Saturday, and we went to synagogue. We knew this made us different from our Christian counterparts, but we also saw, again, that it looked very much the same.

It was supposed to look the same. It was supposed to be the same, for all intents and purposes. All the cultural machinery of the town was geared toward blending that local discrepancy into the greater national culture. With families named Bernstein and Levine and Schwartz living on streets named Chadwick, Andover, Old Colony, and Piccadilly, Great Neck was a sort of gigantic contraption engineered to assimilate upper-middle-class Jews into the predominant Protestant-American society around them. If there was any potential conflict between our two cultural identities — if we even had two cultural identities — no one told us so, no one outside our homes anyway, no one I knew.

Sure, there were families that were more religious than mine, more rooted in their Jewishness. There were houses where some grandparent with an accent and a grudge kept the Old World hostilities alive and kicking. But not outside, not on the rolling lawns, not on the happy anglophile Great Neck streets, not for me or for my friends. For us, in school, when we were taught about "our history," it was American history. When we learned about "our forefathers," they were the American founders. Until I was eleven or so, I thought I was a direct descendant of George Washington and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. To my mind, they were as much my ancestors as Moses and David and the rest of the biblical gang.

Then, as now, I never thought of myself as anything but American. My values were American values: freedom above all things, live-and-let-live tolerance, truth, justice, fair play. My games were American games. My heroes were the same as the heroes of the other kids around the country: astronauts and Davy Crockett, baseball players, Superman and the president. What's more, since so many of the kids I knew were Jewish, most of the typical characters in an American kid's life were, in my life, also Jews. In a gentile town, maybe the odd Jewish kid or two would stand out. Maybe they'd have been relegated to stereotypical Jewish roles: outsiders,...