I

The Jewish Experience

Gold had been asked many times to write about the Jewish experience in America. This was not strictly true. He'd been asked only twice, most recently by a woman in Wilmington, Delaware, where he had gone to read, for a fee, from his essays and books, and, when requested, from his poems and short stories.

"How can I write about the Jewish experience," he asked himself on the Metroliner returning to New York, "when I don't even know what it is? I haven't the faintest idea what to write. What in the world for me was the Jewish experience? I don't think I've ever run into an effective anti-Semite. When I grew up in Coney Island, everyone I knew was Jewish. I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing. Just about the only exceptions were the Italian families living at the other end of Coney Island and the two or three living close enough to us to send their children to the same school. We had an Irish family on our block with a German surname and there were always a couple of Italians or Scandinavians in my class who had to come to school on Jewish holidays and looked persecuted. I used to feel sorry for them because they were the minority. The Irish family had a dog—no Jews had dogs then—and raised chickens in their back yard. Even in high school just about all the boys and girls I hung around with were Jewish, and virtually all of the teachers were. And the same was true at college. It was not until I went to Wisconsin for a summer session that I found myself among gentiles for the first time. But that was merely different, not unpleasant. And then I came back to Columbia for my degree and doctorate and felt right at home again. My closest friends there were also Jewish: Lieberman, Pomoroy, Rosenblatt. Ralph Newsome was the only exception, but I felt no different with him than with anyone else, and he seemed perfectly at ease with me. I wouldn't know where to begin."

He began by going to Lieberman.

"Whose Jewish experience?" Lieberman, a hulking, balding redhead, asked with blunt distrust when Gold presented the idea.

"Mine."

"Why not mine?" Lieberman's narrow eyes blazed. His desk was littered with typewritten manuscripts and dark correcting pencils as thick and grubby as his fingers. All through college Lieberman's dearest wish for the future had been to manage a small, intellectual magazine. Now he had his magazine, and it wasn't enough. Envy, ambition, and dejection were still ravaging what few invisible good qualities he might have been born with. Lieberman had never been generous.

"You'd like me," Gold recapitulated with amusement, "to write a piece about you, for publication in your magazine?"

Lieberman saw the light moodily. "It wouldn't work."

"You would have to write it."

"I can't write. You and Pomoroy convinced me of that."

"You rely too much on rhetorical questions."

"I can't seem to help it. What did you have in mind?"

"I haven't worked it out yet," Gold began. He avoided Lieberman's eyes. "But I would do a sober, responsible, intelligent piece about what it has been like for people like you and me to be born and grow up here. Certainly I'll go at least a little bit into the cross-cultural conflicts between the traditions of our European-born parents and those in the prevailing American environment."

"I'll tell you what," Lieberman responded. He broke one of his thick pencils between his hands and paced. "We've got a very sober and responsible magazine for highly intelligent readers. I want something racier from you on that subject, spicier. Frankly, we're usually very dull. Sometimes we're so dull, I don't believe I'll be able to continue. What was it like the first time you saw an uncircumcised cock? How does it feel to be screwing gentile girls?"

"What makes you think I screw gentile girls?" asked Gold. "Fake that part if you have to," Lieberman answered. "We want viewpoints, not facts."

"How many words will you take and what will you pay me?" Lieberman deliberated. "How about fifteen or twenty thousand words? Maybe I can build the whole issue around it and cut my other editorial costs."

"I'll want six thousand dollars for that."

"I'll give you three hundred."

"I won't do it for less than twenty-five."

"I won't pay you more than seven. I'll feature you big on the cover."

"Let's settle for fifteen."

"We'll call it a thousand. That's high for us."

"I'll want six hundred today. And I want the three hundred that's still coming to me for 'Nothing.'"

"We haven't published that yet."

"The deal was on acceptance," Gold argued with some feeling. Months earlier, Lieberman had purchased an article commissioned from Gold by a popular sex magazine, which then had rejected it as inferior to the minimum standards of intelligence of its readership—an item of information Gold discreetly elected not to submit with the manuscript. The full title of the piece was "Nothing Succeeds as Planned," and Gold still waited for the money owed him. "Why don't you publish it already? It might cause some comment."

"I'm waiting until I have enough to pay you." Lieberman uttered a staccato laugh and eased himself into his chair. Lieberman was invariably pleased with himself whenever he made a joke. "I read your review," he began at a slower, disapproving pace, "of the President's book."

Gold was guarded. "And I read yours."

"I found it interesting."

"Yours was not."

"I thought you equivocated unnecessarily," Lieberman pushed on. "It seemed to me you lacked the courage to come right out on the side of the Administration."

"You didn't hesitate at all." Gold waited until Lieberman nodded as though accepting praise. "But I got a call from the White House. They all enjoyed my review, it seems. I assume that includes the President."

Humanely, Gold did not mention that there had also been suggestion of a government appointment. Torturing Lieberman was fun; crushing him to death might be going just one step too far.

Lieberman studied him with porcine malevolence. "You're making that up," he decided at last. "Remember Ralph Newsome?"

"He's in the Department of Commerce."

"He's on the White House staff now. He telephoned."

"Why didn't they telephone to compliment me on mine?"

"Maybe they didn't see it."

"The President is on my complimentary list."

"Maybe they didn't like it."

"Newsome never liked me," Lieberman recalled, brooding. "You and he were always close. You got that foundation grant together."

"Not together. At the same time. You didn't like him."

"He's anti-Semitic."

"I doubt that."

"Ask him," Lieberman challenged. "He doesn't have brains enough to lie." Lieberman shook from his mind like dust whatever disagreeable feelings had gathered. "I've got another good idea for your piece," he offered, with calculating enthusiasm. "Profitable. Give me thirty or forty thousand words for the same money and I'll feature it in two issues. Make it sexy and light and you'll have most of what you'll need for a popular book that could turn out to be a big best seller. Throw in blacks, drugs, abortions, and lots of interracial screwing. I bet Pomoroy will snap a book like that right up."

Pomoroy, on the contrary, looked grave, and Pomoroy grave was as ominous and distressing as an upright cadaver in rumpled shirt, green corduroy, and large eyeglasses. He was a tranquil and unhappy man of forty-eight, Gold's age. Pomoroy had worked his way up to the position of executive editor in a thriving, faintly disreputable, commercial book-publishing house. The more successful he grew, the bleaker became his outlook. Pomoroy thought he knew why. This was not what he'd had in mind. And he could think of nothing else.

"The trouble with people like us who start so fast," he had once observed in his most funereal tones, "is that we soon have no place left to go." And Lieberman, naturally, had disagreed.

Pomoroy seldom laughed or raised his voice; when he did laugh, it was usually in a vain effort to reassure some troubled author that things were not going to turn out as awful as they threatened. He had no tolerance for deception and never found need to practice any.

"What exactly are you talking about?" he inquired when Gold paused. Gold was fidgeting beneath Pomoroy's inexpressive gaze. "A book. One just right for you. I've been asked to do this extended study."

"By whom?"

"By several magazines. Lieberman will definitely publish it if we can't get someone better. A study of the contemporary Jewish experience in America," Gold persisted with increasing heaviness of heart. "What it's been like for people like you and me, our parents, wives, and children, to grow up and live here now. I don't think it's ever been done."

"It's been done hundreds of times," Pomoroy corrected him. "But I'm not sure it's been done by someone like you."

"Exactly. I can make it racy and light enough to appeal to the mass market. There'd be a strong tilt toward sexuality."

"I'll want a scholarly, accurate work that will be useful to colleges and libraries. With the strong tilt toward the psychological and sociological." Gold was deflated. "There's no money in that."

"I'll give you a guarantee of twenty thousand dollars. We'll charge five of that to research as a publishing expense instead of against your royalty account, and you can have that this week."

"Make it six thousand. When can I have more?"

"Five. When you show me two hundred pages."

"Two hundred pages?" Gold echoed with pain. "That can take forever."

"Forever goes quick," Pomoroy observed.

Leaving Pomoroy's office, Gold was exuberant.

Early each autumn Gold considered how much money he would need to continue through to the following summer and pay still one more year's tuition and related expenses for a son at Yale, a son at Choate, both on partial scholarships, and a dissident twelve-year-old daughter at home who attended private day school and was perpetually in danger of being expelled. Beyond his salary as a college professor, Gold would need twenty-eight thousand dollars. Eight he could count on from royalties and speaking fees, which left twenty. He had just made one thousand from Lieberman and twenty from Pomoroy. But he owed Pomoroy a book. He could toss that one off swiftly once he had his material. Jews were a cinch. It was good as gold.