What We Say, And Don't Say

Yesterday, I read a piece by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal, "Maybe It's Time for Jewish Self-Segregation", prompted by the increase in American anti-semitism, some from elements on the Right and institutionally on the Left, mainstreamed by academic theory as I've described before.

I was startled to see this anecdote which Epstein recounted as occurring when he was five.

My father asked me what I had learned in school one day, and I told him the poem "Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe", which I began to recite.  When I came to the n-word - before "tiger" had been substituted as a more appropriate alternative - my father angrily stopped me and told me I was never to use the word again, especially since our people, like the Negroes (as they were called then), had been long persecuted and called all sorts of terrible names.

Epstein was born in 1937 so this occurred in 1942.  What caught my attention is that I had a very similar experience with my father when I was probably six, in 1957, when attending a summer day camp for the first time.  I had already learned the version of Eenie, Meenie with "tiger" but that day a camper told me there was another version, though he did not explain why, and recited it to me. I had no idea what the n-word meant. Either that day or the next I was sitting next to my dad while he drove and I recited the version using the n-word as something new I'd learned.  Like Epstein's father, my dad angrily stopped me, explained why it was a bad word, and told me never to say it again.  I can't remember if he also, like Epstein's dad, referenced the Jewish experience, but he did at other times, telling me of what it was like growing up and encountering prejudice as a member of the only Jewish family in a small Connecticut town in the 1920s and 30s.

I'm 73 now, dad passed a decade ago, and I've not said that word since that day.  It wasn't only what he told me - he lived his life in a way that I could see by how he treated people and who he had as friends that this meant a great deal to him, and so it did to me.