lass--many more than
there had been in the whole Brooklyn school--but I kept away from them
as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles--not
many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my
supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of
conferring their friendship upon me.

"It will be different when I am in high school," I told myself. "It will
be different because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older
there, will be more sensible and broadminded, and I shall be less
nervous about the difference between us!"

The difference ... I did not know what it was, but I felt it all the
time. I tried to hide it, to disregard it--but I knew that it was there,
in my blood, in my face, in my name ... and it held me apart from my
class as if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace.

So it was that I looked forward more and more eagerly for the change and
liberation which I thought high school would bring me. Half a year, two
months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My
public schools days were past. I had graduated into high school with
high honors and with an equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish.

If Aunt Selina had been different ... but no, I am not going to blame it
on anyone excepting myself.

The summer after I graduated from public school I went with Aunt Selina
and her friend, Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White Mountains.
It was one of those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management,
if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that
fact. They were constantly raising the price of our rooms, but the two
ladies seemed content to keep on paying what was asked for the rare
privilege of dwelling in forbidden places.

It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The other guests snubbed us
continually, left us to our own devices. I used to have to go walking
every morning and sit on the porch every afternoon in the company of the
two ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even
among the children there was a rigorous boycotting--and I was the
sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course,
because at that time I lacked entirely the spirit to be indignant--just
melancholy, and hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed of the
things I should have gloried in, hating the things I should have
worshiped.

Well, I told myself, it wo