I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my
only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my
religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it!

Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into
those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the
devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would
have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and
infinitely more in the building up of my character.

There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever
needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack
the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed
agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and
codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am
grown to man's estate I can know these things of myself--but how could
I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more
for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world
recognize, then, his own needs and cravings?

It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I
realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not
know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable
loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to
lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor.

Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was
killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another
child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She
never rose again. The shock killed her.

I remember that the funeral services were conducted by the rabbi of our
synagogue. They were according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought them
dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I
felt. The Hebrew that was in them was mockery and gibberish to me. I am
afraid I was glad when it was over, and I was alone with my aunt with
whom I was to live.

This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. Her husband had been a devout
Jew of the most orthodox type. She used to tell me with great amusement
how he would say his prayers each morning with his shawl and
phylacteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion
on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated
and broadmi