FORA BRIGHT OUTLOOK FOR THE HOLIDAYS

•

sold. David's best friend, Greg Levitan,
had moved away. The two had made a pact:
They would be in the same homeroom for
eighth grade. When David found out the
0.. Levitans had moved away he was furious,
not at the black families moving in but at
all the whites who were leaving. He was
also beginning to resent his parents' in-
sistence on staying in Merionette Manor.
With the temple and Jewish Community
Center now sold, he and Steven had to
travel half an hour to go to temple and
op Hebrew classes in Hyde Park. Why were
his parents staying? Why were they stay-
' . ing when he was sometimes afraid to go to
■ school? One day, David and Steven went
down to a park on 110th Street to play ten-
nis. They were jumped by an integrated
gang — white kids, black kids, and
`-` Hispanic kids. The gang members started
_ asking David and Steve: "Who are you?
Where are you from?"
David knew what they wanted to hear.
•
But he wouldn't say it. "What d'ya mean?"
"Who are you? What are you?"
David wasn't afraid of telling them who
he was. "I'm Jewish."
* Pow! They punched him in the face.
David and Steven confronted their
parents. "You believe this stuff about in-
tegration," David said, "but we're living it."
It was Roz who decided they had to
leave. Bernie wanted to stay. This was part
of the long-standing difference in their per-
sonalities. Bernie was always slow to make
decisions. In this case, he tenaciously held
on to his idealism. He did not want to move
until it was clear they had no other choice.
But Roz believed things had gone too far.
Many of David's and Steven's friends from
Camp Ramah had settled in Highland
Park, an affluent suburb north of Chicago,
overwhelmingly white, like most of Chi-
cago's suburbs, and with a substantial
Jewish community. A synagogue they
liked lay just down the road.
So they moved there. It was unreal, Roz
knew that, but it was quiet and she didn't
have to be scared. As she.drove the streets
of her new hometown in 1971, Roz felt a
sense of serenity, but also of retreat. She

r

and Bernie — the big social activists — felt
no desire to get involved in town politics
or in any other issues.
Roz feared that she had turned her
David and Steven into bigots. Had they
grown up in the suburbs, she reasoned,
they would have seen the troubles of the
1960s through rose-colored glasses. They
would have said, "Oh, how bad those con-
ditions are." Instead, she feared, their ex-
posure to blacks had coarsened them, the
exact opposite of what she and Bernie had
dreamed when they first marched with
King in 1966.
She was wrong. In high school, David
read Charles Silberman's Crisis in Black
and White, a landmark book that bluntly
outlined the problems of. American race
relations and the aspirations of blacks. He
was proud of his parents' involvement in
civil rights. He was madder at the Jews
and whites who had left Merionette Manor
than he was at his parents or, certainly, at
blacks who were moving in. But those
years in Merionette Manor had left a scar
on David. He tried to be intelligent about
the whole business, but he was still careful
whenever he saw someone on the street
who looked suspicious, especially if the
person was black.
Steven developed an outlook that would
come to be known as neoconservative. He
would not call himself a liberal. Liberals,
Steven felt, embraced the cause of the
underdog. But he didn't feel like an under-
dog; he never had. Steven had not felt that
blacks were his natural allies when he was
growing up, and he did not feel that way
in his 20s. There were traits in black
culture that he did not like, a certain
showiness and lack of responsibility. He
agreed with more conservative Jews like
Morris Abram that the goal of the civil
rights movement had been to make the
society color-blind. He was troubled by af-
firmative action. Yes, there had been a
great historical wrong done to blacks. But
you couldn't redress that through quotas
and numbers.
Roz and Bernie Ebstein never went back
to Merionette Manor. There was no reason
to. Their new house was large, two stories,
with a winding walkway that led through
the front yard to the entrance. Just off to
the right as you walked in was a big hall
closet. When the Ebsteins moved in the
summer of 1971, they filled it with boxes
of odds and ends, including the American
Jewish Congress banner they had carried
along the streets leading to Soldier Field
in 1966. The banner rested in the front
closet for years. Then one day when she
was cleaining, Roz took it out of the closet
and threw it out.

❑

Excerpt from Broken Affiance by Jonathan
Kaufman. Copyright© 1988 by Jonathan
Kaufman. Reprinted by agreement with
Charles Scribner's Sons, an imprint of
McMillan Publishing Company, permission.

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