My mother lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio and she like so many of her generation, determined to break the glass walls that imprisoned her. Her family and everyone on her street refused to abandon the customs of their fathers because those ways comforted them in this strange, brittle land where streets seemingly of gold were barricades that fenced them into the bottom rung of a hidden, but rigid class system.

Mother, like so many first generation immigrants to this country, was determined to shed all traces of the ghetto from her speech, her dress and her style of life. She emulated the values of the middle class mainstream and shed her cultural roots like dirty underwear. She and her friends imitated the Christian ethic they envied so much, but they couldn’t quite pull it off. They couldn't erase what they really were and so they worked unceasingly to present a paper thin, unconvincing façade of sophisticated grace. Artificial class divisions festered in every Jewish community in this country at that time.

In New York, the immigrants of the lower east side struggled to survive in the shadow of the Park Avenue bankers and financiers. Yet, those uneducated, impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe had dreams even more searing than those of their more sophisticated landsmen from Germany and Austria. They learned far too quickly that it wasn’t enough to be Jewish for another Jew to accept you. You had to be the “right kind” of Jew. The only ways to break out of the cage created by birth in the twenties and thirties were through education and marriage.

My father chose education as his path through the gates of prejudice into the nirvana of acceptance. He worked long and hard to give himself a college degree in accounting. He delivered papers every day and did bookkeeping for the old world merchants on LaGrange Street. He woke up before dawn to deliver meat to his father’s customers and stayed up well past midnight translating legal documents for his neighbors from English to Yiddish. He was the only boy in the typing class at Woodward High School because he knew how important that skill would be for his ascent into the world of respected businessmen. Although he never lost sight of the star he was determined to catch, he managed to notice the little redhead across from him in his fourth grade class at Sherman School. Just as he knew he would arrive in the business world, he was certain he could capture her heart.

That small classmate was my mother and she, too had dreams. Someday, she would be a woman of importance with money in the bank, a house in the suburbs and a calendar filled with gala events. She was sick of the poverty and ethnic fog that enveloped her and she wanted out. It didn’t take her long to realize that if she wanted a warm coat in the closet and meat on her dinner plate, she better marry the man who could earn it for her. That man was the funny looking, gangly butcher’s son who had been courting her since she was nine. She married him for a purpose and he married her for love.

In 1939, Jews were being imprisoned and massacred by Adolph Hitler. Those who had emigrated before the turn of the century chose to believe that the fate of their European brethren was not theirs. My family celebrated Christmas at my Aunt Dorothy’s with a decorated mantle and presents before the fireplace. We colored Easter eggs and hid them and we celebrated Chanukah and Passover as well. We went through the motions for everyone’s ritual but none of them, including our religion, meant much to us. We were Christian Jews with our own country club and a city club that excluded those who hadn’t made it yet and of course the other faiths whose unspoken rules barred us from their inner circle.

When I went to the University of Michigan, there were two Jewish sororities, S. D. T. for the wealthy, aristocratic Jews and AE Phi for the fat, intelligent ones. I was an A. E. Phi, albeit a skinny one and one of my classmates was a girl from Atlanta. I never realized that the sorority I chose for its intellectual standing was a step down for a well-bred Atlanta girl whose roots were in the more cultivated German and Austrian genre.

For reasons I do not want to understand, we need to feel superior to others to nourish our own sense of importance. I watched my parents and many of my own generation strive blindly for something they could never achieve. Integration into a society is a gradual thing that takes generations to accomplish.

When immigrants came to this country at the beginning of this century, they earned their way as plasterers and butchers, so that their children could become doctors and lawyers and their children, artists and musicians. That happened in my family and I feel sure we were not alone. Indeed, there was much that wasn’t good about The Good Old Days. What a terrible waste of energy to try so hard to be something you are not. No one can erase their ethnicity and why should they?

The beauty in each of us is our individuality. That is our contribution to civilization. Thank heavens, we no longer worry about being the “right kind” of Jew anymore. In this lovely millennium of ours, there is room for us all to be people. . . .just people. What more can we possible want to become?