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I was asked, along with a number of other people, to write a response to Merle's article, and thinking this would be an easy task, I agreed to write something. I thought, frankly, how hard could it be to write even a few thousand words on as pregnant a topic as “culture is memory, memory is culture”? The task, however, proved more daunting than I imagined.
In fact, over the last few weeks I have written dozens of pages of blather attempting to craft a first paragraph that would ease open the mental door behind which a clear path forward would make itself known to me. This, however, was not happening. Rather than finding the princess-guide I hoped for, behind every door I opened sat a hungry tiger licking its chops.
I could not understand why this was happening. I have, after all, family with roots in multiple cultural heritages. My paternal great-grandfather was a German Jew who emigrated to the United States in the mid-to-late 1800's. My paternal grandmother was Irish Catholic. Her mother, my great-grandmother, emigrated here most likely in the late 1800's. My maternal great-grandmother was an orthodox Jew who emigrated to the United States and married an orthodox Jewish dairy farmer. My grandmother, who was the first-born of six siblings, married a Scots-Irish Alabama Baptist when she was sixteen years old. My paternal grandfather's family, I was told, had roots in North America that reached back to the late 1600's.
Fast forward to 1975, the year in which I met Merle on the steps of the Grand Army Plaza Public Library in Brooklyn, New York, and to the story Merle occasionally tells about how I responded that day when she asked me about my family background: for the record, I said “middle class”.