harold a. katz memoir volume 1 - University of Illinois Springfield

went back in the stacks who had not pulled out Malinowski's book and perused it; we all
knew his name. The faculty invited him for a weekend of intellectual discussion, as faculties
sometimes do.
Van Sickle, my good friend, told me about one episode in the weekend that I will never
forget. He told me that Malinowski had stayed with him and that in the course of the visit
Malinowski had told Van Sickle about his Polish background, and how . . . anti-semitic
Poland's society was. And he told Van Sickle that even though he, Malinowski, had spent
a lifetime studying anthropology and he guessed he knew as much about it as anybody, that
he still could not shake the anti-semitism that he had picked up, growing up in Poland. I
can never forget that even the great Malinowski was still a prisoner of his childhood religious
prejudices; even though he might intellectually overcome them, he could never change his
feelings.
Q: Did you find any anti-semitism there on the campus?
A: It was very subdued. I did not find rampant anti-semitism on the campus. There was
not interracial or even much interreligious dating; it was not the modern era, where distinc-
tions of religion and race have diminished in importance. Two of my four children are mar-
ried and - with their parents' blessings - neither within the Jewish faith. Now that was
totally foreign to the situation at Vanderbilt. My group was a little different, my very small
group. There were no blacks at Vanderbilt, but there were religious differences. We had
not yet liberated ourselves enough to reach out to the students at Fisk.
I did not date very many non-Jewish girls. I did date a few, who shared my ideology. But
there were Jewish fraternities and non-Jewish fraternities. I was rushed for the Jewish
fraternity. I will never forget the episode that occurred when I went for the rush at the
Jewish fraternity, the AEPi [Alpha Epsilon Pi]. They were trying to interest us in joining
the fraternity. One of their members who was in the medical school hypnotized one of the
prospective pledges at the fraternity house. It was quite an event to see somebody being
hypnotized. The hypnotist gave the subject a post-hypnotic suggestion, and after he woke
him up, the fellow went some other place and came back, exactly as the post-hypnotic sugges-
tion had been given.
I went to a party that night and when a lull occurred I decided that I would try out
hypnosis. And I got some girl to lie on the couch, and I took her ring off and using it to
focus her attention exactly as the medical student had done, I hypnotized her. The strongest
man there could not bend her arm. It was extraordinary. Then I tried to wake her up, but
she didn't wake up. I was petrified that I had started something that I couldn't
finish. Fortunately, a few moments later she woke up, and that's the last time I ever hypno- '
tized anybody, and it was the last thing I had to do with that fraternity.
I didn't join a fraternity. I became an independent at Vanderbilt. What I'm really trying
to say is, I was basically an independent by nature, and my lifestyle remained that way at
Vanderbilt. I remained on the fringes of the major groups.
There were some fine faculty members, as I have indicated. I worked for one faculty
member who was an historian, Earl Fee Cruikshank. There was another professor who
impressed me, D. F. Fleming, a great authority on the League of Nations. He believed in
international cooperation. There was a faculty member, Dr. Edwin Mims, the chairman of
the English department, who taught freshman English. He was a wonderful man, who must
have been in his eighties then. He made us memorize line after line after line of poetry. I
know that memorizing is no longer in vogue but the pleasure that I have had over the years
in remembering the poetry that Dr. Mims forced us to memorize has been extraordinary.
And he forced us, he would embarrass us; you just had to do it. That was your assignment.
He was not the modern kind of faculty member who lets you do what you want. The truth
of the matter is that he did know better than we knew what was good for us. I benefited