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studied that beautiful face by flashlight. And that same longing which I could not explain would
return to my heart.
There were times, however, when I could smugly shrug off such feelings. My parents did
not object to the Bible-reading and hymn-singing in the public school which we attended -- as long
as we did not participate. (My father was not a religious Jew. In fact, he did not believe in God.)
Many times I sat with my hands folded and thought self-righteously, "We are Jews; we don't
believe that stuff. Jesus was no more the Son of God than I am!"
My parents had been born in Europe -- my mother in Hungary and my father in Romania.
They taught us to read, write, and speak German and Hungarian.
When I was eight years old we moved from Chicago, where I was born in 1910, to the
capital city of a central state. Here my father entered us for our first year in Hebrew school as well
as in public school. We began to learn the English language.
In Hebrew school I learned the Old Testament stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;
about David, Daniel, and Moses. But never once did we learn that God still requires a blood
offering for sin.
We became well assimilated into this capital city, for there were many other Jews there. In
the early part of 1922 we moved to a little town thirty miles distant. It was here that we first felt
the sting of being Jews. People in that little town were very bigoted, very narrow. I do not believe
there was a Catholic family living in the town; Negroes were not allowed to stay there overnight;
foreigners were not welcome. And' now, worst of all, a family of Jews had moved in!
When the children of the neighborhood came to our home, they could see that we were
different. Our language, our diet, our conduct, our dress -- all were different. Mother dressed us
like little Europeans. I wore long pigtails, long dresses, and long hose. The children soon began to
ask questions, and we told them that we were Jews. It was then that trouble began.
Satan hates the Jews and the world hates the Jews because they are different. This little
town hated us. They began to call us Christ-killers! We were called Christ-killers on the street, in
the schoolyard. We were hissed at in the schoolroom. The worst part about it was that we did not
even know that Christ had been killed, let alone that we had done it! How unfair it is to call Jews
Christkillers, for all, Jews and Gentiles alike, are guilty of his death. (At one time Jesus said that
He must needs go to Jerusalem to be delivered unto the Gentiles to be crucified of them. But
Christian Sunday school teachers often, with unrecognized venom, teach little boys and girls that
the Jews killed Jesus. Little children who have learned to love the tender Jesus unconsciously
allow a prejudice to come into their hearts.)
If anything was stolen from the school-room, the cry was, "The Jew kids did it." If tattling
went on among the children, they said, "The Jew kids did it." (Even the terms Jew-people,
Jew-girl or Jew-boy brought heartache. We would have felt them kinder if they had used the terms
Jewish man, Jewish woman, Jewish girl, and Jewish boy.)