those days too) and the Beukes and Bialleses next door. Our homes were extensions of each other. These wonderful people are still my rock and my solace.
But if ours was first of all a happy, prosperous family life, on the other hand hard work in the Germanic sense was expected of every body, and everybody, moreover, was expected to enjoy it.
My father had a dairy business at 7749 South Carpenter Street that thrived precisely off the sheer amount of blood and sweat he and my grandmother, "Oma," poured into it. He would get up at three in the morning and run two of the most important routes, then come home for a big lunch that was really a European-style dinner, sleep, and go back to the dairy to work. Oma, who had come over from the German section of Poland near present-day Poznan in steerage when she was sixteen, heaved the milk pails around with the best of the men. But when she dressed up in her fine lace and beaded clothes, in her elegant big house with the Czechoslovakian china and the German crystal, she was the envy of any grand lady.
In contrast to the hardworking but fun-loving nature of the house, my religious life hovered like a slightly threatening angel. I was sent to a Baptist Sunday school with a straitlaced, terribly decent and highly puritanical family down the block. Not only did I believe in God, heaven, and angels, but I took totally to heart the Baptist maxim that one must also "convert" and "bear witness to" one's loved ones. Whenever my mother's father and mother came out from the North Side, I became anxious and puzzled. My grandfather, Carl Gervens, a lovely, gentle, scholarly man from the Rhine- land, was a German socialist and skeptic. He was not about to be "saved." I simply did not know what to do.
But this early experience with religious absolutism is not some thing I really regret. It helped me to gain a strong moral sense--and a sense that life was meant to be a dedication, not simply a pastime. When, during my university years, I gradually lost an organized faith, it was a great and disturbing loss for me; I have wondered since whether work, when central and crucial to us, does not become an internal search or a substitute for the lost or wayward outer God we now seek inside us.
My propensity for otherworldliness fed by constant reading, I divided the world into two spheres, both of which were deep and sometimes terrifyingly real to me. One was the world here and now, the hearty bourgeois world around our breakfast table. The other world was the "heaven" of our Sunday school ... the languorous clouds in the sky ... the world beyond worlds beyond the horizon. I remember how excited I became one day when both worlds collided with a great Götterdämmerung crash in my mind. I was poring over the atlas, one of my favorite pastimes, and I discovered that Bethlehem, which had always been a metaphysical concept for me, really existed. On a map! I was overcome with a throbbing excitement for days.
Juxtaposed to my literary dreaminess was a very, very real world. There was Chicago with its political corruption, its racial hatred, and its Mafia operations and a citizenry that accepted all of this as natural. It was this tribal morality that fed the growing flames of my hatred for injustice and my desire both to protect myself from this parasitical world and to fight it and to try to change it.
Perhaps most important, hovering always just over the horizon, both terribly appealing and terribly threatening, was the black community. It hung there like a cloud on the horizon--but I had always loved the rain and the wind, and so I was fascinated by it. Most of the people in our neighborhood feared or hated blacks; to me they represented my first fascination with another culture. It was forbid den--and thus needed desperately to be known. I probed it, but carefully; occasionally I would venture a little way into it and sit on the stoops (we had stoops in those days and in those neighborhoods) and talk
But if ours was first of all a happy, prosperous family life, on the other hand hard work in the Germanic sense was expected of every body, and everybody, moreover, was expected to enjoy it.
My father had a dairy business at 7749 South Carpenter Street that thrived precisely off the sheer amount of blood and sweat he and my grandmother, "Oma," poured into it. He would get up at three in the morning and run two of the most important routes, then come home for a big lunch that was really a European-style dinner, sleep, and go back to the dairy to work. Oma, who had come over from the German section of Poland near present-day Poznan in steerage when she was sixteen, heaved the milk pails around with the best of the men. But when she dressed up in her fine lace and beaded clothes, in her elegant big house with the Czechoslovakian china and the German crystal, she was the envy of any grand lady.
In contrast to the hardworking but fun-loving nature of the house, my religious life hovered like a slightly threatening angel. I was sent to a Baptist Sunday school with a straitlaced, terribly decent and highly puritanical family down the block. Not only did I believe in God, heaven, and angels, but I took totally to heart the Baptist maxim that one must also "convert" and "bear witness to" one's loved ones. Whenever my mother's father and mother came out from the North Side, I became anxious and puzzled. My grandfather, Carl Gervens, a lovely, gentle, scholarly man from the Rhine- land, was a German socialist and skeptic. He was not about to be "saved." I simply did not know what to do.
But this early experience with religious absolutism is not some thing I really regret. It helped me to gain a strong moral sense--and a sense that life was meant to be a dedication, not simply a pastime. When, during my university years, I gradually lost an organized faith, it was a great and disturbing loss for me; I have wondered since whether work, when central and crucial to us, does not become an internal search or a substitute for the lost or wayward outer God we now seek inside us.
My propensity for otherworldliness fed by constant reading, I divided the world into two spheres, both of which were deep and sometimes terrifyingly real to me. One was the world here and now, the hearty bourgeois world around our breakfast table. The other world was the "heaven" of our Sunday school ... the languorous clouds in the sky ... the world beyond worlds beyond the horizon. I remember how excited I became one day when both worlds collided with a great Götterdämmerung crash in my mind. I was poring over the atlas, one of my favorite pastimes, and I discovered that Bethlehem, which had always been a metaphysical concept for me, really existed. On a map! I was overcome with a throbbing excitement for days.
Juxtaposed to my literary dreaminess was a very, very real world. There was Chicago with its political corruption, its racial hatred, and its Mafia operations and a citizenry that accepted all of this as natural. It was this tribal morality that fed the growing flames of my hatred for injustice and my desire both to protect myself from this parasitical world and to fight it and to try to change it.
Perhaps most important, hovering always just over the horizon, both terribly appealing and terribly threatening, was the black community. It hung there like a cloud on the horizon--but I had always loved the rain and the wind, and so I was fascinated by it. Most of the people in our neighborhood feared or hated blacks; to me they represented my first fascination with another culture. It was forbid den--and thus needed desperately to be known. I probed it, but carefully; occasionally I would venture a little way into it and sit on the stoops (we had stoops in those days and in those neighborhoods) and talk
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