lived the fraternity men. In all, it was an unoutlandish little college town of the kind I’d seen before only in movies with Kay Kyser or June Allyson, not so much subdued or genteel, and certainly not posh or gentrified, but instead suited for the coziest, most commonplace dreams of order. Lewisburg emanated an unpretentious civility that we could trust, rather than an air of privilege by which we might have been intimidated. To be sure, everything about the rural landscape and the small-town setting (and Miss Blake) suggested an unmistakably gentile version of unpretentious civility, but by 1951 none of us thought it pretentious or unseemly that the momentum of our family’s Americanization should have carried us, in half a century, from my Yiddish-speaking grandparents’ hard existence in Newark’s poorest ghetto neighborhood to this pretty place whose harmonious nativeness was proclaimed in every view.
My parents turned out to have been as impressed as I was, though probably less by Bucknell’s collegiate look than by our enthusiastic guide, a Jewish boy from our block who seemed to them, as he did to me, to be thriving wonderfully in this unfamiliar atmosphere. After dinner in the hotel restaurant, when Marty had left for his dormitory and we were in the elevator on our way up to bed, my father said to me, “You like it, don’t you?” “Yes, but how can we afford it if they won’t give me a scholarship for September?” “Forget the scholarship,” he told me. “You want to go here, you’re going.”
I sat up late at the little desk in my room, a stack of hotel stationery at the ready for recording my “thoughts.” I replayed over and over the conversation with my father in the hotel elevator, adding a line of my own that I would not have had the self-control to say to him face-to-face but that I was able to write freely and exuberantly on a sheet of the Lewisburger’s paper. I felt a buoyant sense of having survived the worst while preserving unimpaired the long-standing preuniversity accord that would seem to have made us an indestructible family: “And now we won’t have to have that terrible fight—we’ve been saved by Bucknell.”
Over precisely the issue that had been simmering since I’d begun college—my weekend whereabouts after midnight—my father and I did, of course, have the terrible fight, when I was home from Lewisburg for my first midyear vacation. And it was worse than I had foreseen, however banal the immediate cause. Along with my mother, my brother—who fortunately happened to be in from Manhattan, where he was beginning to establish himself as a commercial artist—made every conceivable effort to act as a peacemaker and, with an air of urgent diplomacy, hurried back and forth between the two ends of the apartment, where the two raving belligerents were isolated. And though, after two days of histrionic shouting and bitter silence, my father and I—for the sake, finally, of my desolated mother—negotiated a fragile truce, I returned to Bucknell a shell-shocked son, freshly evacuated from the Oedipal battlefield, in dire need of rest and rehabilitation.
* * *
A N ATTRACTIVE WHITE Christian male entering Bucknell in the early fifties could expect to be officially courted by about half the thirteen fraternities. A promising athlete, the graduate of a prestigious prep school, the son of rich parents or of a distinguished alumnus, might wind up with bids from as many as ten fraternities. A Jewish freshman—or Jewish transfer student, like me—could expect to be rushed by two fraternities at most, the exclusively Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, which, like the Christian fraternities, was the local chapter of a national body, and Phi Lambda Theta, a local fraternity without national affiliations, which did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or color. A Jewish student who wished to take part in fraternity life but was acceptable to neither was in
My parents turned out to have been as impressed as I was, though probably less by Bucknell’s collegiate look than by our enthusiastic guide, a Jewish boy from our block who seemed to them, as he did to me, to be thriving wonderfully in this unfamiliar atmosphere. After dinner in the hotel restaurant, when Marty had left for his dormitory and we were in the elevator on our way up to bed, my father said to me, “You like it, don’t you?” “Yes, but how can we afford it if they won’t give me a scholarship for September?” “Forget the scholarship,” he told me. “You want to go here, you’re going.”
I sat up late at the little desk in my room, a stack of hotel stationery at the ready for recording my “thoughts.” I replayed over and over the conversation with my father in the hotel elevator, adding a line of my own that I would not have had the self-control to say to him face-to-face but that I was able to write freely and exuberantly on a sheet of the Lewisburger’s paper. I felt a buoyant sense of having survived the worst while preserving unimpaired the long-standing preuniversity accord that would seem to have made us an indestructible family: “And now we won’t have to have that terrible fight—we’ve been saved by Bucknell.”
Over precisely the issue that had been simmering since I’d begun college—my weekend whereabouts after midnight—my father and I did, of course, have the terrible fight, when I was home from Lewisburg for my first midyear vacation. And it was worse than I had foreseen, however banal the immediate cause. Along with my mother, my brother—who fortunately happened to be in from Manhattan, where he was beginning to establish himself as a commercial artist—made every conceivable effort to act as a peacemaker and, with an air of urgent diplomacy, hurried back and forth between the two ends of the apartment, where the two raving belligerents were isolated. And though, after two days of histrionic shouting and bitter silence, my father and I—for the sake, finally, of my desolated mother—negotiated a fragile truce, I returned to Bucknell a shell-shocked son, freshly evacuated from the Oedipal battlefield, in dire need of rest and rehabilitation.
* * *
A N ATTRACTIVE WHITE Christian male entering Bucknell in the early fifties could expect to be officially courted by about half the thirteen fraternities. A promising athlete, the graduate of a prestigious prep school, the son of rich parents or of a distinguished alumnus, might wind up with bids from as many as ten fraternities. A Jewish freshman—or Jewish transfer student, like me—could expect to be rushed by two fraternities at most, the exclusively Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, which, like the Christian fraternities, was the local chapter of a national body, and Phi Lambda Theta, a local fraternity without national affiliations, which did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or color. A Jewish student who wished to take part in fraternity life but was acceptable to neither was in
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