I

I was born in 1927 as the first child of a bourgeois Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. We were comfortable but not rich. My father ran a small family business that had been founded by his father, who had moved to the city from Herlinghausen, a Westphalian village, and from a centuries-old family cattle dealership. My mother came from a family of affluent small-town merchants and bankers in the Hanover area, though her father had been an eye doctor. Both my parents were Gymnasium graduates, and my mother had a year of junior college; my father had hoped to attend the university in Cologne but had to join the family firm instead. My mother's ancestors had broken with Orthodoxy earlier than my father's, but both my parents were nonreligious, acculturated, and unconnected to the formal and informal Jewish communities in Cologne.

My parents' social life was limited to a handful of relatives and family friends, and my own therefore almost entirely to their children. Athletically inept and shy, I soon found myself more comfortable with books than with these children or school friends. When I was old enough to read books, I spent a lot of spare time in my parents' library and now remember most vividly that I enjoyed reading both fiction and adventure (including James Fenimore Cooper, in German translation) and nonfiction (for example, books by archaeologists excavating in Egypt and especially the books of Sven Hedin, the first Westerner to explore Tibet). I think that by age nine or ten I wanted to be an explorer. I was too young for, and my parents were not much interested in, German high culture, and German popular culture was sparse. The creative output of the Weimar era was banned in 1933, and when German filmmakers began to make mostly Nazi propaganda films, we no longer went to the movies. Beyond that, I recall only the brothers Grimm and the "Max and Moritz" cartoons, which described how the minor mischiefs of young boys and girls inevitably ended in death, loss of limbs, or other forms of mutilation. Tibet was both less dangerous and more interesting.

By 1937 my parents had decided to leave Germany and applied for an American visa, but the number of applicants was huge and the quota small. Early in 1939 we therefore went to England, where my uncle and his mother had moved in the mid-1930s. Because one of my mother's aunts was a close friend of a high-ranking Sears Roebuck executive in Chicago, the latter gave us an affidavit, a crucial prerequisite to the visa,

which enabled us to enter the United States, still visaless but under a special wartime exemption from the immigration law.^[1] In September 1940 we arrived in Chicago, moving into a rooming house in Woodlawn, then a predominantly Irish low-rent area.

America was still in the throes of the Depression, and although our life in Nazi Germany and wartime England had already been austere, it now became even more so; my father worked as a Fuller Brush salesman, my mother as a domestic. Our downward mobility was surely harder on them than on me, although we were so happy to have escaped from Germany—even before we knew of the Holocaust—that our economic problems were bearable. Besides, the drive to regain bourgeois status began at once. I am not even sure that I even felt a decline in fortune. Compared to my mostly working-class fellow students, I was so well educated in English and already sufficiently interested in writing that a few weeks after I was enrolled in the eighth grade of the neighborhood school, I was made editor of the school newspaper.

My parents wanted nothing more to do with Germany or things German, and we spoke English at home. I knew precious little German culture anyway, but now I also discovered American popular culture. I still remember spending a lot of time in the basement of our rooming house reading a year's worth of Sunday Chicago Tribune comics in newspapers that had been stored there by a frugal landlady.

I must have been starved for adventurous and humorous popular culture because I also became a fan of radio serials like "Captain Midnight" and "Jack Armstrong" and of comedians like Jack Benny. When I had the money, I spent Saturdays at the local triple-feature movie theater, where I caught up on American Westerns. In addition I became a sports fan and especially admired athletes whose prowess was said to be based on brains, such as Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman, and Ted Lyons, the aging knuckleball pitcher of the Chicago White Sox.

My unqualified enthusiasm for popular culture seems not to have lasted very long because in 1942, as a sophomore at Hyde Park High School, I was writing long essays, some of which were critical of the mass media. Later I submitted short features on the same theme to the high-school newspaper. I also wrote a couple of pretentious pieces urging my fellow students to enjoy the good music I was learning about in music appreciation class, by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in particular. I was also still a sports fan, became sports editor of the high-school newspaper in my junior year, and contributed to a Chicago Daily News readers' column on the sports pages.

Meanwhile, both my parents had obtained easier, better-paying, and more secure jobs as their spoken English and the Chicago economy improved. We moved into our own apartment, first in a basement that flooded with every storm and then into a much better one in South-moor, a small buffer area between poor Woodlawn and middle-class South Shore. And I gave up an afternoon newspaper route for a better job as a bookrunner in the University of Chicago library stacks.

Although I was as shy as ever, I was now on the margins of a clique, mostly the ambitious children of Jewish shopkeepers in the area. I paid little attention to my poor fellow students unless they were varsity athletes but was conscious of the affluent Jewish youngsters from Hyde Park and South Shore who dominated student life. While my clique wrote the school publications, the affluent students were active in fraternities and sororities, organizing Saturday-night dances for which they were able to hire nationally known bands. I imagine some of my cultural criticism was directed against them, although I do not remember any strong feelings of resentment.

In 1944, my senior year, I edited the high-school newspaper and began to think seriously about becoming a journalist, although my father thought I should play it safe and learn business skills and my mother was sure I would become a teacher. Lloyd Lewis, a Daily News editor, persuaded me to study liberal arts instead of journalism. Unable to afford Oberlin, then an "in" college for Chicagoans with writing ambitions, I applied to the University of Chicago. With the help of a half scholarship I had enough money the first year, which having begun in January I had to finish in record time because in August 1945 I was drafted. After fourteen months in the Army of the United States, first as a typist, then as an editor of an army base newspaper, I returned to the university in the fall of 1946. Thanks to the GI bill, some scholarship aid, and part-time work, I was able to stay until I received my M.A. in June 1950.

My socialization in the German and American class structures was accompanied by a very different set of experiences in the Jewish community. My parents had not wanted me to go to a Jewish school, but in 1933, when I started school, Nazi law required it, and I spent my first years in a secular Jewish public school. In 1937 my parents sent me to a strictly Orthodox Gymnasium because it taught English. This it did superbly, but I bitterly disliked the religious classes and teachers. However, in England I suddenly turned to prayer for a while, perhaps as a way of coping with that immigration. By the fall of 1939 World War II

had begun, and all German-Jewish men, including my father, were interned by the British, who suspected that the Nazis had hidden spies among the refugees. Moreover, my fellow students could not distinguish between German Jews and Nazis, beating me up a couple of times. My religiosity ended after we arrived in America, but I was also back in a predominantly Jewish milieu, for Hyde Park High School was in effect another secular Jewish school.

In the summer of 1943, needing to earn some money, I went to a Jewish summer work camp which provided wartime "stoop labor" to Chicago-area truck farmers. There I met a young and immensely charismatic Jewish youth worker, Samuel Kaminker, who believed in reading Hebrew and American poetry rather than prayers at Sabbath services. I was sufficiently interested in his essentially nontheistic conception of Judaism, radical at the time, to take some courses later at the College of Jewish Studies, searching for what I described in my 1947 autobiographical paper as "a rational Jewish religion for myself."

Kaminker was also an admirer of the Israeli kibbutz, ran the camp on a modified kibbutz basis, and started me thinking about spending my life in an egalitarian community of farm workers in which no one had to struggle to make a living. That vision stayed with me for the rest of my student days, and just before I received my M.A. I joined a small group of budding sociologists who planned to go to Israel and carry out participant-observation research at a kibbutz—as a way, I think, of trying to see whether we wanted to become permanent members of a collective. Even so, my interest in equality extended beyond the kibbutz because, after reading R. H. Tawney in social-science courses and hearing him lecture at Chicago in 1948, I seriously considered studying with him at the London School of Economics. However, I never made it to Israel as a researcher or to London as a student.