spiegel@mhuxl.UUCP (outlab) (03/01/84)
I have a (true) story that I like to tell when the conversation entails anti-semitism. It is told in three parts. While a graduate student in St. Louis, I had a radical Trotski-ite roommate (jewish) who spent most of his time trying to organize the local blue-collar workers to get the unions to work for the workers and not for the unions. He and his girlfriend (also jewish) were real throwbacks to the activist sixties and were arrested a couple times, etc, etc. He moved to Detroit and she moved to Austin. Both asked me to forward their mail and I did so. Months later, at work, I got into a discussion with a colleague about mixed marriages. The colleague had been stimulated by an article in a national magazine about assimilation and had a cute graphic depicting assimilation. We began talking about the cute graphic and he suggested a bowl of soup with different religious symbols floating around in it. I took something out of my pocket and sketched what my idea would look like - over the traditional melting pot was hanging a star of david with it's points melting a little. He told me he was raising a "mixed" family and thought his children learned more about both religions this way, through contrast, since he was a very dilute, reform jew. We finished our discussion and I thought no more of it. A week or so later I got a late night call from my ex-roommate's ex-girlfriend. Hi, how are you, what are you doing? It's been months, etc. After a few minutes of chit-chat, she got down to the reason for the call. "Do you remember seeing my unemployment check - did you forward it along?" I said I didn't remember it specifically, but I had consistently sent along everything that arrived at the apartment. Well, she said she was very frightened. When they had lived in St. Louis, their postman really hated them - he was after all delivering them all this radical literature and she said probably knew that she was jewish. I don't remember the reasons why she knew the postman had it in for her, but she was very happy when she moved to be out of his grip. Months passed, and everything was OK until one day she received something in the mail that let her know that he had followed her to Texas. "What happened?" I asked. "Well, I got my unemployment check the other day, and on the back of the envelope was a crude jewish star being threateningly drawn into a boiling, firey caldron! And I don't know what he'll do next!" Oh no - that was me! I told her, I had drawn it. So not every act is as clearly interpreted as it seems.