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Jan. 13th, 2005 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupI feel that I should post, have no reason not to post... yet have nothing really interesting to say. The self-and-other-loathing aspect of the AHA being past, it's hard to summon up again the feeling of disgust in the gullet that occurs at such events. I think it was worst on the flight over, thick with fucking historians, so many well-dressed ugly people being easy to identify.
The conversations universally about when's your book coming out, what's your topic now, what's that publisher like, what's so-and-so and so-and-so doing now, oh I hadn't heard that they're in that department now, etc. etc. etc. The guy next to me and his wife were both on the aisle, and a third woman came up and talked to them for over an hour about this kind of crap on the flight. You have a whole goddamn convention to have this conversation I wanted to scream while trying desperately to catch up on some sleep. Talkers. Yeesh.
Despite all this, I've been in a pretty OK mood. I wish I could do more research/writing work -- that's the overarching message of hanging around one's better-achieving peers -- but have had some success with other getting-life-together tasks the past couple of weeks. I did a first round of taxes, the basement looks fairly clean, etc. Work has not been bad. We're not doing great financially right now, what with $250 a month heating bills, but at least I have a handle on it. That kind of thing.
*******************
Speaking of the better-achieving, I ran into one of my former grad school colleagues at the department party. A nice person we were just getting to know in Baltimore when she and her (fellow historian) husband moved away. Well, they fetched up in Mount Lebanon, on Willow Drive, about maybe a half mile from where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. It's kind of neat that they are near a place I know so intimately. Like I could tell them where the lake is that used to be a coal pit, or the hidden, recluse's 1920s mansion. I mean, for all my mixed feelings about the place, home is home.
But I asked if their daughter would be going to Hoover (my elementary school). The answer was no, but she had a funny story. The real estate agent had said something to her like, "I don't want to talk about those Hoover School people." And then she met someone else socially in Mount Lebanon who started talking about Hoover School with some unease. She asked what was up with Hoover, and finally the woman said, "I really shouldn't say this... but... okay, it's the Jewish school."
Ah yes. My home town. Well, that should cure me of any Steelers-tinged nostalgia for a while. Enjoy living there, folks.
*******************
It's the second encounter with casual anti-Semitism in the past few weeks. The day before Christmas, we were in Greenport, Long Island, in a diner. The Mrs. was speaking excitedly, as is her wont sometimes, about how some people were upset about saying "Merry Christmas" and that "Happy Holidays" was more politically correct. I was just about to tell her that one should be careful about stepping too loudly into Bill O'Reilly's cow piles, when our server came over with our food and made the point for me. "Yeah, you know who it is making all that big deal about it -- it's them Jewish people," he informed us. "The immigrants and all them, came over here, and they started saying things, and it's us who gotta change. The immigrants and the Jews made us all change."
I pondered a response long enough for him to wander away (for the record, the right riposte was "That doesn't sound like Cherokee to me," as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flw once put it). I was half-tempted to make something of it. But my usual caution took over. My "fight or flight" button is set pretty firmly on "flight," but more profoundly, I was upset at the Mrs. for raising the issue aloud.
And that's a little bit of Mount Lebanon, too. Not that there were nazis around or something. You just don't do that. And this is something I picked up without being told. It's not as though my dad ever told me directly (though he did warn me once about being too openly leftist, and it surprised me to realize that as someone who lived through the Red Scare he probably knew what he was talking about). But growing up even in the "Jewish school" (like 15%, for the record), you learned just not to get into it around people. You never knew what kind of door into some weird world you would find, like when Richie informed me pretty straightforwardly at age ten that the Jews killed Christ and that was that. He didn't mean any animus by it, either, which was maybe the scariest part.
Of course since then I've had my father-in-law ask the Mrs. about Barabbas -- like, you know, you guys really must have had some good times with that whole thing! -- so as an adult I continue to not want to open up those doors. But the Mrs. didn't learn this craven habit of behavior. She spoke about this subject like a normal person, and she saw what happens when you do that. I scowled at the guy and I scolded her. But I was also a little impressed. In general, I'd just rather not get into it, on a global scale. I'm just a reticent, agreeable, stifled person unless I trust whoever I'm around, which paradoxically gets me into more trouble than being straightforward, I think.
Anyway, I left the guy a decent tip, too. Because, you know. Can't have him thinking Jews are cheap.
The conversations universally about when's your book coming out, what's your topic now, what's that publisher like, what's so-and-so and so-and-so doing now, oh I hadn't heard that they're in that department now, etc. etc. etc. The guy next to me and his wife were both on the aisle, and a third woman came up and talked to them for over an hour about this kind of crap on the flight. You have a whole goddamn convention to have this conversation I wanted to scream while trying desperately to catch up on some sleep. Talkers. Yeesh.
Despite all this, I've been in a pretty OK mood. I wish I could do more research/writing work -- that's the overarching message of hanging around one's better-achieving peers -- but have had some success with other getting-life-together tasks the past couple of weeks. I did a first round of taxes, the basement looks fairly clean, etc. Work has not been bad. We're not doing great financially right now, what with $250 a month heating bills, but at least I have a handle on it. That kind of thing.
*******************
Speaking of the better-achieving, I ran into one of my former grad school colleagues at the department party. A nice person we were just getting to know in Baltimore when she and her (fellow historian) husband moved away. Well, they fetched up in Mount Lebanon, on Willow Drive, about maybe a half mile from where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. It's kind of neat that they are near a place I know so intimately. Like I could tell them where the lake is that used to be a coal pit, or the hidden, recluse's 1920s mansion. I mean, for all my mixed feelings about the place, home is home.
But I asked if their daughter would be going to Hoover (my elementary school). The answer was no, but she had a funny story. The real estate agent had said something to her like, "I don't want to talk about those Hoover School people." And then she met someone else socially in Mount Lebanon who started talking about Hoover School with some unease. She asked what was up with Hoover, and finally the woman said, "I really shouldn't say this... but... okay, it's the Jewish school."
Ah yes. My home town. Well, that should cure me of any Steelers-tinged nostalgia for a while. Enjoy living there, folks.
*******************
It's the second encounter with casual anti-Semitism in the past few weeks. The day before Christmas, we were in Greenport, Long Island, in a diner. The Mrs. was speaking excitedly, as is her wont sometimes, about how some people were upset about saying "Merry Christmas" and that "Happy Holidays" was more politically correct. I was just about to tell her that one should be careful about stepping too loudly into Bill O'Reilly's cow piles, when our server came over with our food and made the point for me. "Yeah, you know who it is making all that big deal about it -- it's them Jewish people," he informed us. "The immigrants and all them, came over here, and they started saying things, and it's us who gotta change. The immigrants and the Jews made us all change."
I pondered a response long enough for him to wander away (for the record, the right riposte was "That doesn't sound like Cherokee to me," as
flw once put it). I was half-tempted to make something of it. But my usual caution took over. My "fight or flight" button is set pretty firmly on "flight," but more profoundly, I was upset at the Mrs. for raising the issue aloud. And that's a little bit of Mount Lebanon, too. Not that there were nazis around or something. You just don't do that. And this is something I picked up without being told. It's not as though my dad ever told me directly (though he did warn me once about being too openly leftist, and it surprised me to realize that as someone who lived through the Red Scare he probably knew what he was talking about). But growing up even in the "Jewish school" (like 15%, for the record), you learned just not to get into it around people. You never knew what kind of door into some weird world you would find, like when Richie informed me pretty straightforwardly at age ten that the Jews killed Christ and that was that. He didn't mean any animus by it, either, which was maybe the scariest part.
Of course since then I've had my father-in-law ask the Mrs. about Barabbas -- like, you know, you guys really must have had some good times with that whole thing! -- so as an adult I continue to not want to open up those doors. But the Mrs. didn't learn this craven habit of behavior. She spoke about this subject like a normal person, and she saw what happens when you do that. I scowled at the guy and I scolded her. But I was also a little impressed. In general, I'd just rather not get into it, on a global scale. I'm just a reticent, agreeable, stifled person unless I trust whoever I'm around, which paradoxically gets me into more trouble than being straightforward, I think.
Anyway, I left the guy a decent tip, too. Because, you know. Can't have him thinking Jews are cheap.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 05:03 pm (UTC)For what it's worth, I haven't run into that kind of appalling behavior in Pittsburgh in the time I've lived here. Of course, for all I know Mount Lebanon is another country or something, but... :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-01-14 08:47 pm (UTC)Oooh
Date: 2005-01-14 05:50 pm (UTC)-Mr. Steen
this may be self-evident, but...
Date: 2005-01-14 08:54 pm (UTC)The Joy of Memory Loss
Date: 2005-01-14 08:42 pm (UTC)Y'know, I always recall getting strange reactions about Hoover because it was the "weird" school. The school that didn't give grades, the school that mixed the grades in together, the school on the edge. People would actually say, "Them Hoover kids march to the beat of their own drum."
Now, I never thought there could've been an anti-semitic element to it. But now I am thinking maybe there was.
There were a lot of Jewish families in Cedarhurst Manor because Virginia Manor and the other developments had Restrictive Covenants. If I'm not mistaken, they maintained the Restrictive Covenant in Virginia Manor until the 70's! There were two or three kids in School who made the claim to be "the first Jewish family in Virginia Manor."
(Virginia Manor, by the way, for anyone not in the know, is the hoity-toitiest of the hoity-toity Lebo neighborhoods.)
Maybe anti-Semitism is fashionable among the Nouveau Riche now. You know how unbelievably fucking stupid, vain, arrogant, and fashionable Lebanites can be. Smarmy, egotistical soccer moms. Fuck 'em!
it's best among your own kind
Date: 2005-01-14 09:05 pm (UTC)That happens to me all the time. But to you it should be familiar. You're very quotable. This is something you said in like 10th grade and I never forgot it.
Now, I never thought there could've been an anti-semitic element to it.
Me neither, which is why I found it so interesting that someone would come out and say it (to a person who's Catholic, I might add). I always thought mostly of Dr. Davidson and "Gifted and Talented" and those things that made us punching bags once we got to Mellon Jr. High. We were the coddled ones who needed a good lesson. Cedarhurst was also the most Democratic area of Mt. Lebanon, too.
I don't know why it became a somewhat Jewish area (in relative terms, of course). Virginia Manor has something to do with that (though that didn't stop Trish Will from regaling me about "all those rich Jewish brats from the Manor"). As a developing place in the 1950s and 1960s it probably bypassed all the WASPy older areas of Mt. Lebanon. Temple Emanuel probably had something to do with it too.
But I never once heard my parents mention us being there because there were a few Jews there. They probably thought it was an accident. Now that I think about it, though, I betcha it wasn't uncommon for the real estate agents to steer people in certain directions. Happens today all the time.
count on me to comment on the most boring aspect of your post
Date: 2005-01-18 01:52 pm (UTC)I did a first round of taxes, the basement looks fairly clean, etc.
Because J and I have a joke that goes like this:
"It's a beautiful day-- what do you want to do?"
"Let's pay some bills and clean the basement!"
Re: count on me to comment on the most boring aspect of your post
Date: 2005-01-21 01:40 pm (UTC)