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“The pompous son of a bitch knows everything—it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”
How could I not be confused, when our disgrace and our glory were one and the same?
It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.
The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”
There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.
The status conferred by economic and vocational advantage inclined them to believe that those who lacked their prestige were rebuffed by the larger society more because of insular clannishness than because of any pronounced taste for exclusiveness on the part of the Christian majority, and that neighborhoods like ours were less the result of discrimination than its breeding grounds.
