Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project

Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project ARTHUR GREEN Interviewed by Jayne K. Guberman August 5, 2016 A Project of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania Art Green, 08/06/16 Jayne Guberman (JG): My name is Jayne Guberman. Today is Friday, August 5, 2016, and I’m here with Art Green in his home in Newton, Massachusetts, and we’re going to record an interview for the Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project. Art, do I have your permission to record this interview? Art Green (AG): Yes, indeed you do. JG: Great, so as you know, today we’re going to explore your experiences during the late sixties and early seventies in particular, and particularly your role in founding the first havurah, Havurat Shalom, and the period of its early years. I’d like to start by talking about your personal and family background to set the stage for your involvement in the late sixties, so can you tell me a little bit about your family when you were growing up. AG: My family — I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. My parents both came from Patterson, New Jersey. Family background is important somehow. My father, Martin Green, was the first child of a couple who immigrated just before he was born. He was born the year after they arrived. He was born in 1907; they’d arrived in 1906. They came from Lodz, western Poland, but both their families had come from shtetlakh before Lodz. In Lodz, his parents had both lost the hasidic religion of their parents and became quite secular. My grandfather sort of labor movement secular; my grandmother also very secular. Her siblings were all Communist party members; she was not a Communist but shared their view of religion. They were completely anti-religious, thought religion was the opiate of the masses, and my dad was raised in a strictly atheist, secular household. Now, that grandmother, as I like to say, when I got under foot as a little kid playing in the kitchen, she would say to me, “Go shlug kappores,” and I’d ask her what that meant and she said, “Go swing a chicken around your head.” It was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I didn’t know there was anything Jewish about it, but that’s how Jewishly knowledgeable she was in her very secular, anti-religious world. We were in Newark because Dad was a history teacher, at Weequahic High School; that’s the all-Jewish public high school that Philip Roth describes in his novels. And that’s what Dad did. He was a thirties’ intellectual: social, and economic matters were what were important, psychology; certainly anything spiritual was just all nonsense and bullshit and he felt very strongly about that. He married my mother Ethel, who was the daughter of a traditional — not Orthodox but traditional — old-world Jewish family also in Patterson. When I say traditional but not Orthodox I mean grandpa’s tailor shop was open on Shabbos. But upstairs from the tailor shop in grandma’s house you couldn’t sew you, couldn’t write, she lit candles; everything was strictly kosher. When they retired — he retired from the tailor shop when I was six years old — they moved, and then he started going to shul every Shabbos and eventually shul every day, maybe as much for the Yiddish conversation and schnapps and herring as much as the davening, which he knew by heart. He wasn’t a great believer — she was a believer, he wasn’t a great believer — but they were traditional Jews, traditional balabotishkeit, sort of Yiddish speaking, 1 Art Green, 08/06/16 Judaism was their world. This is all — I give you all this detail on my grandparents because they are very important in my life. JG: You have a sister also? AG: I have an older sister named Paula, with whom I’m very close now. We were not terribly close as kids, but yes, the four of us lived in this apartment on South 20th Street in Newark. When I was seven years old mom developed cancer; we don’t know what exactly what kind — “women’s cancer” it was called in those days. You didn’t mention the “c-word” and you certainly didn’t mention words like “uterine” in front of a child. She died when I was eleven. And that was sort of the traumatic event of my childhood and probably the determinative event in the course of my life in many ways. JG: How so? AG: I remember going to synagogue with my mother when I was maybe seven or eight years old. Friday night service was at Temple B’nei Abraham, which was this big, liberal temple in Newark. That’s the place I went to Hebrew school. The rabbi there was Yoachim Prince; he was a very world known orator. People went Friday nights to hear Rabbi Prince speak and to listen to the cantorial choir concert; nobody opened the book. I remember going with mom and opening the book and being interested in what was going on there. Why she and I were there I’m not sure. Was she interested in religion and less of an atheist than my father was, or was she just escaping the cigar smoke of his Friday night bridge game at home? Hard to know. But when I was eight, Dad took me aside and told me, “You have to do this terrible thing for your grandmother called Hebrew school.” Because every boy in the family had to have a bar mitzvah; that was taken for granted in the Atkin family. JG: This was the grandmother — AG: My mother’s mother. My sister received not a day of Jewish education because girls didn’t need to, but I had to go to Hebrew school to please Grandma. He said, “If you hate it, you can quit.” And I took to it like a duck to water; I loved it. I’m a rare success story of the afternoon Hebrew school system. Three days a week, in a very sort of Hebraist, Labor Zionist atmosphere, Ivrit b’Ivrit. By my second or third year in Hebrew school we had a pen pal in Israel and I was exchanging letters with him in my broken Hebrew, which of course the teacher corrected and it was all very exciting. I just loved it. Now part of it was that the tough kids from elementary school weren’t there, the tough kids, meaning kids who beat you up, the Catholic kids, they were across the street being punished at Blessed Sacrament. So Hebrew school you didn’t have to pretend you didn’t know the answers and things like that. It was my first exposure to a second language and I was obviously good at language, and I just loved it and thrived in it. 2 Art Green, 08/06/16 JG: Your childhood also coincided with the war, essentially. AG: Well, I was born in ’41. I don’t remember the war or the end of the war, but I remember mom and grandma, again mother’s mother, sitting and looking at lists of survivors after the war, looking for a cousin who had been left behind. And I was there with my grandfather when he found out what happened in his shtetl, very traumatic memory somehow. So yes, the background of the war was there. Dad was a history teacher, as I said. When I was eleven or 12twelve I read John Hershey’s The Wall. I discovered something called The Black Book of Polish Jewry at a very young age, and that sort of told me what had happened in the war. What I didn’t know and found out only very recently was that my father’s family, the atheist side, the Communist side of the family, who we were out of touch with for many, many years, I just made contact three or four years ago with cousin Eleanor, a little older than I am. She said, “Do you know about the other sibling?” and I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “There was one brother who remained frum, refused to go to America, and he and his wife and eight children died in the Lodz ghetto.” Nobody in the family ever mentioned that when I was a child. Did they try to get them out and fail? Did they say, Who needs a crazy religious brother? and left him there? I have no idea, but that’s a piece of family history I found out much, much later. So, I was brought up in this secular home, not only secular but assimilationist home. I remember Christmas stockings; I hear we had a tree one year and grandma had a fit, but I don’t remember that. I remember Christmas stockings, hamsteaks with pineapple rings on the kitchen table — very, very trying to be American. Even my name, Arthur Eliot. I was named for Dad’s grandfather who was Avram Itzhik, but that became Arthur Eliot in that generation, and assimilation is what my dad, presumably my parents, wanted. When I applied to rabbinical school, to jump ahead, I received a letter from Grandma Green, Dad’s mother, and the letter read like this — I still have it upstairs. I just showed it to somebody, in night-school English, one sentence — “Dear Arthur, I hear you still want to be a rabbi. I would be prouder of you if you were a teacher and teach people things that are true because if there was a God in the sky he would be shot down by Sputnik already.

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