Until I was 16, I lived in this Jewish community. I... I never thought twice about it. I wasn't a synagogue goer. At 13... at 13 I was Bar-Mitzvahed in a synagogue. I was Bar-Mitzvahed on March 9^th, 1946, which is... today is an anniversary for me. And I would... of course, I wanted to be Bar-Mitzvahed, I wanted to do well at it, but after that I never wanted to set foot in a synagogue again. I had no religion in me. And even after three years of instruction in Hebrew school, I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. I didn't know who these Bible characters were. I didn't know what Hebrew was. I didn't know why I should learn it, but I did it. I did it for my parents, I did it for my grandparents, I did... and I did it because all my little friends did it.

But once I was free of that, I never went back into a synagogue... if I could help it. And when it came time to go to college, I went to... excuse me... I went to a college that was predominantly Christian. It wasn't a religious school, I mean the students were... were predominantly Christian, 95%, 100% white the college... the college was. And then there were 2% of... of Jews. I... I deliberately made that choice. I didn't know anything about the school. I certainly didn't know anything about it academically. But I knew from a friend of mine who'd gone there that it... it wasn't like our high school had been. Now why did I want to do that? I wasn't in flight from my background, I wasn't in flight from the neighbourhood. I was curious, as a kid. I'd begun to read in high school, on my own, American writers, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell – I would read him secretly – and Thomas Wolfe and other American writers. And I wanted to know what the hell this America was. It wasn't that I didn't feel like I was an American kid, as... as a Jew, but what about the rest of the place? What... what is it like beyond my neighbourhood? So I went and I began to learn a little bit, I suppose. Mostly I studied my studies.