Diary of a Los Angeles Jew, 1942-1972 (An Excerpt)

Abstract

Diary of a Los Angeles Jew, 1942-1972 (An Excerpt) Marc Lee Raphael (bio) Autobiography is rather fashionable. . . . Everyone is writing his or her "memoir". . . . They are rather repulsive. —A. S Byatt Autobiography, of course, is the highest form of fiction. —E. A. J. Honigman Three different interests came together to convince me to start an autobiography, a book that is a somewhat unusual combination of diary excerpts from the first thirty years of my life and my reflections on these during the seventh decade of my life. The interests unfolded independently, but at a certain point it seemed convenient to link them into a single book. The first was a fascination with Jewish autobiography (autobiographical novels, memoirs, and autobiographies have become common around the world), initially because of a course I was preparing to teach. At the same time, I became increasingly convinced that I should take a fresh look at American Jewish life in the roughly twenty-five years after World War II. Historians of the American Jewish experience are rethinking the 1950s and 1960s, and I wanted to join the effort. And finally, a model for my book came to me when I read an unforgettable memoir, one that I have begun to use in my course on the Holocaust, Rosetta Loy's First Words. Loy's combination of diary entries in Rome on the eve of and during World War II, and her reflections on those entries (with the benefit of research in the Vatican Archives) many years later, excited me, and I am using this technique in my book. This technique has a fundamental premise underlying it, the feeling that an autobiography is only memory's report—years later—of what was once thought or felt; it is only remembered consciousness. Unlike the diary form in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel,which opens with a long list of New Year's resolutions ("I Will Not" and "I Will") and is full of plans, I hardly ever plotted my future in my diary. Perhaps this reveals the truth of what my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Veazey, told my parents ("very little imagination"), and what my sixth-grade teacher, the beloved Miss Morrison, virtually repeated two [End Page 299] years later ("not too. . . imaginative"). I hope that the use of my diary excerpts, combined with much later commentary on these entries, prevents me from substituting the completely formed from that which was only in the process of being formed, from attributing a logical coherence or single meaning to events that were open at the time, from presenting a teleology, a movement toward a specific goal, when at the time I had not a clue where I was heading. Even worse would be to recall something that I never was at all. Of course, there is no certainty about the "self," the autos, and perhaps the entire effort to turn a bios,a life, into a text, is problematic. I don't think so. So this is both a history of a Los Angeles Jew in the middle of the last century, and a history of my reading of that history. It is a narrative of self, for Oliver Sacks is correct, I think, when he notes that "it might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative,' and that this narrative is us, our identities."1 This is the story of one self, and how this self related to Los Angeles, to family, to friends, and especially to Judaism. Of course, the "self" is a construction, a persona that must (to some extent) be carefully protected and maintained, but I hope this format does not conceal every weakness and magnify every strength. David Ellenson (b. 1947) noted in an autobiographical essay that, for him, the "study of Judaism had become, and remains, a religious quest, an attempt at self-knowledge and discovery." For me, as well, my increasing interest in Judaism and Jewish texts has been a religious quest, and I note this as early as in sermons I delivered as a teen. And I never doubted that the person I recall when I read my diary and remember the...