Pardon me are you Jewish?

[---]

Jody's post goes to the absurd heart of racial and religious hatred. My
father is Jewish (though not religious), so when I learned as a kid that
your mother has to be Jewish or you're out, I told him I wasn't Jewish.
He said "In a pogrom, you're Jewish." Yikes! Which is to say, each of us
suffers from definition by others.

It's a clever bit in Gravity's Rainbow when Pointsman's crew are
drugging Slothrop to mine his presumed American black-hatred, and he
complies -- except he's making it up, hoping for an insanity discharge.
So like my being Jewish (the subject line of this post is what
Schneerson's Hasidim ask likely passersby when they're out with their
mitzvah tanks), Slothrop is a bit ambivalent concerning his Americality.
Duane Marvy and the Schwarzkommando further contribute, as had learning
of the deal between his father and Lyle Bland. Finally, he is going
around in Tchitcherine's Soviet uniform (a symbol of non-racial
non-religious internationalism?). Several times in the Zone, he longs to
return "home" but never goes as far as actually making an effort to do
so. He becomes a permanent dweller of the Zone, where boundaries are
still porous and choices have yet to be made.

Yours,
Eric R

P.S. Speaking of vaudeville, one of my greatgrandfathers and Al Jolson
were second cousins!