The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography - Plot & Excerpts
I hadn’t begun to foresee this as a part of the struggle to write, and yet it was to be central to it. As intellectually sophisticated as I was, “self-hatred” was still a new idea to me then; if the phenomenon had ever been present in my world, I had certainly never perceived it as a problem. In Newark, I hadn’t known anyone to whose conduct self-hatred was anything like the key, and the Bucknell chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, whatever its shortcomings, never seemed to chafe under its distinctive identity or noticeably to apologize for itself. When Moe Finkelstein, one of the Sammies’ two varsity football players, entered the game for Bucknell, his fraternity brothers invariably sent up a whoop signaling their proud affiliation, a demonstration of feeling that would have driven a self-hating Jew into paroxysms of shame. In fact, what was most admirable about the Sammies was the easygoing way in which they synthesized themselves into a manifestly gentile environment without denying their difference or combatively insisting on it.
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