The Petition (Part 3)

Bloggers Note: One of my readers, an SHS alumna, left a comment yesterday in which she correctly named the teacher I'm calling "Mr. Stubick" in this story. As mentioned in my initial note, I've chosen to change his name for several reasons I'll go into at the very end. I hate deleting ANY comments, but in this case I had no choice. I ask all Summit readers to please refrain from giving away Mr. Stubick's real name, either on this site or on my Facebook page.

Incidentally, I've been quite surprised by the interest generated by these postings -- not only from Summit people but also those completely unfamiliar with the people and events described here. I wish I didn't have to post in such short installments, but I'm writing this from my day job and am interrupted an average of once every 30 seconds. It's the literary equivalent of waterboarding.

As a result of these constant interruptions, I may have mangled the chronology. I'm almost certain now that the story actually begins during my junior -- and not sophomore -- year. And that's going to become somewhat important later on. So for comprehension's sake, let's assume I've been a junior and am still a junior at this point of the narrative.

Without further ado, on with Part 3:

My next piece for "The Tower" was an editorial about people cutting in the cafeteria line, something about which I was passionate. Stubick loved it, because it gelled with his worldview of teenagers as either hapless victims or sinister victimizers. But I felt a bit silly having made a big deal about such a relatively inconsequential topic.

Also, the editorial had zero effect. Bigger kids continued to cut smaller kids in the line, as I'm sure they still do today. (Although I will say now as then, where the fuck are the adults who are charged with keeping schools from turning into "Lord of the Flies?" Would it have been so hard to post a gym teacher at the front of the line to make sure everyone waits his turn?)

In any case, my next topic would be far more serious. It came to me in Chem Study class, after I had a minor altercation with a kid named Dwight. I don't remember what the argument was about. Perhaps he didn't properly clean my beaker, or vice versa. All I know is that after our disagreement I left class briefly to go the boy's room.

And when I returned, I discovered a penny had been carefully laid on top of the schoolbooks on my desk.

It wasn't my penny, and it hadn't been there when I left the classroom; of that I was certain. But there it was, staring up at me, like some kind of dark talisman.

This was shocking to me on a number of levels. First, because Dwight wasn't a bad kid. He was just a mild-mannered dork with whom I had a number of honor's level classes. And second, because this was New Jersey, not Mississippi. I was aware that mine was one of the only Jewish families in town, but I had never felt targeted because of it. Yes, Summit was overwhelmingly WASPy and Republican, but it was also affluent, educated and somewhat socially progressive.

Yet at that moment, my mind began to connect some dots. Earlier in the year, I suddenly recalled, while changing classes in a crowded hallway, I had dropped my pencil and bent over to pick it up. "Find a penny?" asked an older boy strolling past me.

I recalled smiling back at him, bewildered, knowing he had made a joke but not getting the punchline.

Then I flashed back to an evening spent months before with my friend Matt in which I had flipped through his Summit Junior High School yearbook. I had attended a private school during those years and was curious about the junior high experience. As I perused the yearbook, I was stopped cold by a page showing a large candid photo of Adam Pechter, an obstreperous boy with whom I had grown up and attended Hebrew school. (He had left for boarding school at the same time I switched back to public school.)

In the photo, Adam stood at a classroom lectern delivering some sort of oral assignment, his index finger extended.

Underneath the photo, someone had scrawled, "Is that a penny I see in the back of the room?"

Somehow, the penny on my desk brought all of these events into clear focus, as if I were putting on new eyeglasses. That night, I wrote an essay which began: "To the person in my Chem Study class who put a penny on my desk: Thank you." It detailed the casual anti-Semitism I had encountered and my subsequent epiphany that while I never thought my religious background registered one whit among my non-Jewish classmates, it apparently did.

My tone wasn't angry but deadly serious: This penny-pinching stereotype, something with which I in my sheltered upbringing had been only vaguely aware, had roots in Nazi Germany, where it had been used in part to justify the genocide of 6 million Jews.

I submitted my penny essay to Mr. Stubick the next day. He read it with great approbation but offered some constructive criticism, specifically with regard to the Germany bit. Yes, the Nazis regarded the Jews as greedy, he pointed out, but the stereotype was much older than the Third Reich, dating back at least to Shakespeare's Shylock.

Contrary to what some may believe about me, I am very receptive when someone offers me thoughtful feedback, especially when it makes my writing stronger. So I immediately went back to work on the piece, revising the section about the history of the Stingy Jew and making other changes suggested by Stubick before resubmitting it to him for publication.

But when the piece ran a month later in "The Tower" it was my first draft that appeared. Stubick had somehow misplaced my revised version or forgotten that I had made revisions in the first place. Or something. He offered me a shrugging apology but no real explanation.

The piece made a big impact. A number of students approached me with apologies for things they had said or done of which I hadn't even been aware. A local synagogue reprinted the essay in their newsletter and asked me to speak about it. And Miss Johnson, my Chem Study teacher and one of the dearest people at our school or any school, expressed her horror to me that such a thing would happen in her classroom, as if she could have somehow prevented it.

But I still felt wronged by Stubick's carelessness. I couldn't fathom how he could have mishandled a piece that was obviously so personal and important to me.

Our war was brewing.

To be continued.

Homo in flashback. ♥