My Life Among the Gentiles is a delightful and warm-hearted collection of autobiographical essays written by a school teacher who is Jewish and who grew up in an overwhelmingly gentile environmnet of an upstate New York town. With compassion and humor, Miriam Biskin describes episodes in the lives of her colorful relatives and friends, and shows their roles in her life. You will meet her grandparents, who innocently participated in an economic fraud; Grandfather Mendel, who was under the impression that Abraham Lincoln must surely have been a Talmudic scholar; Mrs. Biskin’s own mother, who administered bowls of chicken soup as if she were handing out aspirin; her beloved friend Mrs. Bohen, who took the author, when she was a child, along as a consultant for an eye examination. Then there are the not-so-nice: her brother, who tried frantically to deny his Jewish faith; Jakie, the doll-smashing, spoiled brat, upon whom the author took revenge in a most satisfactory manner; the deaf old Yiddish teacher; the judge who thought a fair test to give applicants for American citizenship would be to ask them about the depths of rivers; and the Christian children who out of fear, ignorance, or hatred plagued the author’s childhood with bigoted, or ignorant, words and deeds. You will also learn about the world of Christmas trees, Channukah bushes, holy communions: the times when children of differing religions are puzzled by the non-observance of their cherished holidays and traditions by their playmates of other faiths. For the Jew and non-Jew, the sociologist and layman, My Life Among the Gentiles hopefully will shed some light on the question of human relationships. For as the author tells us, Some of my well-adjusted friends level a finger of judgment in my direction and make the pronouncement that I am a ‘defensive Jew.’ Their perspicacity is unimpressive because of the obviousness of the fact. My heritage, my commitment, my identity are all items worth defending, and their label fits as long as they don’t stray to such idiotic euphemisms as ‘Jewess.’ … And as they apologize for my conduct, I’d like them to get the name right. ‘Jew’ is not a dirty word or a scornful epithet: it is a simple and honorable deisgnation for that portion of the species which has been witness to man’s long struggle to attain humanity.
