Growing up Hadley

The current issue of WORLD includes a Q&A with Hadley Arkes, who grew up in Judaism and at age 70 professed faith in Christ. Here’s more from that interview about his childhood and his drift away from Judaism.

Your father was a factory foreman and then had a launderette? Yes, how’d you find that out?

How old was your grandfather when he came to the United States in 1910? My grandfather was about 26 or so. My dad was born in 1914, and I in 1940.

When you were 2 years old your parents and grandparents were all together and you wandered into the kitchen. What happened? It’s wartime in Chicago. I was the only child, and the first grandchild, in a house with nine adults, so I could wander in pajamas in the morning. I was maybe 2 years old or so, and the kitchen was just filled with grownups trying to get themselves out and to work. I walk in, “Good morning, everybody.” And I get a standing ovation. “Look who’s here! Who gets him today? We’re going to play tennis. No, we’re going for milkshakes. We’ll go for milkshakes after tennis.”

True love. Unconditional. I used to wonder as a kid, “Why was there a me? Does everybody see me the way I see myself?” It was part of the sense that you were loved and you mattered. Your presence in the landscape mattered to them.

You had great security at the most insecure time for Jews in centuries, given that a murderous regime in Germany was out to kill them all. Yes—I had the sense there would always be a grownup looking after me. I never felt unfree. When a friend of mine and I were 8 years old we would pack a lunch, get 12 cents for carfare back and forth, and go downtown to Chicago to some free movie or something like that. Can you imagine sending two 8-year-olds into the city today?

You also went to Hebrew school two afternoons each week. Right, and then Sunday, and maybe services on Saturday. Gee, that’s a lot. Wow!

What are your memories of that? It was benign. I liked the teachers. We’d memorize things. I had a bar mitzvah.

When did you stop going? My parents weren’t really going. I did it for my zayde [grandfather] because he would go. We would go to High Holiday services, always on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

The ceremonies didn’t impress you? In the Coen Brothers’ awful movie, Solid Good, a rabbi doing a homily says, “You see, there are no answers. And that is why we have to preserve the Jewish people.” My cousin Sylvia said, “That’s why we have to preserve our Jewish people?” I drifted away because nothing compelling was going on there.

You had other things to do? Yeah. I realized there wasn’t much to talk about, and in high school I was busy with other things. The main point was the Henny Youngman history of the Jewish people: They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.

For more from this interview, see “Hadley Arkes and abortion.”