Now it occurred to her that her chief problem was not her opinions, which were conscious and had already changed considerably, but the way in which she thought and by which she had arrived at those opinions, which was still largely unconscious. There is nothing in the education of the average non-scientific human being to discourage him from the habit of generalizing from little or no evidence, and worse still and far more important, nothing to discourage him from the habit of starting with a generalization and ending up with the individual, instead of the other way round. That was precisely what she herself had done when she had tried to visualize David Reiser through a miasma of vague impressions associated with the word "Jewish" even though his religion or his race or whatever it was that the adjective actually meant, happened to be entirely irrelevant.
"I’d like you meet David sometime. You’d like each other".
She had been looking at the pigeons gathered on the walk at their feet, waiting for more corn, but something in the way he said it made her turn her head quickly to glance at him, and she found that he had been watching her and knew what she was thinking. She said, "I might just as well think out loud and be done with it!"
He touched her cheek lightly with one hand, and with his arm lying along the back of the bench again, across the space between them, he said, "We just operate on the same wave length, that’s all".
Erica scattered some corn among the pigeons, and then she said suddenly, letting herself go at last, "The whole world has changed for me since I met you. I’m not being sentimental-I’m not even being particularly personal. It’s not that, it’s something else". She paused, searching his face, and went on, "It’s as though I’d shifted position after twenty-eight years of seeing things mostly from just one standpoint, and I haven’t got used to how different everything looks. Do you understand that too?"
"Yes, I think so".
"Maybe it sounds silly, I don’t know. I haven’t even tried to explain it to anyone else because-well, because there isn’t anyone".
She said after a pause, "I got the most awful jolt that day. It was the result of three things, really-first of all, the…" she smiled at him quickly and said, "the wave length, I guess, then what you said about that apartment house and then Charles-all one right after the other…". Her voice trailed off and then she remarked, "You must think I’m awfully stupid".
"You’re not stupid". His eyes left her face and looking straight ahead of him he said, "Only you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. It’s a lot more comfortable to be on one side or the other than out in the middle where you get it both ways".
"I don’t care whether it’s comfortable or not".
There was a brief silence and then she heard Marc laugh. "What a weird conversation for two people sitting on a park bench who’ve only met once before for half an hour! The trouble is that I feel I know you so well that I can’t be bothered going through all the preliminaries. I hope you don’t mind".
Erica slid down on the seat until her head was resting against the back. Looking up at a patch of blue sky between two trees she said, "No, but I do want to know more about you".
"What, for example?"
"Well…" She paused, considering, and then asked, "Is your family very religious?"
"No, not particularly. I doubt if I’ve been in a synagogue more than half a dozen times since I was confirmed. Why?"
"I think I’m trying to get an idea of the general background".
"The general background in my case is more middle-class and small town Ontario than particularly Jewish".
He threw away his cigarette and with his hands in his pockets and his eyes following the cars passing by on the other side of the square he said, "It’s funny, but for some reason or other it doesn’t seem to have occurred to most people that the agnosticism or whatever you call it which has swept over the democratic countries in the past fifty years has hit the Jews in those countries to about the same extent as everyone else. There are still good Orthodox and Reform Jews, of course, but there are still a lot of good Catholics and Protestants too. The chief difference is that the strength of religious feeling among Jews depends to a certain extent on the degree of persecution, so that in general, you might find that even among Canadian Jews, the ones who came originally from Poland and Russia tend to be more devout than those of us who came from Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia".
He broke off and said, "By the way, don’t ever imagine that I’m giving you ’the Jewish point of view,’ will you?"
"Why not?"
"Because there isn’t one. You get Jews like Mr. Aaronson who are British Imperialists, Communist Jews who are Russian Imperialists, Jews who are Zionists, Jews who are violently anti-Zionist, Jews like me who are just Canadians or Americans or Englishmen, and if you put them all together and tried to work out a ’Jewish’ viewpoint, you wouldn’t get very far. There are only two characteristics which most Jews have in common, that I’ve ever been able to observe anyhow-one of them is a determination to survive, if possible, and the other is a basic sense of insecurity. Yet there’s no unanimity on how survival is to be accomplished, and the sense of insecurity takes the form of almost every conceivable kind of behavior from the extreme of aggressive materialism to the opposite extreme of complete idealism. I have a theory that the ghetto produces a disproportionate number of both and that the effects of the ghetto take two or three generations to wear off, but I may be wrong. It’s impossible to prove or disprove it because wherever we go, the ghetto environment still exists to some extent".
He said after a pause, "The only thing to do is to go on being yourself, but in order to do that, you’ve got to remember when someone’s rude to you not to say to yourself that it’s because you’re a Jew; when you meet people and say ’How about lunch’ and they turn you down a couple of times, to remember that other people get turned down too and it’s probably just because they don’t like your face-not to get a chip on your shoulder, not to start looking for insults, not to misinterpret things people say…"
He remarked ironically, "Reiser on the subject of the inferiority complex", and then rather abruptly a moment later, "That’s enough about me. Have you seen René lately?"
"Yes, I had lunch with him today". There was a group of soldiers a few yards away, reading the inscription on the pedestal of the Boer War Memorial and as one of them said something which made the others laugh, she remarked, "René seems to think the war is just a racket".
"I know. He says it’s just another war for conquest between the Great Powers and the political aspect of it doesn’t matter because ideologically, we’re immune. Just why he imagines we’re more immune to Nazi ideas than anyone else, I don’t know. Do you mind if I ask you something?"
"No, what is it?"
"Are you in love with René?"
"No, why?"
"Well, I know how he feels about you and I thought…"
He did not go on to explain what he had thought, and she said, "I asked him to bring you to lunch today…".
"And René wouldn’t".
"Would you have come?"
He smiled at her and said, "No, I don’t think so".
"I guess René knew you wouldn’t. You know why I wanted you to come, don’t you?"