One after­noon in 1979, dur­ing the spring of my senior year at Vas­sar Col­lege, some­one came knock­ing on the door of my dorm room, I opened it to find a woman in her late 30’s or ear­ly 40’s who said she had lived in the room dur­ing her senior year at Vas­sar, could she come in and look around? I said yes and once she was inside, I not­ed how she took in the posters I had tacked on the walls, the bat­tered vel­vet arm­chair I’d bought at the local Sal­va­tion Army for ten dol­lars, and the books on the shelf. I could see the expe­ri­ence was impor­tant and mean­ing­ful for her and she thanked me for allow­ing her to have it. 

When the door closed behind, I was left to go back to what­ev­er I had been doing before. She seemed nice and I was glad to offer her the oppor­tu­ni­ty she’d sought. But I was puz­zled too, though I had come to love Vas­sar and was hap­py there, I was also impa­tient to grad­u­ate, and for my real life, one that would, I hoped, include grad­u­ate school, jobs, apart­ments, boyfriends — some of the mile­stones of adult life — to begin. I couldn’t imag­ine com­ing back to this room in twen­ty years and ask­ing if I could look around; by then, col­lege would be the dis­tant past and I imag­ined being firm­ly root­ed in what­ev­er I had been able to cre­ate. I couldn’t have known just how wrong I was — Vas­sar, and my time there, would not remain in the past; Vas­sar is very much with me still and, in some sense, cre­at­ed the per­son I am now. 

I grew up in a mid­dle class neigh­bor­hood in Brook­lyn, NY. Our neigh­bors and friends were Jew­ish, as were most of my class­mates. This being New York, there were, of course, oth­er reli­gious groups who lived near­by; they were most­ly Catholic, either Irish or Ital­ian. Those kids went to the Immac­u­late Heart of Mary, a near­by parochial school. There was no ani­mos­i­ty between the groups but there was lit­tle inter­ac­tion either. We stuck to our own.

Fast for­ward to 1974, when I entered Vas­sar as a fresh­man. There were plen­ty of Jew­ish stu­dents around me. Jew­ish fac­ul­ty mem­bers too. But there was also a priv­i­leged class I had not encoun­tered before, and cer­tain­ly not in any sig­nif­i­cant num­bers. These were the WASPs and Vas­sar was teem­ing with them. This group was for­eign to me, and in their own way, exot­ic to me. The Muffys and the Taffys, the Chips and the Skips (Vas­sar had been coed for a few years by this time). I felt intim­i­dat­ed, envi­ous, and dis­dain­ful all in a swirling, not entire­ly com­fort­able mix. And while I didn’t expe­ri­ence much overt anti­semitism (my fresh­man-year room­mate informed me that my peo­ple had killed Christ, while anoth­er stu­dent com­plained about how Jews nev­er stopped talk­ing about the Holo­caust) these instances were occa­sion­al and not espe­cial­ly wound­ing. What was more cor­ro­sive was the grad­ual aware­ness that Vas­sar had been found­ed, in part, on exclud­ing peo­ple like me. Jew­ish girls had not gone there in the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry and attend­ed only in capped num­bers well into the twen­ti­eth. Once I knew this, it wasn’t some­thing I could unknow and as much as I loved the insti­tu­tion and felt proud to be a part of it, I had to accept my his­toric exclu­sion, and it for­ev­er col­ored my experience.

This inter­sec­tion of Jew­ish/non-Jew­ish life at Vas­sar shaped the way I saw the world and how I found my place in it. The Jews’historical refusal to become Chris­t­ian, our Bartle­by-like stance, off to the side, say­ing no, we’d pre­fer not to, had come to define us. Being at Vas­sar made that abun­dant­ly clear. 

So being a writer, I start­ed writ­ing about it. In 2018, Harper­Collins pub­lished my nov­el, Not Our Kind, which was about the unlike­ly rela­tion­ship between a young Jew­ish woman who grew up on Sec­ond Avenue and the Park Avenue matron who becomes her employ­er. I set the book in the late 1940’s because that was a time when these lines were even more sharply drawn — the word restrict­ed was used wide­ly and with­out shame to let peo­ple know that if they didn’t like Jews — or Blacks — they need not have wor­ried as the hotel/​resort/​town did not admit them. 

That nov­el allowed me to exam­ine and explore these issues and now, with my new nov­el, One of Them, I’ve returned to the sub­ject. The time peri­od is the same, but this nov­el is set at Vas­sar and is about two girls who live their Jew­ish­ness dif­fer­ent­ly. Despite appear­ances to the con­trary, Anne Bish­op decides not to tell any­one at Vas­sar that she’s Jew­ish, or that her father changed the family’s name to pave his way in the world. Delia Gold­hush has no such refuge, and she’s sub­ject to the scorn and mal­ice of her class­mates. The choic­es these two girls make, how they deal with their back­grounds and iden­ti­ties, let me tease out the issues. I’ll always be inter­est­ed in the sub­ject of iden­ti­ty and exclu­sion and I hope, by telling Anne and Delia’s sto­ry in the most spe­cif­ic, relat­able way I know how, that both Jews and non-Jews will share that inter­est with me.