Above everything I want you to be happy.'Our mothers met, embraced, and promptly forgot their differences in purely feminine discussions of wedding plans (we were to be married by a civil judge to eliminate difficulties), motherly landings of their respective offspring, and the honeymoon.Once marriage loomed up as a certainty, not another word against Ben's race or religion escaped my mother's lips.I have heard the same things from the lips of plenty of one-hundred-per-cent Americans,'Mother,' I said quietly, 'remember the greatest Man who ever lived was a Jew—Jesus.' That held her for a minute.
Ben, however, like a large percentage of modern and intelligent young Jews, looks with affectionate tolerance on these parental habits but eschews them for himself.
What Ben's mother said to him I can only conjecture, for he has never told me.
'Ben,' she most likely said, 'it grieves my old heart to have you marry a Shiksa rather than one of us.
Has there ever been a Jew who could approach Beethoven or Raphael?
Has there ever…’It must not be inferred that Mother, because of her German background, was particularly anti-Semitic.