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 Confluent Myths:Two Lives If we have learned anything from a generation of post-modern discourse which it has become so fashionable to dismiss together with all post-isms, it is the freedom and sensitivity to analyze the myths or narratives we have grown up on, to trace their constructions, their attenuations, and transformations. We now strive to situate these intimate processes in a set of historical matrices. Were the term not so ugly, I would say that we try to historicize the mythicized. Fundamentally, this is an autobiographical project, tempered and controlled, perhaps, by reference to provable fact, but still fundamentally autobiographical. The first person singular or plural is thus the proper voice since I make no pretense at objective, scientific statement. This voice is certainly the right one to adopt when one sits down to write an essay in honor of a friend and colleague with whom one has shared so many significant experiences over a half century. What I intend to write is rare for jubilee volumes which normally are an assemblage of disparate articles written in honor of a colleague. What I am writing is a joint intellectual biography of two friends who were educated at the same moment in history at the same institutions. I shall focus on their elementary and secondary schools since these were the most formative; subsequently, they moved into broader historical contexts and each went his own way. Though the following narrative concentrates on the early education of Walter Ackerman and Arnold Band, it is written against the backdrop of one of the most crucial periods in Jewish history, 1935-1950. Focusing on their schooling rather than on the historical background was intentional, since full integration of both education and historical contexts would merit book-length treatment. The world has changed so much since then—after the Shoah, the establishment of 3 Israel, and the maturation of American Jewry—that it is at times difficult to imagine the world that existed then, only two generations ago and therefore all the more imperative to do so. I hope that this piece may serve as the opening to a deeper understanding of a significant phase of modern Jewish intellectual history, one usually eclipsed by the portentous events of the times. I call this a “joint biography” though it has only one author for both subjects. The second subject, Walter Ackerman, whose voice—for once—will not be heard, will simply have to suffer my analysis in silence. Though we have discussed these issues many times, the responsibility for specific perceptions and formulations is mine. Walter Ackerman and I grew up in the Jewish part of Dorchester, an inner suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Today a slum inhabited mostly by African-Americans and recent immigrants to the United States, Dorchester had in our childhood a thriving Jewish community with all the traditional institutions: synagogues, schools, shopping streets with kosher butchers, Jewish bakeries, small grocery stores catering to the tastes of East European Jews. The neighborhood had been built mostly in the last decades of the nineteenth century and was comprised of a range of houses from substantial, but far from palatial, one-family homes, to two comfortable family dwellings, to crowded three-decker tenementstyle wood-frame apartment houses deliberately built for working class immigrants. Growing up in Dorchester, you knew hundreds of Jews of all ages and types and developed a true sense of urban community. We all knew, however, that our richer relatives lived elsewhere, mostly on the west side of Boston, in communities such as Brookline and Newton. Though Dorchester and the adjacent, densely Jewish districts of Roxbury and Mattapan constituted a secure, self-assured Jewish world, the dream to earn more money and move to Brookline was ever-present even before World War II. This dream dimmed considerably during our childhood which coincided with the Great Depression of the 1930s with its high unemployment and economic stagnation. While Dorchester was probably similar to dozens of other communities of first and second generation American Jews in the cities of the eastern seaboard, it was different in that it was a part of the City of Boston. Boston looms large in the map of our biographies since it is one of the more distinctive cities in America. The peculiarity of the city touched our lives even when we were children growing up in one of its less prosperous , declining districts some six miles from the historical center of the city. For it was, even...

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