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person than he looked in the movies. With his dark hair and eyes, long legs, and large hands, he seemed to fill not only his body but the entire room. Here was the man who was inseparable in my mind from the Tarzan I adored, the Tarzan who roamed free in the jungle and called it home, who called to the wild animals as if they were his own family, who defied the rules of the Lodge and walked through the lobby barefooted and nearly naked, as if the Lodge was as much home to him as the jungle and the only rules were those that nature made. Here was the Tarzan who was not afraid to swim where the grasses grew long and thick; who was not afraid to dive down into and through the grasses themselves, willing and able to face whatever he might find there.
    Then he turned and walked up the marble staircase and was gone.

Chapter Three
I
    I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT I DID TO MAKE MY FRIEND J ENNY ANGRY, BUT the way her eyes grew calm and cold under her thick, straight bangs told me that she’d come up with a way to get back at me. I braced myself.
    “You’re nothing but a Jew, Margaret Richter,” she announced. “Nothing but a Jew.”
    Then she turned and walked briskly away. I stood watching her back as she disappeared down the street.
    Nothing but a Jew?
    I felt the August heat through the soles of my sandals. No one had ever told me we were Jews. Certainly we didn’t go to a synagogue—we went to the First Baptist Church, with Jesus in the stained-glass windows and a steeple on top. Mother’s side of the family was mostly Scotch-English, and Daddy’s was German.
    But were we German Jews?
    Heat waves rose from the cars parked in front of Mizell’s Drugs, where Jenny and I had just eaten ice cream cones. I walked home slowly.
What’s wrong with being a Jew anyway?
I thought.
    When Daddy came home from work, I asked him: “Daddy, are we Jews?”
    He didn’t answer, but he got that secretive, evasive look he got when I asked him something about his disowned sisters, Bessie and Kate. Then he turned his eyes from mine.
    “Daddy, are we Jews?” I repeated pleadingly, but again he looked away. I knew there was no hope of an answer from him. For all his weakness, Daddy was iron-willed when it came to what he would and wouldn’t talk about. But because of Jenny’s statement and Daddy’s refusal to confirm or deny it, I spent the remaining years of my childhood examining family behavior and information for evidence of the truth. I desperately wanted to know who I was.
    A part of me decided that because he wouldn’t say we weren’t, we must be Jews. Also, though I heard Daddy talk about African Americans in racist language, I never heard him say a single negative word about a Jew.
Doesn’t that tell me something?
I asked myself. Daddy was prejudiced against a lot of people: Yankees, Catholics, people he called “white trash,” Gypsies, people who rented their houses, and the lawyer who said to him, “I’d have done it for the blackest nigger,” when Daddy thanked him for a favor.
    My conviction that our family had to be Jewish strengthened when Mr. Louie Steiman was turned down for membership in the country club in a nearby town and Daddy stopped work early and drove over there to support Mr. Steiman’s appeal. Why would he have done that when he and Mr. Steiman were hardly friends? And country club membership was one of the last things to interest Daddy. His defending Mr. Steiman felt almost like a family affair, like the way he acted when he, Uncle Frank, and Aunt Bama would rush to one another’s aid when the need arose. And what about the Yiddish words the three of them used with one another?
    After Daddy’s death I asked Mother the same question: “Mother, was Daddy’s family Jewish?”
    “I really don’t know,” she replied. “I remember people referring to your father’s people as ‘those rich Richter Jews,’ but whether they said that because they had money or because they were Jews, I don’t know. They