That didn't help matters. I was as much a weakling as ever. When I went to public school, I used to cry with a snivelling vexation because the toughs of my class made fun of me. One of them had a little sister in the class below us, and I was very fond of her. I remember how, on St. Valentine's day, I stole into her class room at lunch time and, while she was absent, stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her desk. I didn't understand, then, why the teacher tittered so nervously when I asked her permission to do it. But, when my own lunch was done, and I was back at my desk, I lifted the lid of it only to find that same valentine rammed into one corner, crushed and torn almost in half, and scrawled with the word, "Sheeny!" Nor did the little romantic flight end there. For the next day, after sister and brother had been comparing notes, the former marched straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and for all, from the true American daughter of a true American family, and to confine my sentiments to "some little Jew girl!" I knew none of that sort. What few boys and girls of my own race I had met at playtime or at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I thought, if I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it! Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and infinitely more in the building up of my character. There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am grown to man's estate I can know these things of myself--but how could I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world recognize, then, his own needs and cravings? It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor. Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She never rose again. The shock killed her.