During this week of May Day, it seems appropriate to recall my first pogrom. But first, a little background.

From Kindergarten to third grade I had gone to a pair of Hebrew day schools, both of which were progressive, and the last of which was positively schizoid. We labored under the tutelage of Mr. Oditz, a free-school English teacher straight out of Woodstock and Morah Shulamit, an autocratic Hebrew teacher straight out of the Mossad. It was a strange place. Oditz and Shulamit had an attraction-revulsion thing going on, and they sparred like lovers in an Austen novel until things turned ugly when Shulamit, proclaiming that Oditz had B.O., opened a window, and he, in turn, slammed the window down on her fingers. Their dysfunction meant that we students were free to do whatever we wanted much of the time, so after our regular viewing of Good Morning America, I generally retreated to a musty couch to sink for hours into a book, or to work on my science fiction epic, The Stringbean from Venus.

When my parents saw that I could read Isaac Asimov but couldn’t multiply, they resolved to return me to the public school system; within a few weeks I was thoroughly secularized by P.S.321—particularly by the Commodore Pet 2001 in the Annex, which promised to reveal more than could a lifetime of studying Talmud, and on which one could play Adventure. I was never without a used Ray Bradbury in my pocket and worried constantly about end of the world, by nukes or syzygy, acid rain or malaria-bearing mosquitos, an equal opportunity apocalyptic.

But going from a thoroughly Jewish education to Hebrew school once a week was too sudden a change, too precipitous a drop in my exposure to the Jewniverse, so late that June, my parents packed my bags and packed me off to Duchess County, where I would wait for the end of the world at Camp Habonim Naaleh, kippah-deep in good fellowship, kosher chicken and Israeli folkdance. Habonim, which in Hebrew means the builders, described itself as a Zionist camp; what they neglected to mention in the literature was that they were a Marxist-Zionist hippie enclave, heavy on the Marx. Whatever a Zionist summer camp experience to my parents, it probably didn’t involve packs of filthy prepubescents singing labor anthems while harvesting squash and tending to the goats, a scene less suggestive of sun and fun than of some Catskills auxiliary of the Khmer Rouge. I’m sure, as well, that my parents couldn’t have imagined the vast quantities of federally-subsidized cream of mushroom soup and American cheese that we would consume at lunch and dinner, swept through our systems by handfuls of government raisins.

I wasn’t crazy about Habonim, but then, camp wasn’t really my thing in general—and in many ways, this one was better than most. In the past, my sleepaway experiences had consisted of long stretches of boredom enlivened by regular bursts of athletic humiliation. But sports weren’t the thing at Habonim—they were interested in Class War, not Color War, and that suited me fine. The place had a brainy counterculture vibe to it, and there was always some interestingly bearded grownup around to discourse on Trotsky, Jesus, John Lennon or The Silmarillion. Also, I was learning to play backgammon.

And then there were the songs! The expected Zionist ones, of course, about doughty pioneers greening the desert, but also The Internationale, Union Maid, Solidarity Forever, Pie in the Sky, Joe Hill, and a Swahili song about the Great Bird of Peace that I know sounds like I’m making fun of hippies but really, we learned a Swahili song about the Great Bird of Peace. My parents would never have called themselves Marxists, but they were teachers and proud unionists, which meant that those labor anthems slipped into a niche in my brain as smoothly and surely as a well-aimed Tetris block. I was a convert—and I still am.

It was the songs that helped us see past the giant hole in the dining room wall, through which birds would enter to perch in the rafters and shit in the cream of mushroom soup.

Or when the nurse simply disappeared one day, never to return.

Or the crumbling cement swimming pool which was lit from above by giant spotlights so that, during the occasional night swim, we looked like Cuban refugees accosted by Coast Guard helicopters.

Or the night we were rounded up at three in the morning to watch a lunar eclipse and drink cups of scalding hot cocoa, tripping over roots and bumping into each other in the suddenly perfect darkness, launching our boiling drinks into the air like little volcanoes. In my imagination, the red of the moon as it moved out of shadow was precisely the same shade as the burns on our forearms the next morning.

But nothing could have prepared me for the terrible and wonderful events on the day that a shtetl materialized, Brigadoon-like, in the center of camp.

To be continued….