One warm spring evening, Sue and I went out to a small amusement park in a Buffalo suburb, the Glen Park Casino. I was in thrall to rock and roll, and we wanted to see a new duo called the Everly Brothers. They had rocketed to the top of the charts with “Bye Bye Love.” We arrived early, in time to see two teenagers dressed in tightly fitted black pants, black shirts with white buttons loosely covering thin bodies, rehearsing at the front of the small stage. Recognizing the brothers immediately, I invited them to join us later for a drink. Sue was a bit taken aback when they accepted.
After the show, they came over to our table and sat down awkwardly. Phil, sitting to our left, his right leg jutting out, was more intense than his brother Don, who seemed happy to have Phil lead their side of the conversation. We talked about Elvis, James Dean (I thought Phil resembled him), and rock and roll. I was ecstatic; Sue, with her preference for 1940s rhythms, perhaps less so. Still, it was a memorable evening for two young Buffalonians.
The crowning moment of my growing up in Buffalo, the one etched most clearly in my memory, was my high-school graduation. When the musical introduction, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” concluded, the audience buzzed with anticipation. I stood just outside the auditorium, nervous, my black graduation gown almost touching the floor, my mortarboard tilted slightly. My seventeen years of life seemed to culminate in that one instant. As their president, I entered the auditorium at the head of my classmates. After a few steps, I stopped. The eyes of the audience were on me. I waited, looked around the room, and smiled, catching my mother’s eye. I sensed her enormous pride and knew at that moment that I had it all.
The entry for Sanford D. Greenberg in the 1958 yearbook of Bennett High School, Buffalo, New York:
President of the senior class; president of the student council; president of the Buffalo Inter-High School Student Council; representative of the Empire Boy’s State; associate editor of the school yearbook; chief consul of the senior class; member of the Bennett High School Hall of Fame; member of the Legion of Honor, Key Club, French Honorary Society, cross-country team, and track team. Prom king.
My past seven years had been filled with sunlight, love, friendships, vibrancy, and (to my mind) enormous accomplishments. Those years seemed to have driven away the anxieties of the preceding years of want. I was about to enter Columbia University, and, after that, even more exciting possibilities would without a doubt open for me.
Before I left home for my freshman year at college, Sue and I agreed that to prove the strength of our relationship we should see other people, at least while I was away in the city and she was at college in Buffalo. This was supposedly to allow us to see whether our love would stand the test of time. As it would turn out, our love had to stand a much rougher test than the passage of time and a distance of four hundred miles.
4
The Seduction of the Mind
After a summer of anticipation, I found myself at last on an airplane headed to New York City to begin my college years. Late in the evening that same day, holding my one suitcase (it was green), I arrived at Broadway and 116th Street to stand before the massive iron gates leading to Columbia University’s main pedestrian artery, College Walk. The gates were open inward, as if in welcome, the walkway framed by two magnificent libraries. I understood that this was one of the great moments of my life. I had made it through enough of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to recall, “Now, just as the Gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them, and behold the City shone like the sun; and the streets also were paved with gold.”
In a golden haze, I entered.
I had planned to enroll in a joint program administered by Columbia and the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary, the leading seminary for Conservative Judaism. But my desire to study my religion and its traditions was not to last, or maybe it’s just that Columbia’s secular intellectual climate quickly swallowed me in a way that I could never have anticipated.
How exciting it was to be studying with a faculty boasting such intellectual giants of the day as American historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, Olympian polymaths Jacques Barzun (The House of Intellect) and Peter Gay (The Enlightenment), historian of the New Deal William Leuchtenburg, sociologist Daniel Bell (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and The End of Ideology), literary critic Lionel Trilling (The Liberal Imagination), social philosopher Charles Frankel, classicist Moses Hadas, and art historian Meyer Schapiro, among other academic superstars. At seventeen, I knew a few of these names but could hardly imagine how godlike they were in their sphere and how I would soon come to worship them.
Each morning I walked from my dormitory, New Hall, through a cozy quadrangle. At its far side a large bronze of Alexander Hamilton guarded a building that became the center of my intellectual life—old Hamilton Hall. Its several stories of undistinguished architecture loomed above the quad. The building’s stodgy aspect aside, it had welcomed generations of students to its classrooms, and besides, as an American history major, I was fascinated by Alexander Hamilton himself. History professor James Shenton, my faculty adviser, assigned us readings by and about Hamilton and frequently spoke at length on the great national founder, who had been a Columbia student in the mid-1770s, when the institution was known as King’s College. Now, almost two centuries after Hamilton’s day, I often stood before his statue in simple awe.
In the tradition of the biblical Jewish people who were “strangers in a strange land,” Hamilton had arrived from the West Indies in his adopted state of New York in
