See-more Glasses and passing as Jewish

I was in my study reading a commentary on the Book of Job when the name Seymour Glass (a J. D. Salinger character) suddenly popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t trace its origin in my train of thought. I got to thinking about the name and connected it with Gotthard Glas, the birth name of Uziel Gal, inventor of the Uzi submachine gun, which made me wonder if Seymour Glass was Jewish. (Yes, I could remember the birth name of an Israeli firearm designer but not the ethnicity of a major literary character. Such are the vicissitudes of memory!) Looking that up led me to an article called “How Jewish was J. D. Salinger?” It begins thus:

In 2018, I wrote a book about the Jewish-American writers — Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the others who powered the golden age of Jewish writers in post-war America. I thought of including Jerome David Salinger, known to the world as J.D. Salinger, but I quickly realized his Jewishness was a complicated saga.

Was Salinger Jewish? There is no simple answer. His Jewish roots certainly ran deep on his father’s side. His paternal grandfather was a Lithuanian immigrant who served as a rabbi in Louisville, Kentucky, before becoming a doctor. His father, Sol, belonged to Temple Emanu-El, the prominent reform synagogue in New York, where he worshipped on the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

But Salinger’s mother came from entirely different stock. Born in Iowa to the Jillich family, who were Catholics of Scotch/Irish descent, she was christened Marie. When she married Sol, she changed her first name to the more Jewish-sounding Miriam (Moses’ sister). As Miriam Salinger, she “passed” as Jewish — no small irony in 1920s America. Jerry Salinger didn’t find out his mother wasn’t the Jew she pretended to be until just past his bar mitzvah.

A recent post about black falcons unexpectedly digressed into the story of the Philip Roth character Coleman Silk, a mulatto who decides to hide his Black background and pass as Jewish. So running into Roth’s name and then a reference to a gentile passing as a Jew was a bit of a sync.

The Emanu-El reference was a sync, too. In a comment on my recent post “A Proverb,” Kevin makes a pun on “I can’t” and I. Kant, the philosopher. This led me to look into that name, and I discovered that Kant had actually been baptized Emanuel, changing the spelling to Immanuel only after learning Hebrew. This gentile changing his name to make it more Jewish syncs with the case of Marie/Miriam Salinger. (Although apparently Emanuel is a perfectly Jewish spelling as well, if it’s the name of a synagogue!)

In the end, I did find out how Seymour Glass got into my head. I must have glanced at this bag my wife put in the study:

It’s from a shop called Seemore which sells eyeglasses — so a pretty clear link to Seymour Glass. The name on the bag must have influenced my train of thought without it consciously registering.

Of course, the significance of “see-more glasses” will not be lost on my Mormon readers.