Bernie Rose, Interviews with Jews in Utah, Accn 998

Page 110

Rose (1/25/83 ) page 38 rl-r. K Mr. !1 }~r. K ~r. R iV:r. K ~r. R Mr. K Mr. !1 Mr. K ordinary convention of being Jewish than many Jewish kids. t!¢ Mary and I are going to a cousin's in Washington D.C. who's never been barmitzvahed, not he or his brother. Let me ask you this question. Non of these are easy questions. Do you at all regret the mixed marriages in the · past? I regret only one thing and that's that I never saw a son of mine barmitzvahed. That's the only thing I regret in terms of what eve the past was, but I don't spend my life dwelling on the mistakes of yesterday, if they were mistakes. Let me ask the other side. Do you feel you gained somet~ing throu that thatt you wouldn't have in another way? No. I don't weigh, at least I'm not aware that I ever have. For me to say that, about something I don't know about, for example ••• for me to say "gee, this only weighs so many pounds, and I gave up so many more pounds". You know the book 'Portnoy's Complaint'? Yes, I read the first 50 pages of it. Well, one of the things that ~ook talks about is the fact that in Jewish households in emphasizing Jewishness and exclusivity it makes the non-Jewish women sometimes look sexier, you know, they are more risque. You know, it's more like the forbidden fruit, yo might almost say. It was the other way around. The ones you weren't allowed to touc were the Jewish girls. Right, but they were the ones you had to marry. The other ones couldn't marry because they were ¢~ somehow soiled or forbidden more animalistic or however the other feels •• they were the other.