Growing Up in the Land of Promise

He didn’t have time to read Horatio Alger—he was too busy being a Jewish version of an Alger hero. In the Hebrew school he learned about the God of the Jews; in the public school he was aroused to the call of history; and in the streets he learned the American “hustle.” Then, at Harvard, the aggressive, ambitious young man, from the Jewish ghetto of Boston, studying under a newsboys’ scholarship, got his compass boxed and set out “in search of history.” As they say, “Only in America.”