When I was a young teenager in the late 1970s, my father forbade me to read "Marjorie Morningstar," Herman Wouk's 1955 novel chronicling the eponymous Marjorie's coming of age in the 1930s. Marjorie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked their way out of the Bronx and to Manhattan's Upper West Side, is introduced as a willful, beautiful teenager with a bevy of admirers. In her new social circle she graduated from dating City College boys and moved up to keeping company with young Columbia University men; she left the boy whose father owned a garage in the Bronx for one who was a department store heir.
I furtively read my liberal grandmother's Reader's Digest condensed edition, not quite understanding what my father found so objectionable about the book. In fact, his objection made me all the more determined to get through the 500-plus pages. I suspect that my father thought I was too young to read about Marjorie's love life, which included numerous "necking" sessions with various boys and ultimately an affair with Noel Airman, an assimilated Jew 10 years her senior.
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