TLS signed “Jerry,” one page both sides, 8.5 x 11, postmarked December 29, 1971. Insightful letter to Eileen Paddison, a close friend and aspiring writer who maintained a correspondence with Salinger for over 15 years. Salinger’s response relates to an experience had by Paddison with her grandmother, who, ostensibly, made an anti-Semitic remark. Salinger commiserates with Paddison before pulling from his own childhood memories and how he would be left “dodging or mumbling” when asked about his religion.
Born to a Jewish father and a gentile mother, Salinger expounds on the difficulty of being a ‘halfer’ as a young person. He writes of his mother’s English-German heritage, dismisses the exaggerated value of ethnic descent—“God, what crap it all is”—and recalls a particular phone conversation with an uncle, one of the “Jew haters” on his mother’s “exquisitely Christian side.” In spite of this, Salinger explains how this stunted mentality did not drive him away from his family, but rather taught him to be “grateful to the whole motley bunch…Certain kinds of fiction writers simply do not get born in secure and untroubled families.” He advises Paddison to react similarly to her grandmother, positing that “People who hate (or fear) Jews or any other ‘minority’ group” are well beyond changing, and that prejudice is akin to a “jigsaw puzzle of some several thousand separate pieces.” In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
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