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Remembering Julian Mazor, the Writer Who Changed My Life

When I was 14 and was suspended from school, my father gave me a book that changed my life. Washington and Baltimore is a collection of short stories by Julian Mazor (1929-2018). Mazor wrote several short stories that appeared in The New Yorker in the 1960s. Washington and Baltimore, a collection of those stories, was published by Knopf in 1968.

I’ve been thinking of Mazor a lot recently, and am taking a trip this week to the MLK Library in D.C. this week to find the 1989 story I wrote about him. I’m working on a new project about how American Jews have enriched modern American culture—from Mad magazine to Philip Glass, Annie Leibovitz to punk rock to Steven Spielberg. It’s not a memoir but there will be, as a minor part of the whole, reflections on the Jewish people who shaped my life. Mazor was one of those people.

In 1976 I was an ADHD kid in a Catholic school in Maryland, a combination that often landed me in trouble. I mooned a female classmate—people claimed a nun also caught a piece of the action but I’m not sure—and was suspended for a couple of days. I remember the depressing silence in our house in Maryland, my parents wondering what to do. I’d been to a specialist at Georgetown University who gave me tests and declared me “highly intelligent.” Yet I couldn’t pay attention in class and was getting into trouble.

I was moping in my room when my dad came in and handed me a book: Washington and Baltimore: Stories by Julian Mazor. Specifically, dad asked me to read a story called “The Boy Who Used Foul Language.” It told the story of John Lionel, 12-year-old at home recovering from a bout with pneumonia. John was expelled from school, but then allowed to return to try to encourage him through his medical recovery. John isn’t really a bad boy, but only Bessie, the black maid, understands him; in fact, he got expelled for defending Bessie against a school bully who was using racial slurs. John sincerely wants to become a better person. He has a good heart.

“The Boy Who Used Foul Language” embedded itself into my psyche—John Lionel, my father seemed to say, was me. I did manage to stay in school, go to high school, and graduate college. In 1989 I was a young journalist writing for different  places, including Washington’s City Paper, a great weekly that covered the city and also offered long form literary writing. One day I had an idea: I’d do a story about Julian Mazor. No one had heard from him in years. He’d apparently stopped writing.

There was one problem. Mazor, while still living in D.C., didn’t want to talk to the media. After some sleuthing I tracked him down, but he rebuffed me on my first two phone calls. The third time worked. Mazor agreed to meet me at an Italian restaurant in Cleveland Park. I was thrilled; to me this was like meeting Eddie Van Halen. I fortified myself with a couple pints of Guinness in the nearby Irish pub before meeting the great writer.

Mazor was handsome, soft-spoken, friendly and polite. I told him what his stories meant to me, and also how much I loved the understated way he wrote about people, places, love and life. “It is a pleasure to watch Julian Mazor at his work,” Geoffrey Wolff wrote in The Washington Post. “His style is so transparent that you are unconscious he has one; his words simply go about their business, without fuss or waste or ambiguity… His stories are honest, and his accomplishment impressive.” Kirkus Reviews: “Mazor, possessed of a classic light touch, is the sort of assured and lucid storyteller readers trust immediately as they sense his acuity and affection for humanity, gravitas and humorous inclination.” The New York Times: “He can write; his prose says simply that he cares about people, places, things.”

Mazor revealed to me that night that he was friends with another New Yorker writer, J.D. Salinger. Mazor called him “Jerry,” and asked me to leave it out of the story. I did, even though The Catcher in the Rye was, like Washington and Baltimore, a formative literary experience in my young life.

Mazor was born in Baltimore in 1929. He moved to DC in 1934, where he went to Alice Deal grade school and John Eaton middle school. He graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1947, attended Indiana University and then Yale law school (class of ‘54). Mazor spent two years as a legal officer in the Air Force, serving at Perrin Air Base in Sherman, Texas. In 1958 Mazor moved to New York to pursue writing. He sold his first two stories to The New Yorker in 1962, married, and had two sons. While gathering my facts for the City Paper story I interviewed William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker. Mazor, Shawn told me, ”had a voice like one else at the time.”

After my story, “Looking for Mr. Mazor,” was published in City Paper in 1989, I introduced my father to Mazor. We decided to meet at the same restaurant where Mazor and I had conducted the first interview. Although Mazor was Jewish and my father and I Catholic, Washington’s a small city and the two men knew many of the same people. After some drinks and dinner, we settled into a comfortable conversation. My father’s job at National Geographic had taken him all over the world. Was there any place, I asked him, he had never been—or would never go.

Dad suddenly got serious. “Germany,” he said. He and Julian Mazor were born a year apart. World War II and the Holocaust were still fresh in their memory. I asked my father why Germany. “Because they were the enemy.” There was a brief moment of silence as Mazor quietly nodded and gave my father a respectful look. The two men were friends after that.

I stayed in touch with Mazor over the years, although the contacts became less frequent. Another Mazor collection of short stories, Friend of Mankind, was published in 2004. It contains another story about the young John Lionel. “In the title story in a collection that focuses on obsessive males of various ages trapped in quandaries of their own making,” observed Donna Seaman of Booklist, “12-year-old John Lionel keeps getting in trouble, prompting the exasperated principal to ask, ‘What sort of person would you rather be? Some barbarian at the gates or a friend of mankind?’ This query underlies each of Mazor’s perceptive and voluptuously descriptive inquiries into love and valor.”

Mazor attended my father’s funeral in 1996. I went to Mazor’s in 2018, and had a nice conversation with his son.

I never forgot that night at the restaurant, especially the conversation about Germany and the Holocaust. Like “The Boy Who Used Foul Language,” it would shape my consciousness. To answer the question asked of John Lionel, I’d rather be a friend of mankind than a barbarian.

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