Spielberg Denies the Name Shmuel, Explained

What happens

In an interview, someone traces belief back past a retracted word, "not even spiritual," to religious roots: an Orthodox upbringing, Hebrew school, and a grandmother who taught English to Holocaust survivors. The family lived where there were no Jews. Outside, kids chanted an insult. In the front yard, a grandfather yelled "Shmuel!" and the boy denied the name while friends laughed.

What's really going on

Asked about God, the answer reaches for "my spiritual," then cancels it with "not even spiritual" and lands on "my religious roots and family." Home is Orthodox, with Hebrew school and bar mitzvahs, yet "we always lived in neighborhoods where there were no Jews," and a "real cultural divide" is said twice. Kids outside chant a slur at the family. "All I wanted to do was fit in" is answered at once by "there was no way I could fit into anything." The yard makes the impossibility visible: a grandfather yells "Shmuel!" from the porch, friends laugh, and the line comes back, "No, he must be calling somebody else." Against that stands the "Father Knows Best" household, called an assimilated family, the one he yearned for. He "began to deny everything that I had accepted as a child" if it would "make me a pariah," and the shame, he says, is still with him.

Key lines & what they mean

“And the red light was the Eternal Light, the Ner Tamid, and that's my very first memory.”

The earliest memory he can place is a red lamp in a synagogue, the lamp that stays lit, with old men chanting beneath it.

“All I wanted to do was fit in.”

Belonging is the whole wish. In a neighborhood without other Jews, he does not ask to be understood; he only wants to pass.

“And by being Jewish, there was no way I could fit into anything.”

The wish to fit in dies in the same breath. Jewishness, as he remembers it, blocked every group he might have entered.

“And I immediately denied that that was me.”

When friends connect the shouted name Shmuel to him, he refuses it at once rather than let the yard hear that the name is his.

“I still feel ashamed of myself even remembering that long stretch of my life where I didn't want to be Jewish anymore.”

The shame is not confined to the yard. Looking back at a long period of refusing to be Jewish, he says the disgrace is still present.

Theme

• Identity — Denying the shouted name Shmuel, and later denying what he accepted as a child, so it will not make him a pariah.
• Guilt — He says he was ashamed, and is still ashamed, remembering the long stretch when he did not want to be Jewish.