Jewish. (Part 1.)

When I Was Fifteen

When I was fifteen, my friend Jimmy called my grandparents’ house, looking for me. I was staying with them for the weekend, having escaped briefly back to the city from the northern suburb my parents had removed us to a few months earlier. To be completely honest, I had been nursing delusions of moving back to stay with my grandparents until I finished High School - at my old school, with my friends, at home, in Brooklyn. So the behavior of my grandparents that weekend, and the depth of the disappointment caused by this behavior may have had something to do with how high my hopes had been that they might save me from my current predicament – lonely, lost, outnumbered, failing gym.

Jimmy called when I was still sleeping. It was Sunday, the Jewish Sabbath safely over, so he hadn’t completely ignored my instructions, but he had been supposed to let me call him. Jimmy was just-a-friend, but you would have thought, by my grandfather’s interrogation, that the poor boy had come by the night before, wielding a cross and a plate of pork chops, asking for permission to court me for marriage, thereby single-handedly destroying Jewish Culture as it existed in the United States in the late nineteen-eighties.

***

Ever since I could remember, there had been two sets of rules for being Jewish: one for our house and one for my grandparents’ house. My father’s parents were orthodox Jews. They belonged to an orthodox shul, sent their three children to yeshiva, and were only slightly relieved that my mother had turned out to be Jewish at all, resigning themselves to a war of subtle disapproval for her Reform Jewish family, insisting my parents keep a kosher home, or else they would never come visit. My mother’s own  parents’ tongue-in-cheek retort: if my parents did keep a kosher home, they would never come over. After a year of this, my mother called them all over with an announcement of her own, and they pretty much shut up. 6 months later, I was born. By the time my brother came along, my parents had a well-established and comfortable household that no grandparent would refuse to visit. We ended up with a lot of pots and pans, dishes and flatware; no one could say for certain whether they should be used for milk, or meat – so we used them for both, often at the same time. We used paper plates and ate no meat when kosher relatives came over.

The rules of our house concerning being Jewish went like this:

• Mezuzot¹ hung on every doorway to keep the bad spirits out. On Friday nights we lit Sabbath candles, said prayers over candles, wine, and bread, and ate delicious challah bread from the bakery. We got dressed up to go to Temple, to show respect to God, who cared about patent leather shoes. We had religious school on Sunday mornings and then got taken to McDonald’s for lunch, if we didn’t also have little league, in which case no, we were not allowed to wear our baseball uniforms to Sunday School² because God did not like little league baseball uniforms.

• Santa Claus did not exist, but we had to pretend NOT to possess this knowledge when playing with Kari across the street, because it wouldn’t be nice to disappoint her. When we played dead, we shouldn’t put our arms out straight to look like the cross hanging in the Santos’ house, next door, because that was a Christian thing to do, and we were not Christians.  

• On Rosh Ha Shana and Yom Kippur we ate dinner at home on the fancy dishes. My mother baked round challahs and we dipped apples in honey. We went to Temple in new shoes. On Passover we had huge Seders and then for eight days didn't eat leavened bread or anything with corn syrup in it.

• On Hanukkah we did not celebrate Christmas. Trees were not for Jews, no matter how pretty the tinsel or the balls wrapped tightly with satiny thread, no matter if Andrea’s mother called it a Hanukkah Bush. We lit candles on a menorah, sang blessings in Hebrew and got presents every night, but mainly these were small presents like coloring books or, yes, socks and underwear. There were a few years’ of Hanukkah parties at our house, with dreydls and songs and gambling for pennies and all of my cousins from both sides of the family, and chocolate gelt and fresh, hot, fried potato latkes with applesauce and my mother in an apron and my father and my uncle playing chess on the floor of the living room, and beautiful candles that we waited until the sun went down to light. But these parties ended abruptly after a year when, my mother exclaimed, the grandparents had turned it into a contest about who could spend more money on toys, which disgusted my mother, who muttered something about Hanukkah not being Christmas --- which we did not celebrate because we did not believe in Santa Claus even though there was not a lot of proof on either side of that debate. 

Obviously, our Jewish-ness existed alongside, or maybe within, our American-ness. We went to public school and were encouraged to do well. We had play dates and birthday parties with children from every culture and religion. My best friend was Puerto Rican-Italian-Catholic and we had much more in common than I did with my Orthodox Jewish first cousins who always wore long skirts and asked me if I was a boy, because I wore pants. I was in love with the Golden-haired Irish-Italian-Catholic boy in my class. My mother discouraged this, not because he would never love me, and not because, at eight years old, it was doubtful I had found the boy I was going to marry, but because we came from different backgrounds, she explained, and Jews married Jews.

The rules at my father’s parents' house were more complicated. Still, by the time I was five or six, I had absorbed them completely and was able to switch back and forth easily between the two worlds.

• My grandparents kept a kosher home. This meant that when we were with them, we did not eat non-kosher foods, nor did we discuss the fact that we went to McDonald’s at least once a week. Milk and meat could not be consumed together at the table, and certain meats could not be consumed at all. 

• From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and during Jewish holidays, the rules increased. Shabbos was the day of rest for everyone except for my grandmother. The rules had been interpreted for the modern age. Since there was a law against making your horses work³, there was a new law against driving a car, or traveling by any other means than your own two feet. We lived 11 avenues and 10 streets away from my grandparents’ house: they knew we drove over there. But on shabbos, we parked around the corner and walked up to their front steps because to do otherwise, my father explained, “would hurt their feelings.”

• Since there was a law against striking a match, there was a new law against using electricity to turn the lights on, light the stove, or use any other device that relied on this modern match-striking. This meant that my grandmother left one burner on her stove lit for the duration of the Sabbath so she could provide everyone with a hot meal on Saturday afternoon, and that she washed the dishes by hand, because of course, even the automatic dishwasher was entitled to a day of rest.

• We didn’t spend a lot of holidays at my grandparents’ house, but I remember my grandmother, as I was leaving her house to go home after an unusual visit, post-Temple. It was the first day of Rosh Ha Shana, and we had not had to go to regular school. She asked me if I wouldn’t rather go to a yeshiva, instead of the public school I attended. “Then you’d get two days off for Rosh Ha Shana,” she coaxed. The thought of leaving my friends horrified me. I smiled weakly and let her button up my sweater.

***

When I was fifteen, which was in 1988, my grandparents woke me up on a Sunday morning and told me that a young man had called. They said his name was James and I decoded this to mean my just-a-friend Jimmy, who I had planned to go to the movies with. “What is this young man’s last name?” my grandfather demanded. I told him and he recognized it at once as not-a-Jewish-last-name. I replied that I wasn’t sure what Jimmy was, but no, I didn’t think he was Jewish. My grandmother joined in. “As your grandparents, we feel it’s our duty to ask - you wouldn’t ever marry outside of the religion, now, would you?”

I considered my answer for a moment. Perhaps that was my mistake. Perhaps I should have just given the answer that they would have considered correct. But I’d already felt what it felt like to love a boy who wasn’t Jewish and I knew in my heart that if that feeling happened again and I had the chance to find happiness and contentment with someone who wasn’t Jewish, there was nothing, and no one - not my grandparents or my parents, not a Rabbi or Santa Claus - that was going to prevent me from being with that person. So I answered honestly. “I wouldn’t go out of my way to find someone to marry who was not Jewish, but yes, if I fell in love with someone who was not Jewish, I would have to consider marrying him.”

Maybe you’ve had occasion to witness, on someone else’s face, the particular shade of purple that occurred on my grandfather’s. If not, count yourself fortunate that you have never been in the presence of such unmitigated and focused anger and disapproval by someone (two people, for my grandmother stood beside her husband who stood beside himself) supposed to, by every law secular and religious, cultural and national, to love you no matter what, adore you unconditionally, with more chocolate syrup than was, strictly speaking, good for you and who was supposed to have imprinted as a goal in his very DNA your best interests and the most precious desires of your heart. 

When he could inhale enough oxygen to be able to form words, he told me, noting the date and the year, to make it an official decree, the words punctuated by his pounding upon the kitchen table, in approximate 4/4 time, and the slight unsticking sound made as he lifted his fist from the heavy plastic table-cover to pound out the next phrase : I tell you this here and now, as your grandfather, if you ever married a non-Jew you would never see me again. You would be dead to me and I would say the Kaddish for you as if you were dead. The last fist pounded on the word dead. My grandmother, torn between her aforementioned DNA and her long-suffering, married-to-a-bully mind pleaded with me: Don’t you see, it would be a shande – a scandal – a terrible shame if you were to do this. Try to understand and be reasonable.” I think I probably snorted. I imagine it would have been hard not to, given the extent to which I was holding back tears. I’m fifteen. I’m not getting married. I’m just going to the movies.
 

And I did go to the movies, with my just-a-friend Jimmy. I never voiced my earlier plan to move back to Brooklyn and live with my grandparents. I had spent my entire life stepping carefully around their rules, respecting their wish to keep up the appearance of being Jewish enough for them. They had betrayed my trust in them as family-no-matter-what and made it much easier for me to dismiss Judaism as a force of division, rather than one of family and community. Sometime after college, I stopped marking time with the Jewish holidays. It would be almost two decades since that Sunday morning in my grandparents' kitchen before I would hang a mezuzzah on the doorposts of my own home.

***

As it worked out, both of my father's parents passed away before I was ever in danger of getting married. The first-cousins who teased me for wearing pants as a child, I rarely if ever see. It took a long time to even have occasion to share with what remained of my father's side of the family the joyful news of meeting my match and falling in love and making a home together with him. I had kept my word: I did not go out of my way to find someone who wasn't Jewish. I simply went out of my way to find the right person and he happened to be Irish, raised Catholic, non-practicing. We moved in together in 2005 and shared our first Christmas tree that winter. We also shared our first eight nights of Hannukah. My then-fiance now-husband learned the Hebrew blessings from the English transliteration printed on the box of 44 candles, and was much more committed than I was to lighting the menorah every single night of the holiday. 

There's a lot more to this story of my being Jewish all by myself, and on top of that to my being Jewish and married to someone who is not. We had a wedding. Who officiated? Who attended? Did we serve shrimp at the cocktail hour? We have two children now - both boys. What kinds of rituals and milestones have we and will we celebrate? What do our children think about Santa Claus? I spent a year teaching at and a subsequent year directing a religious school. How did that happen? And how did that work out? But that's why this part is just Part 1. I hope to get back to writing the next part of this story as it unfolds, and as I make sense of it. But I don't think this story will ever really be finished until my own children can sit down and write a moderately sarcastic bullet list of what it meant to be Jewish, growing up in their family.


 Footnotes - (Really just my solution to what would other be embedded parentheticals; some with parentheticals of their own.)
 

1 A mezuzah is a small box containing prayers. You will find them nailed to the doorposts of many Jewish homes, as well as many Brooklyn apartment buildings where Jewish families used to reside.

2 On Saturday mornings we were allowed (even encouraged, so as not to wake up my parents) to get ourselves cereal and milk and eat on the floor in front of the television. Early in the morning there was a program called Davy and Goliath, a claymation boy and his faithful dog who talked about morality and bible stories. Recognizing many of the characters and lessons mentioned in the Old Testament, and hearing Davy talk about going to Sunday School, I was temporarily convinced that being Jewish and being Christian were really the same thing, and that the adults in my life had simply not discovered this yet.

3 This may be a child’s muddled interpretation of the rule. The combustion engine might just go against the match-striking rule.