A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (2 page)

While my father’s family, which I would not get to know until I was an adult, stayed Jewish, my mother’s family intermarried with Christians and converted over the generations. Her sister Charlotte married a Baptist man in the late 1930s, and she became a devout member of the Green Acres Baptist Church of Tyler, Texas, east of Dallas. Intermarriage made practical sense for Jewish families isolated in small communities and surrounded by evangelical Christians, who enjoyed nothing so much as sharing their hellfire-and-damnation vision with members of the Tribe of Abraham. Why, they got heavenly brownie points for converting us! I imagine it took a sturdy, ornery devotion to Judaism to withstand the social pressure to fit in.

My mother, Shirley, had a sturdy and ornery side. Shards of her Jewishness are lodged in my earliest memories. While my mother had no outward interest in any faith, she had bucked the family trend toward intermarriage and then provided, for reasons I cannot fathom, some aspects of a Jewish home after my parents split up. I had not even turned three. I like to think that a spark of the
neshama
(the Hebrew word for “soul”), of Rabbi Schwarz of Hempstead remained in her, which she unconsciously passed along. Once we went to Temple Emanuel in McAllen, although my brother Cooper and I didn’t like it. Mom taught us the essential Jewish prayer, the
Sh’ma
. We had a menorah in the house and two books: the
Union Prayer Book
and
The Wit and Wisdom of the Talmud
, printed in the 1920s. Mom kept a bottle of Manischewitz concord grape wine in the refrigerator, forever skewing my taste toward nauseatingly sweet kosher wines. I remember Mom sobbing when she watched
Judgment at Nuremberg
on TV. She saved her
ketubah,
or Jewish wedding contract. But we never had a Shabbat dinner, a
seder
(festive meal at home for the observance of Passover), or Hanukkah celebrations. An unexplained rift with the Jewish community in McAllen cut off almost all contact with other Jews in the area. A Jewish man owned Joe’s Army Store across the railroad tracks on South Conway Avenue, but Mom refused to speak to him, perhaps because of disagreements over how she should be raising us. Two sisters who lived in McAllen—Fanny and Lena—always gave us gingerbread cookies for Hanukkah. That’s the extent of my memories of the Jewish community. Rather than a faith, Judaism and the Jewish community evolved into a vague, ominous presence identified with my father and murky forces that made Mom unhappy.

Isolated and indifferent to Jewish practice, my mother left religious instruction to our Southern Baptist neighbor, Mrs. D. Her unwavering faith reflected the Baptists’ enthusiastic love of and exasperated impatience with “the Jewish people” to make our family a natural target for intensive spiritual cultivation. Every Sunday, Cooper and I were delivered to the First Baptist for Sunday School, and in the summer we attended Vacation Bible School. My favorite VBS memory: making a shoeshine box with wood that I lovingly sanded and varnished. At Sunday School in the fall and winter, my class devoted as much time to scoping the day’s Dallas Cowboys game as to the teachings of the Good Book. Coach Tom Landry, after all, was a Mission native, and his father Ray had been the fire chief and still operated Landry’s Garage. Still, enough of the Gospel message seeped into my open mind to have an impact. No Jewish influence existed to provide an alternative viewpoint or to buck up any contrary awareness. My father never visited, and his parents—retired since the late 1940s to Coral Gables and Miami Beach—ignored us.

For male role models, I had the pastors of the First Baptist. I remember them as decent, caring, even learned men who went easier on the hellfire than the traveling evangelists who held spirit-flaying crusades in the Rio Grande Valley. Brother Dugger, Brother Glenn and Brother Buddy—good guys all of them, visiting the sick and listening to the troubled. I especially like to remember Brother Glenn McCollum, father of an elementary school classmate and an avid collector of barbed wire. I guess that’s a Texas thing. Their offices at the FBC, bookshelves loaded with Greek and Hebrew texts, fascinated me. I wonder what might have happened had I had followed up on my lingering glances at those language texts and asked to learn some Hebrew. As a bona fide member of the Chosen People, I had the right to know—and it would serve a practical purpose, strengthening my ability to discuss the irrefutable proofs of Christianity with Jewish relatives. As it was, the only Hebrew I knew came from reading a Harry Kemelman mystery novel, which featured a character named Rabbi David Small. The book said that the Hebrew letters for “kosher” looked a little like “7WD” in English, so I could always identify that word.

My search for identity in an overwhelming non-Jewish world flowed toward Christian belief. I struggled under a triple sense of isolation: I was Jewish, a gringo and the offspring of divorced parents. I would grasp at anything that offered a mainstream identity. Looking back, I can see how I craved group membership, something beyond the negatives I associated with my childhood reality. Christianity offered a way out of the gnawing aloneness, even as it caused its own anxieties. From a young age, the hellfire messages of Baptist preachers terrified me into unease, guilt and finally acquiescence. To relieve the gnawing fear of damnation, I accepted Jesus and was duly baptized on Super Bowl Sunday, 1972. That’s also the day the beloved Dallas Cowboys—coached by Mission’s own hometown Christian gentleman, Tom Landry—beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3. Thank you, Lord! I became annoyingly devout, desperate for direction and acceptance in life.

And yet ... we remained the town Jews. My mother’s family moved from Del Rio to Mission in 1925, only seventeen years after the town was founded; everybody knew who and what we were. Mrs. D called Cooper and me her “Jew-els.” When golf-obsessed Cooper wanted to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, the adult sponsor exclaimed, “Why, Cooper, you can’t join the FCA. You’re a Jew!” In one surreal episode, my high school class trouped to a movie theater on the south side of town for a free showing of
Fiddler on the Roof.
Finally, a sense of connection! My mother donated to Israel relief efforts after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Meanwhile, a kernel of curiosity about our heritage sprouted in me. I listened to a San Antonio radio show, “The Christian-Jew Hour,” that crackled 250 miles over the AM airwaves to reach Mission. I read literature from the so-called “Messianic Jews” to try to square the circle of irreconcilable belief systems. A Texas evangelist and Jewish convert, Irwin “Rocky” Freeman, held a crusade at the First Baptist and made a point of visiting our home. In retrospect, I can see I wanted to have my kugel and eat it, too.

The circle would be broken when Cooper and I finally visited our long-absent father in Manhattan for a week in 1972. A self-employed engineer and inventor, he attacked my religious beliefs and most aspects of our small-town Texas upbringing, which he loathed. The revulsion for all things Texas was part of his strong negative feelings toward our mother, which, of course, pushed us away from him every time he opened his mouth. What teenager wants to hear a stranger attack the mother he loves? As a strategy for rebuilding any kind of father-son relationship, it completely failed. Still, in his ham-handed way, Dad showed me I didn’t
have
to be a Baptist. He pried a few fingers from my death grip on the King James Bible. Doubts like weeds cracked the concrete of my faith as adolescence caused its own changes and doubts in life, as I became a mesquite-country version of Alexander Portnoy, with my own complaints. Bit by bit, I became disenchanted with the Christianity imposed on me. I slowly began to wonder about my Jewish heritage, how I could acknowledge it within rigid Baptist beliefs. I wrote a poem called “Jew-Boy” about my dilemma:

I found myself on a swaying spiritual tightrope. I was creeping away from Christianity and the First Baptist but couldn’t see how to move closer to Judaism. I had no Jewish friends and no Jewishly involved relatives nearby. I did get packages of articles and brochures on Judaism from my eccentric Aunt Pearl in Los Angeles, an opera-loving health food fanatic and sister of my grandfather in Miami Beach. My journal from the era records the defining moments on the tightrope, as I worked up the chutzpah required for a sixteen-year-old to go talk to a rabbi alone. On September 7, 1974—shortly after Cooper and I spent several weeks with our father in New York and also in Miami Beach, where we met our grandparents Edwin and Rhea for the first and only time since we were infants—I wrote:

Soon, I tested my emerging identity on a high school classmate, the late Lena Guerrero, who as an adult become a rising star in national politics and the Texas Railroad Commissioner, until her misstatements about her college transcript wrecked her public-sector career in 1992. Anytime we interacted was a big deal for me, and I recorded this conversation with Lena:

On September 14, 1974, my mother drove me to McAllen’s Temple Emanuel, where I met Rabbi Maynard. I spoke generally about my background, my late grandparents who had lived in Mission for over thirty years, but I could never admit that I had accepted Christianity. Raw, scabrous guilt over colliding faiths silenced me. I felt like a fraud among the Jews and a backslider among the Baptists, with nobody to consult about my doubts. Instead, I bore a self-applied mark of Cain. I swallowed my emotions and presented a wildly distorted history. I wrote:

But the drive toward a new path propelled me onward. On September 17, I wrote,