A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (3 page)

I stopped going to church but lacked the strength to start going to temple, although the leader of the youth group called me once, a thoughtful gesture. By 1975 my identity and belief as a Southern Baptist vanished. The Baptist faith simply didn’t work for me, and I was no longer going to pretend it did. Lacking any support or guidance, I started down a wandering path of personal reinvention. My Jewish self-education started as I read books like
This is My God
by Herman Wouk,
Exodus
by Leon Uris and
Basic Judaism
by Milton Steinberg. I liked what I read about Judaism—the faith’s simplicity and self-acceptance versus the devouring anxiety I felt as a Christian, where I always wondered if I measured up to perfection, whether I
truly
believed.

Trust me on this: Jewish guilt is nothing compared to the fears of a doubting evangelical. The last time I ever attended the First Baptist was as a high school senior in 1976—to get a graduation Bible. They wanted to give me one, and simple civility led me to accept it.

I didn’t realize then that friends also had questions and crises of faith over the decades. They made profound changes that broke from family traditions: Catholic to Mormon, Christian Scientist to Catholic, Catholic to Unitarian …. Even the Protestants—Baptists and Methodists—switched around to find their right church homes. As far as I know, I was the only one jotting notes on the journey.

I made other life-changing decisions at the same time. I worked as a paid reporter for Mission’s weekly newspaper, the
Upper Valley Progress,
bumbled through dating disasters with love interest Venus (discussed in the chapter “Baptist Chick in a Halter Top”) and applied for colleges. College searches in the 1970s were more haphazard than today. I had always assumed I would attend the University of Texas at Austin, where everybody in my family went. Visions of writing for the
Daily Texan
danced in my head. So I applied there. On a whim I applied for a full scholarship from the University of Dallas, a Catholic school where I fancied majoring in classics, going so far as to teach myself the ancient Greek alphabet. I won one of the scholarships without even visiting the campus. Based on campus visits from the fateful summer of 1975 spent in New York with my father and his wife, I applied and won admission to Princeton and Columbia Universities. My twelve-page Princeton application essay had this gem of teenage ennui: “My little town, as Simon and Garfunkel dub it, of north side, railroad tracks, south side barrio, Anglo Protestants, Chicano Catholics, limited dating opportunities and bland educational facilities denoted a self-contained environment that bored me.” Limited dating opportunities? They must have chuckled over that at the Admissions Office. But the essay helped get me in. I still remember when Mom brought the thick congratulatory envelope home from her office at Conway, Dooley & Martin Insurance Agency, where she was a secretary.

The Bicentennial summer of 1976 graced me with bittersweet memories of the twilight of my life in the Rio Grande Valley. My reporter gig with the
Progress
occupied me with writing and photography. I was dating another new graduate, a girl from McAllen High School (AKA McHi) whom I had met when in literary competitions. We enjoyed and suffered through a summer of the pure, nervous thrill of first-love explorations. That included listening to jazz albums (for teen intellectuals, a sure symptom of existentialist torment), hanging out at a festival in McAllen’s Archer Park on the Fourth of July 1976, and watching the Summer Olympics, dominated by Sugar Ray Leonard and the invincible U.S. boxing team. As the summer spun on, the relationship faltered; I was heading east and she was staying in Texas for college. Plus, we both felt the religious gap between us, for I was upfront about my Judaism and she was a Methodist.

“
Would you ever marry someone who wasn’t Jewish?” she asked.

“
No,” I said.

In August I cut off my summer beard, grabbed a manual typewriter, donned my best leisure suit and shipped out to the mystery of college in the East. Princeton University was the first place I met Jews outside my family. I checked out Hillel activities during Freshman Week and signed up for Hillel classes. But while I had left the Baptists, they hadn’t left me. My heritage dogged me, along with my utter lack of familiarity with Jewish practice and culture (watching
Annie Hall
and understanding the jokes doesn’t count). I had never attended Hebrew school, never lit Hanukkah candles, never had a Shabbat dinner, never attended a Passover seder, never swung a Purim
grogger
(noisemaker). The Jews at Princeton seemed so East Coast smart and at ease, even jaded, in their faith. I felt shame at my ignorance. Book learning could not replace the experiential void. I yearned to know and be accepted, but I had no way of doing that. Like the simple son at the Passover seder, I did not know to ask. I thought about unburdening myself to the Hillel rabbi but he intimidated me. In fact, I saw all Jewish authority figures as echoes of my father, who would mock rather than understand me. Christianity remained my cross to bear. While my former beliefs held no appeal, I could not find a niche in Princeton’s Jewish life. The few times I tried to attend services I felt completely befuddled and was sure I was the only one lacking total fluency with the prayers and Hebrew language.

My work as a reporter on
The Daily Princetonian
did bring me into contact with Jewish themes. My very first lead story as a freshman, from 1977, covered a speech by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

There had been one major shift in my orientation: from the moment I reached campus I irresistibly gravitated toward Jewish women. Even before classes started, I had a schoolboy crush on one I met on my Outdoor Action camping trip. Meeting Jewish women for the first time ever, I totally wanted to know them. However, in those early days of co-education at Princeton, the male-female ratio tilted horrendously four to one, so the odds were against my success with the opposite sex. My dismal relationship outlook was compounded by my social awkwardness and grievous sense of inadequacy. I still recall my very first class, Spanish 101 at 185 Nassau Street. The class composition: fifteen men and one (Jewish) woman.

I remember other classes, such as a Russian literature precept, for the learning experience and my hormonal attraction to the sultry Semitic instructors. I pined for one busty fellow student in particular. I finally got up the courage to tell her, as we walked through the vast lobby of Firestone Library, “I really like you.”

“
Oh, I like you too, Van, as a friend,” she replied as I crumbled like stale matzoh into the polished floors of knowledge. (There is, I’m pleased to report, some justice in the world. This woman and I dated a bit after we graduated, and we still meet for lunch every couple of years.)

I was already writing about my dismal social life. From an early age, any adventure or mishap became fodder for a literary effort. In the summer of 1979 I was an intern feature writer for
Newsday,
the major Long Island newspaper. I longed for social connection that I lacked at Princeton during that summer of long lines at gas stations. My hapless search was detailed in the essay, “Fear and Loathing on the Long Island Singles Scene,” in the September 12, 1979 issue of
The Daily Princetonian,
included as chapter 2.

Back on campus, Jewish holidays passed in silence. Nobody invited me home for seders. Had I been more involved in Hillel, willing to say those three hard little words —“I need help”—then maybe I would have been welcome somewhere. I never asked, and nobody bothered to read my mind. That changed in my senior year when classmates Marc and Steve invited me to join their families in Brooklyn and the Bronx for Passover. These friends helped me take my first steps into Jewish life. Marc and Steve both did great
mitzvahs
(worthy deeds) and I will always be grateful to them and their parents for welcoming a stranger into their midst.

The pace of Jewish exploration quickened when I moved to Brooklyn a week after graduating from Princeton. I had parlayed extensive but lightweight journalism experience and my economics degree into a job as a reporter-researcher at
Forbes
magazine. On the social-Judaic front, I was astounded by New York’s density of Jewish institutions and Jewish women. While other college graduates hit the bars and discos, synagogue-hopping became my weekend obsession, as I sought to expand my Jewish experiences. I sampled everything from Reform temples to the Flatbush Minyan and for a while I attended the beginners’ services at the orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue. Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, who led the services, was so impressive that I continue to follow his work at the National Jewish Outreach Program. At the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, part of the Reconstructionist movement, I wore a
tallis,
or prayer shawl, for the first time.

On the cultural side, I attended a presentation at New York University by Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, who graciously autographed my copy of his book
The Family Moskat.
Expressing my strong desire for group identity, I attended rallies in New York and Washington to support the cause of Soviet Jewry and I still have a massive dry-mounted poster from a 1983 rally. On a hot August Sunday, I joined a Jewish singles group’s outing to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, where we saw that hilarious new movie,
Airplane.
Years later, a woman from the trip would identify me at a synagogue based on my Texas background and unusual name—those details did make me stand out.

My explorations were not aimless; I had chosen my path and never doubted my direction for a minute. The future wasn’t the problem, rather, the unresolved past was gnawing at me. I could never talk about that past. I arrived at services eager and anxious, and seemingly from nowhere.

My Judaism and my Texas roots sometimes intersected. I began dating a prototypical “older woman” I met at Congregation Emunath Israel on West 23
^rd
Street in 1981. I can still remember the event—a discussion by The Generation After, a group of children and descendants of Holocaust survivors. In a big romantic gesture for this woman, I placed a small ad in the
Jewish World
newspaper, where I was freelancing, in April 1981 (SA refers to San Antonio, where she had lived once):