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Authors: Jennifer Traig

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The idyll was over. My parents had dodged disapproval and back
talk by eloping, but after returning to the United States, they
were fair game. They visited my father’s family first. My
grandmother was matter-of-fact and determined to make the best of
it. She’d never gotten along with her mother-in-law, she told my
mother, and had no intention of putting anyone through that hell
herself. My grandfather said nothing at all. Though he eventually
became very fond and protective of my mother, he would not address
her directly for the first three years and reverted to Russian
whenever she was around. “Tell Alain’s lassie her scotch and soda
is leaving rings on the coffee table,” my mother imagined he was
murmuring. “Tell our daughter-in-law her shoes keep scuffing the
floor.”

My mother’s side of the family was a little easier. Oh, sure,
there had been some concern when they found out my father wasn’t
Catholic. It’s a favorite family story, in fact, and all these
years later the punch line “She married a
what?
” never fails
to get a laugh. But once my mother’s relatives got used to the
idea, they were fine with it. It could have been worse, they
reasoned. He was Jewish, yes, but at least he wasn’t a Yankees
fan.

Now, a few years later, my mother and I were sitting in the
marigold bed and she was trying to explain what this all meant. “Do
you understand?”

Sort of. I was thinking of the song ‘Half-Breed,’ which was very
popular at the time. It told the story of a young woman who was
ostracized in spite of the fact that she’d gotten the best of two
gene pools, the thick straight hair of her Cherokee mother and the
fine-boned bearing of her European father. Against a thumping
backbeat, she brayed her lament.

So I was a half-breed. “Do you understand, pussycat?” my mother
repeated. I shrugged. At the moment all I was thinking was this:
I have something in common with Cher
.

I didn’t understand what Jewish or Catholic meant, but Cher, I
got. Her variety show was a particular favorite of mine. I’d seen
her perform this very song and had been impressed by the feathered
headdress and beaded cutaway outfit. She’d even had a horse. Did
this mean I could expect a future of Bob Mackie gowns, Appaloosa
rides, and turquoise jewelry?

“Do I get beads?” I asked.

“What?” my mother looked up. “You mean rosary beads? Oh, no.
We’re raising you Jewish.”

So that’s how it was going to be. I might be a half-breed, but
there would be no half-creed. This was for the best. There are many
things I fault my parents for – oh, how I wish they’d made me start
a skin care regime when I was young enough for it to really make a
difference – but for this, I am grateful. This they got right. It’s
the best solution to the interfaith dilemma: pick one religion and
give the kids no say in the matter. Children cannot be trusted to
dress or feed themselves; they certainly cannot be entrusted with
dogma and doxologies. If I’d been allowed to make such a decision
as a youngster we would have practiced a faith that required the
liberal application of make-up and banned tooth-brushing.

It was the right choice. I’ve often thought I was born into the
wrong family – I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the
rest of them live without cable or call waiting – but I’ve never
felt anything but Jewish. That day when I was four, the minister’s
daughter only put a name to something I already knew I was. I knew
I was different, knew the whole church⁄New Testament⁄ communion
thing wasn’t for me. I was just too short and my hair was too
curly.

“You’re living in a dream world if you think you’ve never been
baptized,” my Catholic cousin Peter tells me. “You had too many
babysitters and relatives worried about your immortal soul. Do you
remember a visit to an indoor ‘swimming pool’ that had high
ceilings, wooden benches, and colorful windows? Was the lifeguard a
man in a white dress? Was he holding a smoking purse?”

I suppose it’s possible. But if it happened, it didn’t take. I
have never felt any pull toward the Catholic Church, never felt
stirred by saints or relics. I like those tacky garden statues, and
The Thorn Birds
, of course, but that’s about it.

I knew I was Jewish even when I was put out by it. And at first,
I was, as often as not. My introduction to Jewish practice came
shortly after my tête-à-tête with the minister’s daughter and it
did not go smoothly. We had gone to San Francisco to visit my
grandparents for the High Holidays, and my father had felt
compelled to take me to synagogue. Perhaps my grandparents had
heard too much Santa talk, or maybe my mother just wanted to get me
out of the house for a couple hours. Whatever the reason, my father
and I found ourselves in a stadium-sized temple where we had the
special seats reserved for non-members who have neither tickets nor
a twenty for the usher. From our folding chairs in the
three-hundredth row, I could see the antlike figures dotting the
stage below. The lush gilt splendor of the venue had led me to
expect ballerinas or the Ice Capades. Instead, all the spotlights
were on a cabal of wrinkled, bearded, chanting men. It was hot and
dark and loud, and my red velvet dress was stiff and itchy. I
glanced around for the snack bar, finding only a table of lukewarm
herring. Clearly my father had confused his four-year-old daughter
with someone else, someone like Henry Kissinger. This was just not
my scene.

I fidgeted for fifteen minutes, then broke out into a fullblown
howl. Half an hour later we were back at my grandparents’ house, my
father sporting bite marks and a fresh bruise on his jaw where my
party shoe had nailed him as he carried me out. “Well, that went
nicely,” he announced. “I think organized religion can wait a few
more years.”

That was just as well. We lived in rural Northern California,
where there was little organized Judaism to speak of. Even if the
whole family had been Jewish, we would have had, as our farmer
neighbors liked to say, a hard row to hoe. We were so isolated,
ringed by backwoods racists whose hobbies included cooking batches
of crystal meth and writing pamphlets denying the Holocaust. There
were maybe six Jewish families in the whole town, most of them
half-and-half like ours. Living next door to an Israeli family, we
constituted the Jewish ghetto.

My father had always sworn that he would never live in a town
that had more churches than bars. In our town they were in equal
and plentiful supply, including several that blurred the line
between the two. The church that interested me most met in a
converted roller rink. I imagined the services were conducted under
strobe lights, the pastor sermonizing over a disco beat: “Repent,
you sinners, repent. Reverse skate!”

There were certainly more churches and bars than Jews, and there
was no synagogue at all. There was, however, a Hebrew school at the
Jewish Community Center one town over, and as soon as I turned six
my parents signed me up. I did not particularly like it. The drive,
over miles of bumpy country roads through hot, dry farmland, left
me carsick, and the school’s unappetizing snacks of stale raisins
and off-brand Fig Newtons didn’t help. There was a ditch next to
the classrooms where the other kids in the car pool, all boys,
could scoop up tadpoles and dead, leathery minnows to hold in their
warm palms on the drive home. Week after week we sat plastered to
the vinyl upholstery in sweaty shorts as the car slowly filled with
the smell of decaying fish carcasses. My sister and I eventually
built a game around these rides called Hot Nausea Car, a sort of
bingo involving various emetics.

Still, I was drawn in. I felt sick and bored and put-upon, but I
also knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I was a Jew,
enduring Hebrew school like any other Jew. It felt right. It
confirmed my faith in the same way that people who know they’re gay
remain gay even if their introduction to ‘the scene’ is
The
Birdcage
.

I would continue going to Hebrew school long after the rest of
the car pool dropped out. When our religious instruction finally
devolved into monthly potlucks at which we were encouraged to ‘rap’
with other Jewish kids, my sister dropped out, too, but I kept
showing up, tamale pie in hand.

It was all I had. Outside of Hebrew school our religious
practice, in keeping with our half-and-half household, was
half-assed. My scrupulosity hadn’t come along to ruin the fun for
everyone yet, and we still ate shrimp and bacon with abandon. On
Friday nights, our only ritual was watching the entire ABC lineup.
We observed the Jewish holidays halfheartedly, preferring the
Christian ones, which tended to involve more candy and presents.
Oh, we were careful to secularize them. There was never any Jesus
talk, and the icing on the hot cross buns looked more like
asterisks than crucifixes, generous frosting being more important
to us than religious imagery – but they still weren’t bagels.

Of course there was going to be crossover. Of course things were
going to get messy. That’s just how it works. In our house the
commingling was compounded, because it was our Catholic mother who
was in charge of our Jewish upbringing. My mother was the one who
carted us off to Hebrew school and synagogue, who cooked seders and
sufganiyot
. Our Hebrew teachers knew we were half Jewish,
but they assumed the Jewish side was the maternal one; our mother
was the one who came to shul. Besides, she passed. She’s got a
Jewish first name and features. She is, in fact, the only person on
either side of the family who’s had work done on her nose. My
father’s Jewishness, on the other hand, was invisible, deeply felt
but impossible to see. “I don’t need to practice,” he told us.
“I’ve got it down already.”

It was how he’d been raised, born to Russians who’d grown up in
Manchuria, settled in France, then moved to China before ending up
in San Francisco. Jewishness was their only constant. But it was a
particular kind of Jewishness, a cultural one that relied less on
strictures than sensibilities. It was fine to eat ham and to drive
on Shabbat, but to put a bumper sticker on the car – that was
unthinkable.

They weren’t anti-Catholic but anti-catholic. Their aesthetics
were particular but hard to parse out. It wasn’t the Jewish
American norm. They drank sugared sodas and dry wine, wore
sunglasses but not sunscreen. Their Judaism meant shopping at
Gump’s but not Emporium, eating kasha but not kishke, reading Isaac
Bashevis Singer but not Isaac Asimov. It meant doing things a
certain way.

They had a large circle of friends whose tastes and background
were nearly identical to theirs, eclectic as they were, but they
didn’t really fit into the larger Jewish community. Oh, they made a
stab at it. They joined a synagogue shortly after coming to the
United States. It was a showy Reform temple, unlike the Orthodox
congregations of their youth, and they hadn’t cared for the robed
choir and English prayers. But it would do. They enrolled the kids
in its Sunday school and made my father have a bar mitzvah. It was
a glorious orgy of gifts, pens and watches and gadgets, most of
them broken before the day was out because he disassembled them to
see how they worked. His relationship with formal Jewish practice
met a similar end. He learned the prayers and the principles, saw
how it all went together, and put it aside. It was a nice thing to
have around, but you didn’t have to play with it every day.

Our mother, however, was used to great daily helpings of dogma
and devotion. She had been raised attending parochial schools,
going to church every week, decorating her bedroom with crepe paper
altars to Mary. Her parents were devoutly religious and made the
family say the rosary together after dinner well into the kids’
teens. Every night they would kneel in a circle on the living room
carpet, the girls’ skirts fanning out like bluebells as they prayed
with fervent devotion that none of their friends could see them
through the open window.

Their friends wouldn’t have cared. They were all Catholic, too.
As for Jews, my mother, in childhood, had seen only three: two
neighbors and a gentleman spotted at the market while on a trip to
visit a cloistered cousin in upstate New York. “There’s a Jew,” her
grandmother had remarked, nodding toward the young man examining
the canned tomatoes. My mother was simultaneously horrified by her
grandmother’s prejudice and impressed by her perceptiveness. How
did she know? Was there some secret Jewish signifier? My mother
figured it was the horn-rimmed glasses, a belief only confirmed,
many years later, by my father’s possession of the same.

For the most part, my mother and her family enjoyed friendly
relations with the few Jews in town, saving their true scorn for
the Protestants. My mother’s one-day courtship with a Jewish
classmate passed unremarked, but her sister’s Congregationalist
boyfriend provoked an intervention. “If we don’t stop this now
they’ll get married and have children – no,
child
–,” my
great-grandmother warned, “who will grow up thinking church
consists of coffee and cake.”

My mother’s marriage meant no church at all. It had made her
ineligible to receive communion, and she stopped going to church
altogether. Having married outside her faith she wasn’t in what
canon law calls a “state of grace.” Personally, I would have taken
advantage of this condition to pursue some new hobbies, like
gluttony or sloth. My mother filled her time with soap operas and
latch-hooked wall hangings instead. She seemed reasonably happy,
but one of her friends, worried about her immortal soul, began a
campaign to get her back into the Church. It would be simple, she
promised. She’d found a priest who was willing to ‘rectify’ my
parents’ union – this was the official term for the procedure – and
after that my mother would be eligible to receive the sacrament
again. The only problem, she said, was that they had to hurry; the
priest had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and she didn’t think
he had much time left. Were she and my father free on
Wednesday?

BOOK: Devil in the Details
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