The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (4 page)

There is, always, the myth of the Jewish husband, much lampooned by comedians, a stereotypical man who might go off to work and be very much in charge, but who, upon his return home, is entirely under his wife’s thumb (see, there’s that storytelling thing again). The borscht-belt comedian Jackie Mason’s well-known “comparison” between the Italian husband and the Jewish husband is not precisely a nuanced model of cultural sensitivity, but he does represent the stereotype well. Mimicking the Jewish man’s workday full of people murmuring, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, anything you say, Mister Rosenfarb, Mister Goldenberg, yes, sir,” he then contrasts this with the cry of this fictitious businessman’s wife as he walks in the door at home, “You schmuck! You forgot to take out the garbage!” It’s a known location, for me. I certainly know—hell, I have
been
—the model of the Jewish husband entirely in the thrall of his wife, taking a secret pleasure of ownership in accepting responsibility for all things up to and including bad weather, catering to her whims, and generally allowing myself to be always at fault. (My father’s joke on the subject, usually announced in exclusively Jewish company, is: “Lincoln freed everyone but the Jewish husbands.”) Living with that relationship model allowed me to move into a location of Jewish masculinity that I knew, and even if I did not always enjoy the individual moments of it, it felt familiar and, probably more importantly, I felt masculine. Manly, by a certain standard, and it was rather wonderful.

More than a hundred years ago, James Freeman Clarke, a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and essayist, wrote an essay titled “True and False Manliness.” A beautiful and profoundly feminist document, it says in part: “All boys wish to be manly; but they often try to become so by copying the vices of men rather than their virtues.” When people ask me at lectures how my Judaism has affected my gender, I have the sense that they’re usually hoping for some insight into Jewish law and ritual, gendered spaces, and the ways in which my particular Jewish community has, or has not, supported me in my gendered movements. But really, my gender was affected by my Judaism long before that, in the particular ways that being a Jew raised in an East Coast, Ashkenazi Jewish family with a fresh memory of the Holocaust pulled at me, at my gender.

As a girl child, I was never asked to be seen and not heard. I was chastised for being mouthy or a smartass, but never with any real force since family meals always included, or perhaps required, a lot of people talking loudly and all at once. Poppy, my mother’s father, used to predict that I would grow up to be a lawyer every time I tried to get out of trouble by way of a technicality, but I knew that my commensurate punishment was always lighter if I either made my case, or made my inquisitor laugh (I assure you that no one to whom I am related, however distantly, is a bit surprised that I ended up being a writer and storyteller). This is not to say that I got an idyllic pass from all insisted-upon femininity—I did not, as anyone who has ever seen my bat mitzvah photos will tell you. In fact, I got a big dose. But Jewish girls, even Nice Jewish Girls, could be pretty
and
smart, at least in my Reform Jewish upbringing, at least in my family. I could have been a lawyer, doctor, or a nuclear physicist even, if I had liked math at all, or even been able to manage it. (And before you try to tell me that the math business is about inequities in teaching styles, let me assure you that all manner of people tried to teach me math, and to this day, the best I can do is calculate a tip quickly and accurately. In my case, this is not a limitation of gender.)

I honed my argumentation skills early and often, growing up in a family and a community that held friendly, even warm conversations at a decibel level that in other cultural contexts means the will is being rewritten as soon as the doors have been slammed. Any point could be debated, any story could be interrupted, and anyone might be able to jump in and either prove that they knew more about it or had a better idea. At age seven, my brother Jeffrey entered a family argument about nocturnal creatures (sparked, if memory serves, by some raccoon hijinks) and flatly contradicted my father’s assertions about bat behavior by announcing that whatever-my-father-had-said couldn’t be true because bats found their way around primarily through echolocation. My relatives shouted (yes, always with the shouting) with pleasure that he knew a good fact and a big word and had furthermore been able to make himself heard in the din, and he was promptly hugged and tousled while predictions of his future career as a doctor were made. It was some kind of surprise to me to learn as I got older that some people did not consider any part of this either normal or good behavior.

It is worth noting, I think, that in those childhood moments when my brother and I spoke up similarly and were wrong, we were shouted
down
, but hardly ever shouted
at
. It wasn’t necessarily a sin to be wrong; you’d be corrected but not chastised for being mistaken. Later, in high school and university, I discovered how much this confidence and the relative fearlessness it created served me. A wrong answer? In front of everyone? Feh, I could do that five times before dessert.

This, then, was the location of dominance and jousting for position—in the war of golden brains and silver tongues. While some of the men of my family probably could have knocked someone down if they’d had to, in general, these debates reflect the Jewish value of argument and intellectual superiority as the way to master others and grow into adulthood. Where other cultural groups might be playing football in the yard or sparring in the basement or honing their marksmanship on the cranberry-sauce cans, the Jewboys are inside arguing about bats, practicing our own eventual ways of exerting our power in the public sphere.

The private sphere, a different matter. Jokes about overbearing Jewish wives aside, there is some strong legal language in Judaism that installs men firmly above women in public, legal, religious, and social hierarchies, and further: in an unfortunate but common response to the difficulties of being a lower-status person in the public sphere, some Jewish men exercise dominance over their wives and children because they feel emasculated in their business or public lives. I wish I could say that this has disappeared as the stigma of being Jewish has begun to ease, but I am not sure either of those things is true in enough places to assert it. When I was a Jewish girl I was keenly aware of the way I was encouraged to be smart and to learn to argue someone else into submission, but in my conversations with other young Jewish women of my class and denominational background, I’ve discovered that some of them were quite policed, though not as severely as is enculturated, with regard to their gendered behaviors in argument and debate. Still and all, as a Jewish value (if not visible in every family), women’s learning and powers of argument cannot be denied.

As a woman, I was the third generation on both sides of my family to graduate from college, (and the fourth in the lines of two out of four great-grandmothers). We were born into a culture where girls and women have been taught to read and write for as long as we have history to tell. As a person learning to emulate manhood, the virtues available to me to copy seemed much more compelling than the vices, and also, in some cases, similar to the virtues held up to me as a Jewish girl, like academic success and financial stability. When I am asked, as I sometimes am, why transgendered Jews—and especially transmasculinely gendered Jews—appear, anecdotally, to be more likely to remain religiously affiliated, I say that this is part of the answer: It seems to me that we do not have to go as far, nor do we have to climb into places that seem quite as foreign to us. We can still cry and read and be sweet on babies; we do not have to learn how to spit or like beer (which is a good thing, as my fondness for babies is roughly as strong and unlikely to shift with gender presentation as my general distaste for beer).

In addition to emotional connectedness and intellectual success (with a heaping side order of argumentation skills), Jewish masculinity also tends to prize storytelling. I began this essay by telling the story that was told to me by my mother, as she heard it from my young cousin’s father. As a people of diaspora, a people with a staggeringly long oral tradition, even considering our equally staggering literacy rate, there seems to be some . . . genetic selection at work. I have known good storytellers of many cultural or ethnic backgrounds, for certain, and I have known some Jews who could not find the beginning, middle,
or
end of a story with both hands and a flashlight, but I will say plainly that sitting down to dinner with a tableful of Jews guarantees good storytelling.

As an adult who is a professional performer, I am often asked about my training, as in: “With whom did you study storytelling?” Evidently, there are schools, and it is assumed that I am a graduate of someone’s program. I always say with some seriousness that I studied storytelling with Arnie Friedlander. This reply has been published a few times, much to the delight of Arnie Friedlander, who is one of the best storytellers I have ever known in my life and is, by trade, in the building supplies business. Though I have taken a few storytelling workshops, I have not yet logged anything close to the hours I’ve spent listening to my dad and Arnie tell jokes and stories, entertaining a room. My brother and I (and a number of the other kids our age) have developed great comic timing thanks to them and all of the other less polished but still hilarious storytelling men of our family. This is something I have come to associate indelibly with masculinity; a man sitting back in his chair at the dinner table with a glass of something in his hand, smiling slyly, and saying, “I got one for you,” in just exactly the right way. This is followed always by a short pause (which I now can measure out at roughly three beats, but I had to count my natural pause to know this) so that the laughter from the previous story can settle, and then, into the new quiet, a conspiratorial: “So.” And the room is hooked again, knowing there’s another belly laugh around the corner.

I can do these things. I can argue, explain, tell a good story, and love my family. I do it that night at dinner, the night my mother tells me the story about Ezra. I make my case and explain what I mean while my father questions me insistently about gender roles and what exactly that
means
, and how can you measure it, until dessert comes. I am halfway through the third illustrative funny story of the evening, which is actually about my recently deceased grandfather and his particular habit of doing all the dinner dishes before anyone else had gotten up from the table yet. I’m telling the story to make the argument about the complicated concept, and in the same moment that my parents get the gist of what I’m saying we all start to miss my grandpa, and we all tear up. I sniffle, my mother smiles the peculiarly lovely smile she gets when she’s trying not to cry, and Dad looks down and away, tears flowing freely down his cheeks. I think, but do not say: Very Jewish.

Roadside Assistance

On my way from speaking to a conference of amazing students in Marinette, Wisconsin, to Milwaukee for the next set of gigs, traveling down Highway 43, I saw a truck pulled over to the side of the road, hood open, two sun-and-wind-reddened white people standing beside it, looking deeply unhappy. I pulled over, just behind, and asked if they were all right, if help was coming. The man, tall and beer-gutted and gruff, replied, “Do you know what’s around here? We’re dead in the water. I can’t fucking believe this,” before pacing a few steps away to squint at the nearest exit sign and then come back to the car window and stick his whole torso in again.

It didn’t seem like the right time to mention that Mercury was in retrograde.

His wife was dancing in little anxious circles around him, trying to help but mostly just saying “calm down.” I supposed he might be Asshole McStraightGuy, but I recognized the anger that comes from helplessness and frustration. I’m not, shall we say, immune to that either, and I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt even while he paced and swore. I pulled out my new GPS system, which has an I Need Help feature, and called up nearby service stations. When I found a promising one, I held it out to him. “There’s a phone number,” I said. He glanced at it and said, “I can’t fucking read that. Can you read that?” he asked his wife, walking away from me again and puffing out air in upset little clouds. I offered to read it out to him, and he called a couple service stations, both closed. I offered to give him, or them, a lift into the next town to try to get sorted out, but then he walked away again to root through the truck without answering me—maybe to get a map, or his keys?—so I just kept calling garages until I got someone, and then passed him the phone so he could talk to the guy bringing the tow truck. While he used my BlackBerry, his wife explained that they were on their way back from their cabin on the lakes to the wedding of his favorite niece, which they were now definitely going to miss, a piece of information which made me even gladder I had passed his replies through my New York filter and not just gone off and left them.

When the tow truck was arranged, he came to my car and handed me back the phone, then stuck a big, meaty paw through the window and shook my hand, saying, in a much calmer voice, “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” I just nodded at him and said, “Good luck. Hope you make the wedding.”

I pulled away, lip reading through the window as he said to his wife, “Nice guy,” and she responded with a sentence that started with, “He was, he was very nice, and you should . . .” I lost the rest when she turned around.

I wanted to say something else, though—almost did and then changed my mind in the split second before I spoke it. I wanted to say, “I need to say this: I’m a queer. I want you to know because, out of all the cars that passed you, I’m the one who stopped. I’m the one who stayed until your problem was solved.” I am not sure if it would have even registered, if it would have been a safe thing to say while I held his hand, but in the moment of being there and play-acting this rough kind of helpfulness, I wanted to say it anyway. If he liked queers, if maybe he had a sister or a best friend who was of the lavender persuasion, I wanted him to feel well cared for by the great global homo conspiracy . . . and if he didn’t?