16

An early memory: it’s a Saturday afternoon in the late 1960s and my parents are sitting with friends in our New Jersey backyard. The flagstone patio is in dappled shade. A forsythia hedge spills over the next-door neighbor’s fence. The adults sip iced tea from green plastic cups and relax on the kinds of lounge chairs that leave marks on your thighs when you stand. Maybe there’s a bird feeder. I know this much: it’s Shabbos, which means no cigarettes for my father, no radio for my mother. Lunch is served cold, as it always is after my dad returns from temple. The friends are named Kushner. Many years later, their son will be arrested and imprisoned in a tawdry case involving hookers and embezzlement. Their grandson will marry Ivanka Trump. But on this day, the Kushners are just nice older people, quite a bit older than my parents. I’m young—five or six—and when I come outside to say hello to the grown-ups, Mrs. Kushner pulls me to her side. She’s a stout woman with a teased hairdo and a thick accent. I’ve heard whispers that she and her family dug a tunnel out of the Jewish ghetto in their Polish town during the war, enabling hundreds to escape. Mrs. Kushner runs her hand through my hair, which is white-blond, the same color as my eyebrows. She looks at me hard. What does she see? I am pale, blue-eyed, delicate. I have a heart-shaped face. She’s still gripping me when she says: We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.

Fifty-two percent of Eastern European Ashkenazi descent. And the rest: French, Irish, English, German. A schism, a fault line, a split. Just about half of me could have, in fact, gotten bread from the Nazis. I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who had the siddur memorized, who belted out the Birkat Hamazon with my father after every Shabbos meal. I spoke flawless Hebrew—a language that now, when I hear it, has the quality of a half-remembered dream. But I didn’t look the part—not just a little bit but to such a degree that it became a defining aspect of my identity.

I have very few childhood memories—really hardly any at all—but I have always remembered the backyard, the dappled shade, the green cups, and the lounge chairs that particular Shabbos afternoon. My father, still in his suit pants, tie removed, his shirtsleeves rolled up. An embroidered red velvet yarmulke covering his head. My mother is hazier—my mother is always hazier—but she certainly witnessed the moment with Mrs. Kushner as she sat at the table laden with sliced brisket and cold poached asparagus.

What was Mrs. Kushner really saying to me? What had she been thinking? I was being told: You’re one of us. And I was also being told: You’re not one of us. Which was it? And why has this memory stayed with me all my life? I’ve told the story of Mrs. Kushner before. I’ve written about it in essays and other memoirs. I thought the story’s significance was the strangeness, the trauma of being told as a child that, had I been alive during the war, I could have saved people—and my guilt that I wasn’t able to. But now I know that it was the kernel of truth embedded in that memory that kept it intact for me. Mrs. Kushner meant no harm as she gripped my arm and assessed me. She spoke without thinking and as she did, said what everyone thought when they looked at me. It was the first time I recall—though far from the last—that I was told I wasn’t who I believed myself to be.

Once, in my twenties, I actually kept a log of how many times I heard that I didn’t look Jewish in a single day. Shapiro your married name? I’ve never seen a Jewish girl who looks like you. At times, it troubled and angered me. What did it mean, to not “look” Jewish? Certainly there were plenty of blond, blue-eyed Jews. The comments struck me as veiled anti-Semitism when they came from non-Jews, and self-hating when spoken by Jews. What was most uncomfortable—but also a potent and shameful source of secret pride—was that I understood that it was often meant as a compliment. I was pretty in a way that couldn’t possibly be Jewish. Pretty in a 48 percent French, Irish, English, German way, as it turns out.

This is what Jewish looks like, I would think, a kind of internal fuck you. I led with being Jewish wherever I went in the world. It was like a parlor trick, something guaranteed to produce interest, even amazement. You, Jewish? No way. And I would respond by dutifully reciting my family’s yichis, a Yiddish word that translates to wellborn. I would reel off my credentials: went to a yeshiva. Raised Orthodox. Yep, kosher. Two sinks, two dishwashers, the whole deal.