When I walked through our front door, I began to ascend the stairs to make the obligatory check-in with my parents. But the night of the service at Trinity, I paused and reflected on what had occurred. As much as Paul and I had changed that momentous evening, all the external points of reference in our lives remained the same. This was still my house, my parents were still my parents, our religious identity had been Jewish. But now, that last certainty had changed.
A wrought-iron railing separated the living room area from the descending staircase, and through it I could see my mother reclining on her La-Z-Boy as she did every night, comfortably watching her favorite TV shows, occasionally helping Dad out with some paperwork for his business. There, Dad sat in his own special chair, adjacent to hers. The gravity of my announcement now made me anxious—my emotions teetered between excitement and dread.
I wanted to tell my parents what had happened to Paul and me that evening, and about the joy of being a part of this beautiful community, the rich world that had opened up as we accepted Jesus as our Savior. But I also knew how completely it upended our cherished family narrative. The one in which my father, Hank, the good Jew, fell in love with Marjorie Wright, a gentile widow with two daughters, in the laundry room of a town-house complex where they lived across the street from each other. It included the trials they had been through, the family conflict before Mom converted, the Jewish identity he had managed to forge for all of us. We knew how to say the prayers, we celebrated the holidays, we stayed home for Rosh Hashanah and fasted on Yom Kippur. We were pretty much on par with most nominal Jews.
The prospect that Mom and Dad could ever succeed as a couple was daunting. When they met, Mom had been widowed for two years—her alcoholic husband had shot himself with a rifle in the attic of their small home, leaving her with two little girls. To add still another level of pathos, Mom suffered from polio as a child and always walked with the help of a cane.
If my mother’s handicap was physical, Hank Schenck’s was social. He was shy and awkward, but nonetheless approached Marge as she struggled with her basket of laundry. Gallant in his own way, he helped her carry it. Eventually he would make sure they did laundry on the same days so he could see her. He finally summoned the courage to ask her out. My father’s family had hoped that their only surviving son, whose extroverted older brother, an Air Force captain, had been killed in a plane crash in Korea, would continue the Schenck name. But they had never dreamed he would choose a disabled, widowed mother of two who was also a shiksa.
When Dad announced his engagement, the family threatened to boycott the wedding unless Marge, a baptized Catholic who had been raised as an Episcopalian, converted to Judaism. Mom had long since left her religion behind and had no objection to their demands. A very understanding and accommodating Reform rabbi was enlisted. He was willing to be flexible about the rigors of Jewish conversion but required my mother to promise the children would be raised Jewish. She agreed, and my parents exchanged vows under a chuppah, the traditional wedding canopy, and seemed to embody a romantic love-conquers-all kind of tale.
But, over time, the touching story of their falling in love and overcoming obstacles gave way to another reality. Both my parents were given to bouts of depression that left them deeply angry—with themselves, with each other, and often with us kids. I can remember many loud and menacing outbursts, my father enraged and threatening, my mother silent but tormented. Money was always a problem—the usual version of never enough. On the night of my conversion, the scene I was about to disrupt in our living room was a calm one—a rare break from years of emotional tumult during most of my childhood and adolescence.
The financial worries were only a part of a much deeper dysfunction that organized our lives. Mom often pulled me aside to demand, “Where’s your father?” Dad was usually in the garage tinkering with his massive collection of electrical paraphernalia, a hobby he began as a communications engineer in the Air Force that would later turn into a small business installing phone systems. The garage was his domain, a place where he could gain necessary solitude and a sense of control. But, for Mom, Dad’s absences were the harbinger of permanent, catastrophic loss. “I wanna know if he’s alive,” she would repeat, as if the trauma of her first husband’s violent death never left her.
I was scared by her intensity and learned to chalk it up to her quirky personality. But there was more. When Paul and I were around nine years old, Mom suddenly disappeared for what seemed like a terribly long time. Dad and my sisters would only say Mom was in the hospital. When she came home, the powerful medication she was given left her vague and spaced out. At dinner one night, when Dad was working late, she insisted on cutting everyone’s badly undercooked strip steaks. She was disoriented and mumbling incoherently. She repeatedly plunged the blade toward the meat on our plates but missed by inches. The dining room table was permanently scarred. I was terrified. My oldest sister, Kathy, gently took the knife and finished serving the dinner.
Mom’s extreme moods calmed down as we grew up; perhaps she was on medication, perhaps having young twin boys worsened her condition, perhaps she just mellowed with age. No one could have imagined the kind of pain and torment the docile middle-aged couple had endured and inflicted when looking at them, sitting in the lamplight peacefully, watching The Rockford Files. I was too familiar with my father’s rages and my mother’s depressions, and I dreaded triggering either with the news I was about to share. And yet the happiness I felt was so great, the transformation so profound, I couldn’t contain myself—despite the fact it would introduce such a potentially volatile revelation into this hard-won tranquility.
I slowly ascended the stairs and walked into the living room. When Mom asked me the pro forma parental question of where I had been, I told her I had gone to Trinity Church. This got her attention less for the religious identity than for its prestige in our town. This was the church of the upper classes, the businessmen and the prominent citizens. These were not the kind of people with whom my parents naturally socialized. I could have said that I had gone golfing at the country club and elicited the same reaction. Here was the moment when I could have derailed the conversation, sparing both them and me. But my experience had been too consequential to handle with our usual family approach of passivity and evasion. I decided to try to explain, announcing that a visiting British minister had invited us to make Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and I had accepted the invitation. I had been born again, I said.
Dad put down his paper with a snap and glowered at me. I knew that look. It was usually the prelude to an explosion of rage, and I steeled myself for what was coming. We may not have been religious Jews—at home we ate pork and shrimp, food considered treyf or forbidden by observant members of our religion—but there was never any question of our religious identity. In that moment, as I faced my father, I thought of the wartime scrapbook he had kept as a teenager.
When we were small, Paul and I would sit on our dad’s knees at our dining room table, the book open in front of us as he slowly turned the pages. Carefully cut newspaper and magazine clippings, especially those involving aerial bombings over Europe, were pasted on the thick pages.
But the record of the heroism of our troops was also a record of tragedy: black-and-white photos of mass graves, human bodies piled atop ash heaps, haunted faces peering out from behind barbed-wire fences, the striped uniforms that looked like sinister and humiliating pajamas, the fragile mountains of discarded eyeglasses. The man to whom I had just announced my conversion had spent a lot of time schooling his two young sons in the collective iconography of the Holocaust. Our childhood imaginations could not fathom what these ghastly scenes were, so our father explained. “This is an example of man’s inhumanity to man,” he would say. “The Nazis were the most evil people who ever held power, more vile even than the Egyptians who had enslaved our Jewish people. They singled out the Jews, our own people, for extermination. Your generation must never let this happen again,” he said, closing the book. “This is what happens when good people do nothing.”
And, he told us, the good people who did nothing were Christians.
Now, years later, my father was being told his son had just become a Christian. He was stunned by the certainty of my response. This struck at the core of who he was and who he had raised his sons to be. This skinny kid, six months shy of his sixteenth birthday, had presented him with a fact that challenged his basic expectation that his sons would keep the faith, marry Jewish women, father his Jewish grandchildren, and maintain the traditions of the Schenck family. I wanted to explain that my commitment meant belonging. It meant a new, accepting family, a theology that promised redemption. It meant the presence of this remarkable man, Jesus Christ, in every breathing moment of my days. How could I put all this into words? I was speechless and embarrassed. “It means Jesus,” I said haltingly as my father kept asking what it meant to be saved. I became more and more inarticulate. Finally, Dad couldn’t restrain himself. He stormed down the stairs to his garage workshop, his safe retreat when family tensions became too much. My mother had watched this unfold with expressions of curiosity and worry on her face. It was her turn. She asked me why I thought I needed to do this.
Why did I need it? I couldn’t answer that. What I did know was that I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. At that point I was too exhausted to explain. The extremes of emotions buffeting me ranged from the deep joy of my time at church to the pain of this confrontation. The conversation ended, at least for that night. Paul didn’t come home until my parents were sound asleep. He avoided facing the assault that I experienced as the messenger.
Paul and I were, as always, a united front, which didn’t help matters. Dad’s anger and sense of betrayal was doubled. This rebellion was too personal. How would he ever explain his sons’ defections to Aunt Nikki and her husband, Uncle Al, the cultural pillars of our family, or to his mother, our Nana, and the rest of the Schenck clan? Paul and I held firm, even reveling in what we decided were storms of religious persecution that swirled around us. When we brought the stories of our father’s anger to our new friends, they only reinforced our resolve, telling us to stand strong against the devil’s attempts to crush our faith. We learned not to shy away from using our father’s rejection to enhance our status. After all, none of these believers from Christian families ever had to face religious persecution in their own homes.
When Paul and I announced we were going to be baptized “by full immersion” in the Niagara River, my father realized he needed to deploy the biggest guns in his arsenal. He demanded that before we did this, Paul and I had to see a Hasidic rabbi at the Lubavitcher Chabad House outreach center. “Chabadniks,” a derogatory nickname my own family used to describe these “backward Jews” of Eastern European ancestry, were known for their strict adherence to religious law and by their peculiar dress—the men with their long side curls, impressive pointed beards, and prayer shawl tassels flopping from their waists.
Previously, Dad had had no use for these supposed troglodytes. Now they might provide a necessary religious constraint on his two sons whose inappropriate fervor had dangerously metastasized. Paul and I saw the impending encounter with the modern-day Pharisees as yet another opportunity to face an oppressor and emerge even stronger in our testimony of the gospel. So together the three of us drove to Main Street in Buffalo. Dad spent some of the drive continuing his efforts to persuade us to abandon our newfound faith and the rest in agitated silence. We finally arrived and were met by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg.
He welcomed the three of us into a small synagogue. We sat surrounded by stacks of prayer books and other Judaica, and then he asked what brought us to Christianity. We had rehearsed this moment, and Paul began by talking about the biblical prophesies foreshadowing the Messiah. My job was to explain how Jesus aligned perfectly with these predictions. Then it was Rabbi Greenberg’s turn. He told us flatly that Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah but this was not the case. He explained that according to Sacred Scripture, the Messiah would restore the throne of David, rebuild the Temple, and gather the exiles to create the political and spiritual redemption of the Jewish people by bringing them back to Jerusalem. The Messiah was unlikely to perform signs or wonders, but he must be a descendant of David—which Jesus was not.
Rabbi Greenberg went on to challenge the whole notion of conversion. Didn’t we have any appreciation for the terrible role of conversion in the history of the Jews, when our people suffered and died as the result of Christian efforts to change their beliefs? We listened respectfully but refused to budge. He then tried the personal tack and probed the pain we were inflicting on our parents. He asked Dad about the kind of Jewish home he had created for us, only to discover that Mom was of gentile birth, which was bad enough, but that she had also undergone a Reform rite of conversion—not an Orthodox one—rendering it “illegitimate” and of no effect. Because the Jewish religion is matrilineal, our mother’s Christian birth compromised our Jewish identity. He looked at my father reproachfully for not having shared this crucial bit of information. Disgusted, he deemed my father’s twins goyim and gave up.
So did our father. Our visit to the rabbi had exhausted all the resources of his opposition. During the ride home from Buffalo, he was silent, staring ahead, a defeated man. He realized that no argument, no anger, no ultimatums, could change us, and after that he became even more remote. When we defied his plea not to be baptized, instead enthusiastically undergoing immersion by church leaders in the Niagara River, he resolved himself to having lost his sons. My mother was loyal to my father, and a cold wall of silence went up between us and our parents.