I knew so little of my own history. On my father’s side, I had two names: Henriette Ducas and Jacques Hirsch, my great-great grandparents, both born in Héricourt, France, a commune in the Alsace that used to go back and forth between France and Germany, a spoil of war. Newly married, the couple sailed into New York Harbor, and as far as the family knew they washed up onto American shores without a past. My father told me only those names, no names of their parents, grandparents, sisters or brothers. No stories of a family’s joys or its heartbreaks and struggles. Whatever had gone before evaporated into the air of a brand-new world.
My father told me stories of his family’s American successes — a brownstone on the Upper East Side, a shoe store on Fifth Avenue. “A block long,” he would say, the space between his gesturing hands growing wider and wider. For me, a child given to fantasy and fairy tales, that shoe store grew into a department store, and the brownstone became a castle. Yet, there was truth to my father’s stories. I had a newspaper clipping dated 1902, probably from the society pages of the Hartford Courant, announcing a marriage and listing the elegant wedding presents received, “among them being a check of a large amount from Leo M. Hirsch, an uncle of the groom.” This was my great-grandfather, proprietor of that block-long shoe store.
The Hirsches were German Jews, Reform Jews, aspiring to both social status and wealth, assimilation their goal. My father taught me that being Jewish was no different from being Christian. “It’s a religion, that’s all,” he would say, as if to convince himself as well. He wanted to pass, and he wanted me to pass. Not inside the house or among fellow Jews, but in the Christian world. He insisted Hirsch was a German, not a Jewish name.
For years, I didn’t know he was wrong about our name, but I did know he was wrong about Judaism and Christianity. Growing up, I shared things with my Jewish friends I didn’t share with my gentile friends — a nod, a glance, a meaningful touch on a shoulder. I knew, too, there were places I wasn’t welcome. Once, visiting Grandma Rose, my father’s mother, and Harry, my step-grandfather, in Miami Beach where they spent winters, I saw a sign in a window of a boarding house: No Jews. I saw signs over drinking fountains: Colored; White. With or without signs, America named its outsiders.
In that old newspaper clipping the word reverend replaced rabbi. Temple replaced synagogue. “The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Mr. Levy of the Orange Street Temple.” When you changed rabbi to reverend, you tossed away centuries of learning, letting assimilation subsume knowledge and culture.
When I was a child, school forms asked for my religion. “Write Hebrew,” my father would say.
“What’s wrong with putting Jewish?”
“Just do it.”
My friends didn’t go around calling themselves Hebrews. We were Jewish (we didn’t say Jew, an insult), and because we were growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, we knew about concentration camps, gas chambers, and lamp shades made of human skin. We whispered about those lamp shades on the playground the way we whispered about sex, knowing and not knowing, believing and not believing.
We moved a lot when I was a kid, New Jersey to Florida, Florida back to New Jersey. My father’s heart wasn’t good, and his doctor warned that if he didn’t move to a warm climate, it might give out. He had reason to worry. When my father was thirteen, Sandal, his father and my namesake, rolled off a couch and died of a massive heart attack in front of his eyes. This was my father’s story. Years later, my aunt, said to me, “Bullshit. He wasn’t there. He was at the Shore with Rose.”
I never confronted my father with my aunt’s story. I was in my mid-fifties when she told me, and I understood the truth of what had happened didn’t matter. The story of seeing his father die had already shaped my father’s life and mine. My father longed for what might have been, and I longed for a father who knew how to love me.
After his father’s funeral, my father skipped school for days, then intermittently. The truant officer brought him back. In high school, he played high-stakes poker, hung out in bars, and shot pool. He dropped out of college. He bet on the horses. “I wanted to be a dentist like my father,” he said to me. “Then, my father died.”
He wandered from job to job, business to business. “He can’t help it,” my mother said when I protested our many moves. “You have to remember how young he was when he lost his father.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like he was the only person in the world who lost a father.”
“Sandy,” she said, admonishing me.
I flared my nostrils and curled my upper lip.
In one stint in Florida we lived in Oak Hill, a rural town with orange groves, a packing house, a general store, and a Baptist church. There were eight of us in the fifth grade, and we shared a room with the sixth. Kids in my class had never seen a Jew, and when Little Jimmy called me a dirty Jew, I bloodied his nose. At home, my father didn’t know whether to praise me or punish me. I gave him my sweet-girl look, big helpless eyes, sugary smile. He burst out laughing.
By the time we settled in Millburn, New Jersey, and I entered the seventh grade, I’d attended five different grammar schools. At recess I hung back and lingered at the edges. Wordlessly, I watched girls jump rope or play hopscotch. I wanted to join in, but I was afraid of being pushy. Pushy was Jewish. At home, my mother told me to remember I was Jewish. She wanted me to recognize this fact as a point of pride. My father, on the other hand, told me to look and act like the Christian girls, which was easy because I had light brown hair and blue-green eyes. I was small-boned and fine-featured. I was skinny and I ran fast. If there were Jewish kids in my class — and I knew how to figure that out — I avoided them. I could pass, until the inevitable happened. Somebody would make an anti-Semitic remark and I would have no choice. I revealed my identity.
One day, I was standing in line in the cafeteria, talking to Shirley, a popular girl in my class. She invited me over for Saturday. “We can work on our geography project,” she said.
I was stunned by the invitation. At the same time, Linda who was just in front of us in line, jostled and elbowed the girl beside her. She yelled, “You’re cutting! You can’t cut.” She backed into me, and my tray fell out of my hand and clattered on the floor. Linda, with dark curly hair and thick dark eyebrows, wore a gold Jewish star around her neck.
As I picked up my tray, Shirley whispered, “She’s such a Jew.” I felt queasy as if I’d tasted sour milk.
“I’m Jewish, you know,” I said.
“You’re not,” Shirley said. “You can’t be.”
“Stop kidding me.”
“I’m not.”
The next day, Shirley said her mother was too busy on Saturday to have me come over.
When I was thirteen, I begged my father to join the synagogue. “All of my friends go,” I said. “Why can’t I?”
He banged a salt shaker on the kitchen table. Spicy, our black-and-white cocker spaniel, lay curled beside his chair. “Jesus, Lil, why can’t you fix this thing?” he said to my mother.
She held out her hand for the shaker. “Give it to me, Leon. I’ll loosen it for you.”
“Never mind,” he said, unscrewing the top and running his knife along the inside.
I stabbed a piece of meat with my fork. “I want to go to religious school,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
My father sipped his orange soda, paused, then sipped again.
“Leon,” Mom said. “Maybe she has a point.”
Mama and Papa, my mother’s parents, were Orthodox. My mother rejected their Orthodoxy, but not their sensibility or identity. Justice and kindness mattered. Being Jewish mattered.
My father pointed his knife at my mother. “When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.” Ice crackled inside our glasses.
Now he aimed his knife at me. “Eat,” he said. “You’re not leaving this table until you finish what’s on your plate.” He glared at my mother and spoke in an exaggerated tone, as if he were an actor on a stage. “You haven’t asked me about my day.”
“I was with you, Leon,” she said.
They worked together in his camera store, although my father didn’t call what my mother did work, selling greeting cards, film and flashbulbs, taking inventory, dusting, vacuuming, and standing at the cash register processing customers’ payments. My father called that “helping out.”
I was keeping my head down under the line of fire, when suddenly my father stared at my plate. “Get rid of that disgusting stuff.”
I hated steak. I plucked the gray glob I had been chewing from my mouth, and set it on the side of my plate.
“Here,” Mom said, “I’ll take it.” She took the plate and scraped the mess into a garbage pail under the sink.
Spittle formed at the corners of my father’s lips. He eyed my mother. “I don’t see why you let her get away with that crap.”
“Maybe if I went to Hebrew school, I’d learn better manners,” I shouted.
My friend Carol was studying for her bat mitzvah, and I wanted one, too.
“Look,” my father said, “if I told you once, I told you a thousand times. The answer is no, Sandy, so stop beating a dead horse.”
That expression made me crazy. I saw a horse, a real horse, lying in dirt, flank heaving, eyes rolling back into his head as the tail of a whip came down.
I shouted back, “You went to Sunday school. You were confirmed.”
My father pulled his chair closer to the table. The legs scraped. My mother lowered her gaze. “That’s the point,” my father said. “Confirmation, not bar mitzvah. I’ve told you. We’re Reformed, not Conservative. None of that mumbo jumbo.”
Mumbo jumbo meant Hebrew. I narrowed my eyes and glared at my father. “You said bar mitzvah. It’s bat mitzvah, with a ‘t’.”
“I don’t give a damn what it is, you’re not going.” He slammed his fist on the table, and his glass trembled; soda spilled. “For God’s sake, Sandy, don’t you ever give up? Now, see what you made me do.”
I gripped the seat of my chair and tried hard not to bolt. I wanted to tell my father why I needed to go to Hebrew school, but I couldn’t find words. That was the year Mama, my maternal grandmother died, and Papa, my grandfather, had gone to stay with Uncle Gabe and Aunt Bernice. All of my life, Mama and Papa had lived with us, enduring each of my father’s many moves. Now, I came home to an empty house. At supper it was just Mom, Dad, and me. I missed Mama and Papa, terribly. Maybe if I learned the prayers Mama used to recite on Shabbos, her thick fingers circling the candle flames, I could bring her back.
Until I was five, we all lived together in Mama’s and Papa’s yellow stucco house. Afternoons, after she finished cooking, dusting, vacuuming, and hanging clothes on a line, Mama would sit at the kitchen table with her friends, Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Bodkin, all from a place they called Russ-Poland, all speaking Yiddish. I would sit on the floor at Mama’s feet, dressing my paper dolls — Dagwood, Blondie and Cookie — and soaking up language. I learned about Kermit, Mrs. Bodkin’s son who was “carrying on” with a shiksa. “God forbid he marries her.” (He did. For years, Mrs. Botkin did not speak to her son. She never spoke to the shiksa.)
I learned from them that because my Uncle Harry had flat feet, the Army sent him home, “Kenahora,” Kenahora, a verbal equivalent of the red ribbon Mama used to pin to my undershirt every day before I left for Kindergarten. The evil eye did not like the color red.
These women of my childhood had all escaped one form of oppression or another — poverty, confinement, restrictions, pogroms. They lived, when young, in tenements on the Lower East Side. Probably, like Mama, they took in piecework.
Fridays in the yellow stucco house, the kitchen filled with the smells of Shabbos: chicken soup, a first-cut brisket, potato kugel, a bowl of applesauce sprinkled with cinnamon. In the dining room the table was set with a white damask cloth, cloth napkins, and our best silverware — although it wasn’t real silver — and our best dishes for fleishig, meat. My seat was next to Mama’s, but she didn’t sit. She stood, her wavy white hair covered with a black lace shawl. In front of her, two shiny brass candlesticks held white candles. She struck the tip, and a match burst into flame. A hush fell over the table. Everybody watched as Mama drew the light of shabbos to her heart, closed her eyes and chanted the blessing, her thin soprano sinking into my bones.
I lifted my spoon. Mama’s chicken soup was golden with glistening droplets of fat skimming the surface. Mandelen and flakes of parsley floated at the surface. Mama bought her chickens live from the chicken man, who killed them in a yard out back. She cooked them in a big pot, feet floating. She said the feet gave the soup its golden color.
I breathed in the savory aroma.
At the kitchen table, the argument continued, my mother saying, “It’s new, Leon, a bat mitzvah, so that girls can have the same as boys.”
My father jutted his chin and stared at her with beady eyes. She swallowed air. She figured if I wanted a Jewish education, I should have one, but I knew she wouldn’t fight for me, really fight. I took a breath. “I know why you won’t join.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” said my father. “Okay, smarty pants, tell me.”
“You don’t want to spend the money.”
Dad leaned his body across the table, grabbed my wrist, and held on. “For your information, I can buy and sell half that congregation, so don’t start with me.”
My nostrils flared, and I pulled free. “I’ve already started.”
I raced upstairs to my bedroom, slammed the door and stayed there. Later that night as I lay in bed and listened to my father’s footsteps climb the stairs, I understood I would not have a bat mitzvah. I would not learn the prayers Mama used to chant. I turned off my light and lay on my bed in the dark. A car’s headlamps illuminated the ballerinas dancing on my walls, their pink tutus and pink slippers, wallpaper I’d chosen myself. I watched them move and cut through the air as if propelled by something invisible inside them. I was like those dancers. There was that something inside of me, something elusive my father could not take from me ––– Mama’s gift: my deep love for Judaism’s soulful heart.