THE MORE MY LIFE FALLS APART, the stronger my longing for Judaism becomes. It is as though everything unmet in me, all my aloneness, has finally found a point on which to fixate. The elusive something that will make it all better shines like a new toy, the way a frosted glass beckons to a drinker.
The only thing is, I’m not sure if that’s the story I’m in—one of addiction and desperation—or if I’m in another kind of story, one with a real happy ending.
I take up the reading of conversion memoirs as a mother-to-be takes up child-rearing manuals. I read Stranger in the Midst by Nan Fink, and Turbulent Souls by Stephen Dubner, the co-author of Freakonomics, whose family background is similar to my own. He wonders, “Was it love that had inspired my return to Judaism? No, I told myself, not love … It was instinct. My noisy soul had demanded that I follow the flow of my blood.”
La sangre llama.
“But that flow,” Dubner continues, “had now led to my father … was my embrace of Judaism nothing more than an embrace of my dead father, a glorified nostalgia trip?”
This gives me pause. I, too, have always idealized my father. Would I have such a longing for something—for anything—on my mother’s side of the family?
The details of my world feel so bittersweet I can barely stand it. I brace myself against parking meters, dollar stores, the national anthem. Degan comes in and out of the scene like a mechanical toy doll, like an image on a faraway screen with the volume turned all the way down. I am losing weight. Food makes me queasy and I have a constant case of the runs.
At least I will look good in my wedding dress.
And when I think of that train of silk and lace trailing behind me down the aisle, it seems as heavy as history itself, with only me to drag it into the present.