The Jewish Daughter Diaries

by Rachel Ament

  “Shrimp are just big bugs,” she would say. “Chickens are dumb and mean—just ask your uncle Phil. Don’t you think a cow would eat you?”

  In the park one day with my mom and her long-term boyfriend, I complained that I was cold. It had been about six months since I’d stopped eating meat. Across from me, my mother knitted her eyebrows while I pinched clumps of grass with icy fingers. Mom’s stew of worry finally boiled over, and she dragged me to a nearby fast-food restaurant where I could restore my blood to a healthier, meatier thickness. Under the halogen lighting, I dunked something that once resembled chicken in something that never resembled honey or mustard.

  “You look much better,” my mom said, and I gave up, but not for long.

  Though my mom’s instincts suggested that vegetarianism would accelerate the pace of my untimely demise, the medical community—one by one—denied her hunch. During a blood drive at my high school, a lady technician signed a slip of paper confirming my adequate iron levels. Time and again, my pediatrician spelled out my physical normalcy, in between encouraging me not to try coke and comparing my pubic hair to that of the other girls she saw.

  At sixteen, I decided to give vegetarianism another shot. My mom still did not support my diet, but she’d mellowed out slightly, opting for the slow-burning tactic of annoyance over the full-scale assault.

  “Are you getting enough protein?” she would ask on a near-daily basis. Before we went to a restaurant, my family would pause for ten minutes as my mom scanned the menu in detail, lovingly ensuring my inclusion as she highlighted the inconvenience I posed.

  In a stubbornness contest within my family—within any Jewish family—there can be no clear victor. I managed to avoid eating meat until I left home for college and never thought twice about it until my brother gave me a book on sports nutrition. I knew plant-based protein was less efficient, but I’d never seen it spelled out quite so clearly. What ultimately changed my mind about true vegetarianism wasn’t a philosophical evaluation of animal consciousness; it was more like, “Fuck, I don’t even like beans that much.”

  I felt the most comfortable working fish back into my diet. They seemed to lack the psychological complexity of other animals, and they couldn’t bewitch me with curly, humanoid eyelashes. Besides, if my mom’s logic is to be trusted, fish totally deserve to die because they’re racist.

  Still, I couldn’t break the news to my mother right away. I was only eating fish on a trial basis, and again, it just meant too much to her. If she got her hopes up, and I then decided to revert back to true-blue vegetarianism, she would be devastated. So I snuck around town to eat my first lox-and-bagel sandwich in four years.

  I felt so full that I didn’t eat another meal for eleven hours. The sandwich was good—not dazzling, but good enough that I wanted to have another one sometime. I officially became a pescetarian, which I remain to this day, at age twenty-five. After a couple weeks of secrecy, I informed my mom that I’d begun to eat fish.

  She met the decision with little fanfare, instead betraying calm and relief.

  “Oh, good,” she said, naming a few dishes we could now eat together, like tuna with melon or lox and bagels. And then that ended the nagging forever, right?

  If only it were that easy. Apparently my mom magnetically attracts articles about nutrition. These days, she wants me to eat fish multiple times weekly, so I can maximally absorb their beneficial fats. She won’t quit until I’ve digested an entire zoo.

  IF YOU'RE GONNA SMOKE, SMOKE RIGHT

  Almie Rose

  My mom’s mom, my Oma, was a very tiny force of nature. I don’t want you to hear “tiny” and “force” and think, Oh, got it, she looked like Yoda. No. Tiny as in five foot one, without the hairdo and heels (and for that one fantastic year in the ’60s, go-go boots). She was a slip of a thing, but (sticking with the Star Wars references), her presence was like the Death Star—as it was exploding.

  She was a woman who could never turn down a cat who needed a home, so at one point, she had eight cats in a one-bedroom apartment. I can still hear her calling them in her throaty voice, “Willie! MacArthur! Yum Yum! Mousey! Andrew! Beshert!” You have to be pretty Jewish to name your cat the Hebrew word for destiny.

  Oma was a woman who made an entire feast for me and my brother to sneak into the movie theater. We were shy kids who wanted to see the diabolically horrible Batman and Robin and thought Oma was right up there with Bonnie and Clyde for smuggling food into a movie theater. We had to convince her that a pint of ice cream was not necessary. Of course she insisted on bringing her own spread.

  This is one Jewish stereotype that is true: Jews love food. We love cooking it; we love bragging about it; we love forcing other people to eat it; we love to ask people if they want a bite of what we’re eating and to be asked by others; and we love asking over and over if they’re sure, when they decline our food. My dad is Italian and his family is exactly the same. (Really, the only difference between Jews and Italians is the whole Jesus thing.)

  I think I know exactly where it comes from, and it’s a sad and somber place. My Oma’s family lived in Germany when it was prime Nazi-fleeing time. Like Sound of Music get-the-hell-out style. But not everyone made it. My Oma’s aunt Irene lost some of her relatives. No. Not “lost.” She knew exactly where they went. They were murdered. They were part of a horrifying mass murder, and “lost” isn’t the right word. As if they’re just a pair of reading glasses, like, “Oh, where did my relatives go? They were just here.”

  As a result, Oma’s relationship with food was forever tainted. She would say that she would feel guilty for eating, thinking of her family who starved to death. Eating was never easy for her. When I first heard that, my heart broke, and I wanted to hug her and tell her she could feed me until I burst. Yes, I will have a bite of your salmon, even though you know I don’t like salmon and I’ve told you this six hundred times.

  “You Jews always have to bring it back to the Holocaust, don’t you?” a drunken man once said to me at a bar. Yeah, go fuck yourself.

  My Oma had that “if you disrespect me, go fuck yourself” attitude. She knew how to stand up for herself.

  I remember when I was around seven years old and she was helping me put together a pink car for my Barbies, a toy she had bought me for my birthday. Putting it together was excruciatingly difficult, and she was doing her best. Puzzled, I looked at the box that showed an expensive-looking, shiny pink Porsche, which was in no way what we were assembling.

  “It never looks like what’s on the box,” I said dejectedly.

  “So play with the box,” she snapped.

  But on the opposite side of that fire and sarcasm was a fierce love for her children and grandchildren; Oma’s love was immense and unconditional. We were always on her mind. No holiday passed without at least a card. Every Christmas, we looked forward to her Christmas packages—boxes of fantastic homemade cookies and lots of silly gifts. It’s always the agnostic Jews who celebrate Christmas to the hilt. I’m betting my Oma was the only one who really enjoyed decorating the Christmas tree. Maybe “enjoyed” isn’t the right word. It was more of an “I am going to finish decorating this goddamn tree if it fucking kills me” feeling.

  I loved hearing the stories about her from before I was born. There was that now-legendary incident when my uncle told my Oma he wanted to be a bass player.

  “Why would you want to play the bass?” she said, and I imagine she was taking a long drag from a cigarette as she said it. “You can’t even take it to the beach.”

  That puzzling logic was something that we all loved and also found terribly frustrating about her. She was the sort of woman who got right to the point. She was married three times, and at one of her weddings, instead of wearing a dress, she simply wore a T-shirt that read “BRIDE.” There were also “BRIDESMAID” T-shirts and a “GROOM” T-shirt.

  My favorite story about
her is one of my mom’s. I like her to tell me every now and then, because when she tells it, she imitates my Oma’s voice without realizing it. My Oma reminded me so much of a later-in-life Lucille Ball. Bawdy, blunt, and with that terrific throaty voice. So I can only imagine what it sounded like when she presented my teenaged mother with an engraved cigarette case for her birthday, saying, “Michelle, if you’re gonna smoke, smoke right.”

  It’s a valid point. Sadly, and perhaps ironically, my Oma died of emphysema when I was twenty-one, which I guess means that she smoked really, really right.

  “Oh, you little shit,” I can hear her calling me from her grave.

  LOVE, SACRIFICE, AND EPT

  Nadine Friedman

  As I type, a pregnancy test marinates on the bathroom sink while I plow through a twelve-pack of Polly-O string cheese. I bought both at the bodega fifteen minutes ago; until then, I’d been ignoring my absurdly late period and my newly flowering C cups. I’d recognize the symptoms. I’d had a miscarriage ten months before and didn’t want to face it.

  I feared the word “mother,” mainly because I feared becoming my mother.

  I remember an adolescence characterized by power struggles, in which my mother offered me food and gentle recommendations about weight management in equal measure. There was maddening passive aggression—no, she didn’t need a sweater but it is so drafty in here.

  “The world is coming to an end!” she’d declare daily when listening to the radio. Catastrophe was always around the corner. It turned out she was right. It was around the corner. There would be long, hideous years in which she disintegrated from multiple sclerosis into a cloistered fury who wouldn’t take your hand when she fell down.

  The last thing I want to become is her, but my life course indicates otherwise. I have an autoimmune disease, clunky jewelry, ambivalence, disordered eating habits, and a collage of (maternity-based) neuroses. Pregnancy is of Chicken Little–caliber for me, because it means we’re both screwed.

  I’d only ever imagined her as my mother, but I knew she had also once been a child. An independent but dutiful Jewish girl from Queens, raised by a warmly fretful mother and a silent baker dad in a Far Rockaway townhouse. Devotion to her parents was balanced with occasional indiscretions—dancing, flirting, a few weekend trips to Puerto Rico. She did secretarial work that in 2013 I’d consider sexist, but in 1975 made her proud.

  I think of us as opposites, but the more my mind wanders and the minutes tick by and I look at a 1971 photo—her and my father looking big-haired, sleek, and iconic—I know that we are more alike than I want to admit. She asked my father out at a bar at twenty-six, snarking on his age and letting him buy her a Tanqueray and tonic. I did almost the same thing to my fiancé some forty years later.

  She supported her friends, talked to strangers, and complimented all women; in her own way, she was a feminist, too. The last time she saw my best friend, her mind had deteriorated so deeply that she could barely recognize anyone or speak in more than a mumble. Still, my mother called out to her as we left my parents’ house with warmth and clarity: “You’re beautiful, Dondrie. Have fun.”

  She refused to accept help from anyone, one of my own irritating traits, and was stubborn when it came to admitting weakness. Although she’d lost the ability to drive from optic neuritis by the time I was twelve, she still drove me back and forth to school in her bile-colored Chevrolet. One time, she knocked a side mirror off someone else’s Honda and my brother, a pearl-clutcher even at fifteen, demanded we leave a note. My mother and I locked eyes in the rearview and she kept driving, pretending not to hear. It was scandalizing, and though it was based in her denial of her condition and actual lawlessness, I thought it was still pretty badass.

  I inherited her control issues about food as a young working woman. In her twenties and freaking out about whatever fatty kosher meal her mom would cook that night, my mom would stop at the diner for a covert tuna sandwich. Her mother never knew why she wasn’t hungry after work. Even further back, we shared a rudely rebellious food behavior. As a child, if she didn’t like dinner, she’d throw it out the kitchen window when no one was looking. I did the same thing, but in a less forgivable venue—synagogue.

  For the four years I attended Hebrew school (at eleven, I announced my uneasiness with God and its adherent cultural requirement to get up at 8:00 a.m. on Sundays), our Passover Seders were always concluded with a horrendously bland Seder. Hard-boiled eggs, warm salt water, and sludgy haroseth on matzah. I’d accept a plate of the sugary mud and not-fun carbs and, while the rabbi mused on about my people’s suffering (I empathized, if the food was anywhere as bad as this), I’d creep to the classroom window. Looking out, grieving for the Israelites’ tale of loss and liberty, I’d toss my plate out the window and onto the synagogue’s front lawn. Until I renounced Judaism, passersby on Bellmore Avenue could be sure to see walnut-and-apple-drenched perennials on Pesach.

  It is a way in which I like, and am like, her.

  I have no idea what happened to that rabbi, but I think frequently about the one that spoke at her funeral. He said the dead still occupy the earth. It’s not theology; it’s logic. It’s biological. I mean, I’m here, right? And technically, I’m her. What’s happening in the bathroom right now is just more biology doing its thing. He spoke of motherhood, of roots and branches. When we lose mothers, he said, they are the dust around us. It explains the perpetual sensation that she’s hovering somewhere near me.

  If she is here, I wish she’d tell me something about motherhood. Not advice; I have the Internet for that. I want her experience, now that I’m listening and perhaps ready to have my own children. I think part of her pain was her inability to provide more. She was involuntarily demoted from mother-nurturer to child-invalid. She loved being a mother; imagine getting the life you wanted but having to watch it from a prison television.

  Motherhood is a branch of love. Love is rooted in sacrifice, which is earth-bound in pain. Motherhood is most certainly pain. During my last bathroom reckoning with a pregnancy test, it came out positive, and horror overcame me. I rode around Brooklyn with the pee-covered stick in my coat pocket, calling friends, demanding an out. It turned into a single week of terror, self-loathing, fear of fatness, and slow acceptance of my desire to become a mother. I decided to keep the pregnancy, then at six weeks. And just as quickly, I lost it in one harrowing night, over the course of an SVU marathon.

  I don’t want to do this again. With one miscarriage under my belt, I’m working with some lousy data. My brief experience as “mother” was one of failure and disappointment, of sadness and blood.

  But isn’t that motherhood anyway?

  I have to check on the test results now. I stand up, a mountain of string-cheese wrappers floating to the ground. I walk into the bathroom unprepared for the result—a negative, a miscarriage, a baby. And as much as I never wanted to be around her (let alone be like her), I wish she was here right now.

  EVICTION OF THE ALTE MOID

  Deb Margolin

  My mother is a mystery to me. I can finish her sentences; I know how to make her laugh; I know how to annoy her. (Jewish mothers and daughters excel at this particular kind of knowledge of each other.) My mother’s image is as familiar to me as my own hands. Yet, I almost never saw her body; she kept it hidden. She never revealed certain aspects of her intellect or mind-set. I don’t know very much about the person more tenderly familiar to me than almost anyone else. It’s really bizarre, this contradiction, and I suspect it’s very common.

  The greatest and most sacred mystery concerning my mother is the way in which we laugh together, uncontrollably, madly. Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theater, once wrote: “Laughter is a collapse of control in response to something which can’t be fitted neatly into the file cabinet of the mind… It is a form of ecstasy, a collapse of reason into a basic clarity.”

  The laughter I share with m
y mother comes on us in a fit which I can sometimes, but not always, see coming, and cannot in either case control. Neither can she. It is an entirely intimate kind of laughter; it lacks boundary and definition. Certain kinds of things set it off, but these are hard to characterize precisely. This laughter my mother and I sometimes get going together has been the absolute best part of being her daughter. I don’t really share this kind of laughing with anyone else.

  It took me until I was one week away from my thirty-seventh birthday to get around to getting married, and that felt rushed. My mother was relieved that I’d finally decided to take this step; for years she referred to me, jokingly, as an alte moid—Yiddish for old maid. I just thought it sounded like a breath mint or something. In an attempt to help me see the folly of my ways, she would call me at my New York apartment on a daily basis and ask: “Well? Are you married? Do you have any children?” This was her unsubtle way of urging me to pay attention to my ticking biological clock.

  With the announcement to my parents of my engagement, my mother, who doesn’t really love shopping any more than I do, informed me that I needed to “register.” Apparently this means that you go to a store and pick a pattern of china or dishes or knives or forks or serving utensils or pitchers or blenders or whatever and then tell everyone coming to the wedding that they can buy you one of the items on this daunting, depressing, and dour domestic list. (Although I love to eat, I’m phobic about food preparation, and if I have to make someone a cup of tea, I’m sleepless for weeks thinking about which pot to use for boiling the water.)

  Mom decided we should go to Bloomingdale’s because they were having some kind of sale on housewares. I may not have mentioned that Mother is a sale hawk and a coupon clipper. When we’ve cleaned areas of the house, we’ve found coupons for products that went out of business during the Second World War. Once, when she was in the hospital with a serious heart problem, hooked up to tubes, monitors, and wires, she wouldn’t let my father and me leave before scouring her purse for a coupon for Land O’Lakes butter.