by Rachel Ament
“You will meet people in life who don’t like you. You don’t need to help them by using such offensive terms.”
• • •
My grandmother was the first person to ever tell me not to say the word “shiksa.”
עסקיש / Shiksa
Historically, shiksa is a derogatory term. It was meant for non-Jewish women, to call them unclean. An abomination.
At the age of twelve, I had only learned it in its more popular usage, meaning a non-Jewish woman (and an incredibly irresistible one at that).
I had heard it only in playful ways—a friend to a friend about a new girlfriend, a term of endearment to a loved one, a sense of pride from one woman to another.
I am the daughter of a New York City Jew (my father) and a Christian missionary from a farmhouse in Maine (my mother). My parents met at graduate school and shared a passion for helping people and Bob Dylan. While religion wasn’t ever something that ran through our family tree growing up, tradition was.
From all sides, we had tradition. Tradition after tradition.
We had Christmas songs that my mother played on the piano while we all gathered around and sang along. We had green onions with which to whack each other while singing “Dayenu” on Passover. Sometimes our traditions would overlap, interacting with each other and creating hybrid practices just for the four of us: my parents, my brother, and me. I remember the first year Easter and Passover were in the same week—from then on, we adorned out Seder plate with Easter eggs every time the two holidays got close enough.
My grandmother once visited when I was in middle school. I was in that phase when I was trying to act older than I was, desperate to be accepted by my older brother and his friends and to get my own phone line at our house. I was sporting a new vocabulary, learning sarcasm, talking about how horrible the Bush administration had been in its first year. At twelve years old, I had a lot of opinions.
It was a small comment. I was on the phone with a friend. My grandmother was in the kitchen, which attached to our living room through an open walkway. I sat on our living-room sofa, my feet curled against the overstuffed, flower-patterned cushions.
“Dad didn’t want a Seder this year and then changed his mind at the last minute. Mom had to run out and get all the stuff for a dinner party. She forgot—because she’s such a shiksa—and got two loaves of French bread. It was hilarious. We just laughed about it and she made me promise not to tell Dad. She had to use Lipton chicken for the matzah ball soup!”
My grandmother walked in and sat silently in the living room as I finished my phone call. She waited for me to get off and asked me to come sit next to her. I slowly got up and crossed the room, joining her on the other couch. She explained to me that what I had said about my mother was inappropriate, not just in reference to my mother but in reference to any woman. That it was rude, but more importantly, as women, we needed to respect each other.
That was when she told me that I would meet many people in my life who didn’t like me for being a woman, or for being Jewish, and that I didn’t need to help them by using such offensive terms.
I was confused. I was an adolescent. I remember thinking that my mother, by all definitions I knew of the word, was a shiksa. And based on their relationship, I had no doubt that my grandmother thought my mom was one. I thought my grandmother had always been upset by my father not marrying a Jewish woman—what had changed? I apologized and nodded my head. I promised to never say it again. A guilty promise, one that I broke seven years later at a dining-room table in the South.
It was my first real lesson in feminism, served to me by my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother.
• • •
Thirteen years later, I was lying in my bed. The sun was peeking through the blinds in my room, which were always closed to protect me from my neighbors. The man I was seeing lay sleepily next to me. He had a protective and warm hand on my back as I woke up. We had played hooky that day—calling out of our jobs and hiding beneath blankets together. In a few weeks’ time, I would be going home with him to stay in his childhood house. I would be going to meet his family and his friends.
I was calm about it, as my nineteen-year-old need for approval had somewhat subsided. He came from an incredibly wealthy family, and his friends were generally cut from a different cloth than mine (which were his words, not mine). He had told me numerous times that he wondered about his own friends—if they were actually the type of people he wanted to spend his time with. He had met my friends and my family—and he has been shocked.
“You come from a different world than I do. You need to understand, people don’t usually get along with their parents like you do. It is—you are—weird.”
When he was trying to be playful, he would tell me I fulfilled a role for him. We were a mismatched pair to begin with. He would joke that when I finally moved on from him, he would tell stories of the “liberal from Maine” he dated when he was in his twenties.
The night before, in preparation for my visit, I had told him about my other experiences with boyfriends’ families. I told him about being in college and visiting my boyfriend’s parents in Tennessee. I told him about feeling out of place, about feeling alone, about the shiksa comment.
“Don’t worry about pleasing my family,” he said. “You don’t stand a chance to begin with, so it’s silly to focus on it too much.”
That morning, he held me. As we woke up, he wrapped his arms around me and pressed his warm body against mine.
“How does it feel? You’re going to be the shiksa again—except this time with a WASP-y family,” he cooed in my ear. “Good morning, my little shiksa.”
My body tensed. I thought of my mother—of my grandmother.
“Please never call me that again.” He noticed how cold I had gotten and immediately backed off.
I lay by myself and thought. From saying the word, from telling the story, I had given him permission to think of me that way. I had accepted that I was playing a role—a temptress, an abomination. I was allowing myself to be deemed “not good enough.”
I thought about how the word sounded coming out of his mouth. I thought of the S and the hard K and I thought of my grandmother again. She had passed away that year at ninety-nine years and six months old. I remembered her words to me thirteen years before, and for the first time truly felt them.
JEWISH MOM GENES
Mara Altman
I grew up in San Marcos, a southern California town so devoid of Jews that most people didn’t even know what “Jewish” meant, like they thought it was a rare type of salami or mistook it for an ephemeral state of being. As in, question: “Are you Jewish?”
Answer: “No, I’m actually kind of hungry.”
Somehow, even some of my teachers in grade school hadn’t heard of Judaism. One day in second grade, we were preparing for the holiday season, which to most meant Christmas. Our assignment was to make Santa Claus ornaments. I told my teacher that I didn’t celebrate Christmas. “Then what do you celebrate?” she asked.
“Hanukkah,” I said.
She then asked me which colors were used for this Hanukkah holiday thing. I told her blue and white. “Great. No problem,” she said.
Later that day, to my mother’s amusement, I brought home a miniature blue-and-white clay Santa Claus.
Because my mother was the sole Jewish mother I knew, it took me until adulthood to realize that there was a stereotypical Jewish mother. Without other Jewish mothers around, I assumed the following equation was how Jewish mothers were made: Mom + Jewish = Jewish Mother. So it’s true, my mother was a Jewish mother—maybe not in the traditional or stereotypical sense—but I didn’t learn that until later.
As a child, every way that my mom differed from my friends’ moms became distinctive Jewish characteristics. She was obscenely obsessed with dark chocolate. If women could marry chocolate bars,
my father would probably be a Ghirardelli chunk. That was Jewish. She didn’t watch TV except for Star Trek: The Next Generation. So apparently, Jewish mothers only watched sci-fi. She didn’t shave any part of her body. So clearly, all Jewish moms loved sporting hairy pits and limbs.
The list of her quirks went on. My mom let my two brothers and me eat sugar cereals like Frosted Flakes and Cap’n Crunch for dinner. Food was always available but never pressed upon us. We’d leave food on our plates—everything from strips of flank steak to florets of broccoli. Her motto when it came to food was: “Kids will eat what they need.”
She made sure I knew how babies were made before most kids knew how to wipe their own tushes. It was one of those things I just grew up knowing—knowledge I took for granted—like the fact that humans have two arms or that we live on a planet called Earth or that Jewish girls will often be afflicted with unibrows as well as pubic hair that grows halfway down their thighs.
My mom believed that parents who talked about their kids all the time were boring. The only thing more boring than bragging about your kids was talking about body aches and pains.
“Mara, no one enjoys hearing about your toe blister.”
I mean, implementing a rule that one shouldn’t kvetch about his or her aches and pains is basically sacrilege in the Jewish culture, but I didn’t know about that then.
“But—” I’d begin.
My mom could anticipate my next question. “No, Mara, your toe blister is not a tumor.”
I didn’t know that Jewish moms were supposed to be anxious and overbearing, because my mom never once yelled rote parental warnings at me like, “You’re gonna catch a cold if you don’t wear a jacket!” In fact, she promoted taking nude mud baths in the backyard regardless of the weather.
She didn’t worry that my heartburn might actually be the precursor to a heart attack or that I might have early onset glaucoma. The likelihood of alien abduction didn’t even cross her mind.
So, to me, Jewish mothers were mostly calm and collected. They didn’t sweat the small stuff (unless you ate the last of their dark chocolate bar).
See, but someone had to worry, so I did. I couldn’t help myself; it was almost as if this tendency toward neurosis were encoded in my genes. I was stricken with hypochondria strong enough for the whole diaspora. I became a gold-medal fretter. When I developed a little bump on my forehead, I suspected it was cancer and left a movie theater mid-watch to make my mom inspect it in the sunlight. I was probably the only tween in modern history to be relieved to find out that I was experiencing the dawn of adolescent acne.
At age fifteen, when I started dating, my mom continued on her distinct parenting path. She told me that I could have my first boyfriend spend the night.
“Have him stay over, if you want,” she said. No other moms I knew were saying stuff like that. These Jewish moms were totally bonkers.
I stared at her, horrified. “In my bed?”
She nodded.
I think that’s when the voice started to develop in my head. At least, that’s when I can best pinpoint its origins. I found myself talking to myself and being critical of her judgment. Does she not know how irresponsible that is, having a boy—a boy with a schmeckle—spend the night?
As mentioned earlier, I already knew what those things could do.
The internal monologue kept going—in a female’s voice, like mine, but gruffer and more critical. You could get pregnant and then what about your future? Have you thought about that, huh? Your future?
“You don’t have to put it in capital letters,” my mom would say. “It’s just fun to spend the night with someone you like.”
And sure, my mom cared about education, but it wasn’t sacrosanct. She took me out of school once every couple of months for a mother and daughter day, but it was hard for me. I’d feel guilty. “But Mom,” I’d say, “we’re learning about parabolas that day.”
“What do you think you’ll remember down the line?” she’d respond, “One more day sitting in class or going out with your mom?”
Part of me thought it sounded awesome—ditch class, wahooo!—but I’d have to fight that voice in my head, which by this time had grown even stronger. Don’t be derelict in your academic duties, Mara. How are you going to get into an Ivy League with those truancies?
As I matured, the voice continued. It seemed to have my best interests at heart, but it was never satisfied with my accomplishments—always wanting more and better. Oh, you think you’re going to get an A in biology if you go to that party tonight? You better stay home and study.
Sometimes the voice would just be flat-out judgmental and cruel. You should eat more of that cake; you spent a billion years making it, it’d say, followed by, Too bad you ate so much cake. You’ll never fit into your new culottes now.
I just couldn’t win.
• • •
As my mother had suspected, I got into college despite my multiple truancies. College was immediately revelatory, but not in the way I expected. I met other Jewish peers for the first time and hence was introduced to other Jewish mothers and, finally, to their lore.
I had expected to finally have something in common with these new friends and to be able to bond—“Your mom has hairy legs, too, right? Ohmygod, isn’t it wild?”—but instead that’s when I finally discovered my mom was an aberration. An anomaly. We’re talking opposites. So different, in fact, that under “Jewish Mother” in the dictionary, you might see my mother’s cute little face pictured under antonym. Apparently my math had been wrong; my equation—Jewish + Mom—didn’t actually equal “Jewish Mom.”
Other kids’ moms were described as smothering and overprotective and fixated on accomplishments. These ladies also, I heard, got all hardcore about their Jewish daughters marrying Jewish boys.
Even that piece didn’t match my own experience. All these guys I’d been dating—all the males I’d grown up with—hadn’t been Jewish, and my mom never gave a crap. She thought that love should come before a religion or cultural affiliation, though she had mentioned I might have something in common with Jewish boys to help make a strong relational foundation. “You both grew up on bagels and lox,” she said. “That could mean something.”
Then she’d be quick to add, “But it’s really up to you.”
I would even eventually move to India and date a Muslim. His father was an Imam and all his sisters wore burkas. My mom didn’t even flinch. She never met him but saw a picture.
“What a handsome man,” she said approvingly. “He sounds wonderful.” Her openness was completely dumbfounding.
The differences kept cropping up, so many that they couldn’t go unaddressed much longer. Something was wrong. Who was this lady? For example, I met a guy in class who told me that his mom called him every other day and would get huffy and wish holy bloody nightmares upon him if he couldn’t talk. He said most Jewish moms were that way and kind of shrugged it off. I couldn’t relate. I called my mom more often than she did me, and when I did, she often wouldn’t be able to chat.
“Sorry, sweetie. I’m busy. Call you shortly.”
WTF?
Was my mom even Jewish? Was this some elaborate hoax she’d been playing on me? Maybe by telling me we were Jewish, she was trying to get me to understand and be sensitive to the life of a minority. I mean, all the things I thought were Jewish—the no pressure, no worry, and even the Star Trek–loving—turned out not to be very Semitic at all. I always thought that once I met other Jews, it’d all make sense, but instead I found myself more perplexed than ever.
So during my first summer break, I had to decipher this discrepancy. With some reluctance, I sat my mom down and asked. “Mom, how did you become this way?”
I didn’t even have to explain what I was asking; it was like she already knew that this conversation was coming. She sat across from me with a cup of tea snuggled b
etween two palms and began to answer circuitously, telling me about her childhood in much more detail than ever before.
“Your grandparents were…”—she said, pausing to find the right word—“characters.”
“Wait,” I said, “that’s not what I was ask—”
“Hold on,” she said. “I’m getting there.”
She explained that my grandparents were second-generation Jews of Eastern European ancestry. In the early ’50s, they settled with their young family in a two-story house near Culver Boulevard in Los Angeles. My grandpa owned and operated a small retail plant nursery called Fuchsia Land. He crushed snails—the nemesis of his darling flora—with his bare hands, and he watered his plants so often that his pointer finger became deformed—permanently crooked—because of the eons he spent with it bent over the spigot of a hose.
Before that, he had assembled sandwiches at Canter’s Deli, a famous Jewish deli on Fairfax Avenue. He’d got his start in the culinary world by working as an army cook during World War II. There were so many cockroaches skittering around in the kitchen that he had no other option but to bake with them. He told the soldiers that the muffins were blueberry.
While my grandpa was outside with his fuchsias, my grandmother, a muumuu-wearing five-foot woman with fiery red hair, ran the household. By the time I was a conscious human being, she had Alzheimer’s, but my mom explained that in her heyday, “Jewish mother” flowed through her veins as readily and excessively as plasma. She was an expert—we’re talking full-blown professional—at smothering her children with love and guilt. To wit, my mother’s two siblings are both doctors.
As my mother continued to explain, she began to lean forward and clench the table. She was getting revved up. It turns out that my grandma was quite a dramatic figure, and my mother was finally ready to let me in on her strange, often outrageous past.
She said that my grandma watched over her and her siblings like a drill sergeant at boot camp. She slept in the living room on a foldout sofa bed and used it as a command post in the mornings (and at night to catch anyone if they stayed out past curfew with a date). If my mom showed up ready for school with a skirt above the knees, she’d quickly be dispatched back to her bedroom to change into something more appropriate. My mom eventually adapted, learning to stuff the clothes she actually wanted to wear in her purse so that she could change at school.