Devil in the Details

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Devil in the Details Page 5

by Jennifer Traig


  I would continue going to Hebrew school long after the rest of the car pool dropped out. When our religious instruction finally devolved into monthly potlucks at which we were encouraged to ‘rap’ with other Jewish kids, my sister dropped out, too, but I kept showing up, tamale pie in hand.

  It was all I had. Outside of Hebrew school our religious practice, in keeping with our half-and-half household, was half-assed. My scrupulosity hadn’t come along to ruin the fun for everyone yet, and we still ate shrimp and bacon with abandon. On Friday nights, our only ritual was watching the entire ABC lineup. We observed the Jewish holidays halfheartedly, preferring the Christian ones, which tended to involve more candy and presents. Oh, we were careful to secularize them. There was never any Jesus talk, and the icing on the hot cross buns looked more like asterisks than crucifixes, generous frosting being more important to us than religious imagery – but they still weren’t bagels.

  Of course there was going to be crossover. Of course things were going to get messy. That’s just how it works. In our house the commingling was compounded, because it was our Catholic mother who was in charge of our Jewish upbringing. My mother was the one who carted us off to Hebrew school and synagogue, who cooked seders and sufganiyot. Our Hebrew teachers knew we were half Jewish, but they assumed the Jewish side was the maternal one; our mother was the one who came to shul. Besides, she passed. She’s got a Jewish first name and features. She is, in fact, the only person on either side of the family who’s had work done on her nose. My father’s Jewishness, on the other hand, was invisible, deeply felt but impossible to see. “I don’t need to practice,” he told us. “I’ve got it down already.”

  It was how he’d been raised, born to Russians who’d grown up in Manchuria, settled in France, then moved to China before ending up in San Francisco. Jewishness was their only constant. But it was a particular kind of Jewishness, a cultural one that relied less on strictures than sensibilities. It was fine to eat ham and to drive on Shabbat, but to put a bumper sticker on the car – that was unthinkable.

  They weren’t anti-Catholic but anti-catholic. Their aesthetics were particular but hard to parse out. It wasn’t the Jewish American norm. They drank sugared sodas and dry wine, wore sunglasses but not sunscreen. Their Judaism meant shopping at Gump’s but not Emporium, eating kasha but not kishke, reading Isaac Bashevis Singer but not Isaac Asimov. It meant doing things a certain way.

  They had a large circle of friends whose tastes and background were nearly identical to theirs, eclectic as they were, but they didn’t really fit into the larger Jewish community. Oh, they made a stab at it. They joined a synagogue shortly after coming to the United States. It was a showy Reform temple, unlike the Orthodox congregations of their youth, and they hadn’t cared for the robed choir and English prayers. But it would do. They enrolled the kids in its Sunday school and made my father have a bar mitzvah. It was a glorious orgy of gifts, pens and watches and gadgets, most of them broken before the day was out because he disassembled them to see how they worked. His relationship with formal Jewish practice met a similar end. He learned the prayers and the principles, saw how it all went together, and put it aside. It was a nice thing to have around, but you didn’t have to play with it every day.

  Our mother, however, was used to great daily helpings of dogma and devotion. She had been raised attending parochial schools, going to church every week, decorating her bedroom with crepe paper altars to Mary. Her parents were devoutly religious and made the family say the rosary together after dinner well into the kids’ teens. Every night they would kneel in a circle on the living room carpet, the girls’ skirts fanning out like bluebells as they prayed with fervent devotion that none of their friends could see them through the open window.

  Their friends wouldn’t have cared. They were all Catholic, too. As for Jews, my mother, in childhood, had seen only three: two neighbors and a gentleman spotted at the market while on a trip to visit a cloistered cousin in upstate New York. “There’s a Jew,” her grandmother had remarked, nodding toward the young man examining the canned tomatoes. My mother was simultaneously horrified by her grandmother’s prejudice and impressed by her perceptiveness. How did she know? Was there some secret Jewish signifier? My mother figured it was the horn-rimmed glasses, a belief only confirmed, many years later, by my father’s possession of the same.

  For the most part, my mother and her family enjoyed friendly relations with the few Jews in town, saving their true scorn for the Protestants. My mother’s one-day courtship with a Jewish classmate passed unremarked, but her sister’s Congregationalist boyfriend provoked an intervention. “If we don’t stop this now they’ll get married and have children – no, child –,” my great-grandmother warned, “who will grow up thinking church consists of coffee and cake.”

  My mother’s marriage meant no church at all. It had made her ineligible to receive communion, and she stopped going to church altogether. Having married outside her faith she wasn’t in what canon law calls a “state of grace.” Personally, I would have taken advantage of this condition to pursue some new hobbies, like gluttony or sloth. My mother filled her time with soap operas and latch-hooked wall hangings instead. She seemed reasonably happy, but one of her friends, worried about her immortal soul, began a campaign to get her back into the Church. It would be simple, she promised. She’d found a priest who was willing to ‘rectify’ my parents’ union – this was the official term for the procedure – and after that my mother would be eligible to receive the sacrament again. The only problem, she said, was that they had to hurry; the priest had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and she didn’t think he had much time left. Were she and my father free on Wednesday?

  They were. Hence, wedding number three. Twenty-five years later, both the priest and my parents’ marriage are still standing; my parents’ relationship, it seems, was the more chronic condition.

  My father hadn’t wanted to make a tsimmes of it, and arranged for the ceremony to take place while my sister and I were in school, not even telling us about it until it was done. This was a serious affront. I was seven at the time, and my parents knew my sole aspiration in life was to be a flower girl. I was annoyed that I’d been left out, and angry that my mother had forgone accessories. She’d worn a suit, a suit, to her previous two weddings and now she’d gone and wasted a third opportunity. I thought the occasion called for leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a tiara, a twenty-foot train. “What do you mean, you didn’t wear a veil?” I demanded. “And where was your bouquet? Geez, what a crappy wedding.” But there was cake and punch and a little dinner party, to mark my parents’ third wedding and my mother’s return to her faith.

  When my mother started going to church, my sister and I did, too. This wasn’t an attempt to convert us; she simply couldn’t find a babysitter. She actively discouraged us from participating, growing alarmed when we picked up a hymnal. “Here,” she said, fishing a horoscope guide out of her purse. “Read this instead.” Still, it made my father uncomfortable, and he finally asked her to stop bringing us. He needn’t have worried. The only aspect of church that piqued my interest was the kneeler, that ingenious red vinyl-padded shelf that flipped down from its nook, allowing you to genuflect in comfort. Man, was that great. I wanted one for home. It would be perfect for watching TV on the rug right up close, as I preferred, or for inspecting the welcome mat for dead bugs.

  And it would have made a nice addition to our interfaith home, I thought, with its multi-denominational decor. On the refrigerator door there was a picture of Jesus made out of what appeared to be fruit leather, held up by a magnet from the Jewish Federation. On the mantel, a menorah next to a frond left over from last year’s Palm Sunday. The front door sported a mezuzah and a Christmas wreath no one had bothered to take down yet. Oh, we tried to keep things separate and compartmentalized. My mothers’ prayer cards and rosaries were tucked away here; my yarmulkes and prayer books stored safely away from the rest of it, there. But there was still so mu
ch cross-contamination. It was all a big jumble.

  The anti-Semitic sixth-grade classmate who worried that my Jewishness was contagious was partly right, it turns out. We do rub off on one another. We absorb one another’s credos, customs, cuss words. I’d say we bring out the best in one another, but it’s more like we borrow the worst. My father swears like a true Catholic, invoking the names of all the saints and apostles, while my mother spits her epithets out in Yiddish.

  I’m their child in every way. Though it’s true that I’ve never felt anything but Jewish, I have plenty of habits that betray my half-breed origins. It’s a fact that I drink Mountain Dew with breakfast. I watch Chris Farley movies. I can’t stand lox or white-fish salad. I buy the wrong mustard and I smear mayonnaise on just about everything, even french fries. But I hasten to point out that this is a habit I picked up from my father, a man whose favorite snack is a mayonnaise sandwich. On white bread.

  When I was thirteen I underwent a conversion to make my Jewishness official. But it didn’t really convert anything, didn’t erase my goyish affections or my gentile ties. It just made me a religious Jew who has a nun for a cousin and a Catholic lay lector for a mother.

  We rub off on one another. No amount of washing would undo it, no amount of vacuuming would set things straight. Our home was a hodgepodge, a halfway house, and I sometimes felt I was being held there until I was socialized enough to assimilate in the real world. I thought I never would. That’s normally the great fear with intermarriage – assimilation into the mainstream, loss of the outside culture – but as I grew older, crazier, and more religious, I felt as though I didn’t blend in anywhere. I was just so weird. I didn’t even fit in my own family.

  This was largely my doing. If there was disharmony in our interfaith home, I’m the one who caused it. I was behind the Easter Dinner Fiasco of 1982, the Passover Tableware Crisis of 1986, the Shabbat Refrigerator Light Bulb Feud of 1988. My parents had done everything right, ruling the house by dictatorship, a method that works so well for much of the Third World. It didn’t work for me. Every day, I was stirring up insurgencies, issuing fatwas, declaring holy war on the whole damn family.

  The problem, besides my raging mental illness, was that I felt cheated. As a child my favorite book was All-of-a-Kind Family. I loved those girls in their identical pinafores, helping their mother make honey cake and challah. It galled me that we were nothing like them. It was bad enough that our outfits didn’t match. Having religions that didn’t match was just too much. They were the all of a kind family; all we were was kind of a family. Sure, we shared genes, a last name, and substandard table manners, but other than that, what bound us together?

  It’s a strange thing, not sharing a faith with your mother, a person with whom you otherwise share so much. It made discipline difficult. What can your parents threaten you with if you don’t share the same cosmology? After flirting with monsters and the bogeyman, my mother finally settled on Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Until I was ten years old I was terrified that if I misbehaved, the SLA would swoop in and force me to accessorize with heavy artillery and olive drab, which did nothing for my complexion. On the other hand, at least the SLA family members all shared a common belief. At least they dressed alike.

  But us, we were a mess, my father and sister and I subscribing to three different strains of Judaism and my mother subscribing to a different faith entirely. The best sport of any of us, she probably had it hardest of all. We supported her religious practice only when it involved tasty snacks for the rest of us.

  It’s hard. Tell it, Cher. We didn’t move from town to town, and we didn’t feel unwelcome, like we couldn’t hang around. But boy, we had our moments. I made sure of that.

  I imagine it’s not always so difficult; my scrupulosity must have made a challenging situation completely intolerable. I know plenty of well-adjusted, happy people who are half-Jewish, just like me. Or not so like. For all we have in common, we have more that differs. That’s the thing about these mergers. It’s a strange math, the equation differing from family to family, from child to child, the outcome wildly dissimilar each time. Even in my own family, the sum varies, the parts adding up differently. I ended up an observant Jew, and my sister is a non-practicing agnostic; my mother, devoutly Catholic; my father, baffled by all three of us.

  Over the years we’ve figured a way to make things work. Mostly this involves keeping our mouths shut. We do not discuss our respective religions. Others are fair game, and we sure do enjoy a good Pentecostal joke. But Judaism and Catholicism are off-limits. We don’t discuss the pope or abortion or the spread of ultra-Orthodoxy. Yeast infections are a perfectly acceptable topic for mealtime conversation at our house, but heaven help you if you bring up Saint Paul.

  We all have our touchy subjects. Mine is my interfaith background. Though I’m unimpeachably Jewish now, there are still things I can’t do, people I can’t marry, royal titles I can’t hold. The Hebrew term for someone like me is ger, meaning convert, or, literally, stranger. It’s an unappealing word, a mongrel growl. Couldn’t they have come up with a better term for us? Why not something cool and futuristic, like shapeshifter, or something glamorous, like Mrs. Eddie Fisher?

  Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. As Cher sings, you can’t run away from what you are. Over the years, I’ve stopped trying. I have come to accept the law and my lot. I don’t really want to be king, and I don’t want a different family, either. Sure, we don’t share a faith, but we do share the things that really matter. We all enjoy pancakes, off-color jokes, and schadenfreude. When we get together, there’s no fighting over what to watch: we all love Cops. And when the shirtless, inebriated perp wets himself, we share a smile and a knowing look that says yes, yes, deep down we’re not so different.

  Deep down, we’re not. And if I could dicker with my birthright, I’d probably do something about my hair first. Oh, the hair. Geez, Cher. You don’t know how good you have it.

  INTERSTITIAL

  PHOTO, SANTA’S LAP, 1974

  ∨ Devil in the Details ∧

  The Good Book

  My childhood was reasonably happy, but it wasn’t very exciting. Oh, sure, there was the religious mania, but on the whole that was pretty dull; I never managed to make any bushes burn or seas part. Like Bilaam’s, my sister’s ass could speak, but that was hardly a miracle. We had no signs and no wonders. But we could turn anything into whine. “This town sucks,” I announced, surveying the lack of major retail outlets. “Our dumb pets don’t know any tricks,” my sister declared when they failed to amuse us. “There’s nothing on TV,” we moaned, “and we’ve never been so bored in our lives.”

  Vicky and I were completely incapable of entertaining ourselves, and our parents weren’t much help. It’s not that we didn’t have ideas. We knew exactly what items would keep us happy and interested, but our parents rejected them all. A circus-trained primate, a backyard water slide, a child-sized Mercedes – the answer was always no. They refused to get cable even when I threatened to call Child Protective Services. “Nice try, pussycat, but subjecting you to UHF stations doesn’t constitute child abuse,” my mother said. “Now, if we were forcing you to watch PBS I’d say you had a point.”

  Ours was a hardscrabble youth of syndicated reruns and gardening shows, and my sister and I frequently endured long stretches of tooth-gnashing boredom. Sundays were the worst. In our house, Sunday was known as the Bored’s Day. The rest of the week we could scrape together a few playmates or victims, but on Sunday there was nothing to do and no one to do it to. Every Sunday morning all our friends were carted away by the Bible Bus, a merrily painted wagonette that cruised the town snatching up children and hauling them off to church for a day of sing-alongs and Noah’s Ark puppet shows. Hours later they would return, flush-faced and sky-high on doughnuts and punch. By then it would be too late to play, and they would stagger up to their front doors laughing at their churchy little inside jokes. What was so funny about Nimrod? Wh
y did they crack up anytime someone said ‘Enos’? “It’s a Sunday school thing,” our friends said, wiping hysterical tears away. “You really had to be there.”

  Sundays were awful. The long day stretched out before us with nothing to watch but golf and Mexican variety shows, nothing to do but comb our parents’ room for entertainment. One Sunday afternoon, after I’d mined their closets, carpets, and waste-bins without turning up anything of interest, I turned to their bookshelf. Two volumes caught my eye: the Bible and Haywire, Brooke Hayward’s account of her Hollywood family’s descent into ruin. That neither one was appropriate reading matter for a nine-year-old didn’t occur to me. Heaven and hell, I thought. This should be fun.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon flipping between the two. Each book made a big impression, but unfortunately not a distinct one. Because I read them simultaneously, they remain inextricably linked for me and I tend to confuse the characters. Was King Saul the emotionally absent workaholic who left his family for Slim Hawks? Was Margaret Sullavan the young princess who found Moses in the rushes? I picture Noah and his family in designer bathing suits, hand in hand on a California beach, and I sometimes find myself wondering what chapter of Kings Peter Fonda appears in.

  Well, both books make good reading, that’s for sure. And on that first day I cracked their respective spines, I beheld all that was contained therein and lo, I judged it good. So this was what all the fuss was about. I read about Adam and Eve, and Leland and Pamela, and felt like I, too, had tasted the fruit of knowledge. Who knew it would be so juicy? Divorce, suicide, fratricide, nervous breakdowns, booze – this was spectacularly educational reading.

 

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