Devil in the Details

by Jennifer Traig

  It was always a disaster, a fire hazard, an eyesore. Even the family pets were moved to register their displeasure. The dog peed on it; the cat ate the needles. A tree doesn’t belong in a house. More specifically, it didn’t belong in our house. It was a violation of the promise the rabbi had extracted from my parents when he married them. Ours was to be a Jewish home, with Jewish kids: no crucifixes, no creches, a mezuzah on every doorpost, giant Stars of David clanging around all our necks. We would fly an Israeli flag from the front porch and on Sunday mornings we would gather, strong and tan from planting trees with our Zionist youth group, to toast our heritage as herring juice ran down our chins.

  It was my father who broke the bargain and brought home the first tree when my sister and I were still babies. My mother was spending Christmas three thousand miles away from the rest of her family, with a husband who had to work Christmas Day and two children who were, likely as not, condemned to hell because she hadn’t been permitted to baptize us. A tree was the least he could do. From there it all followed: the manger scene, the Advent calendar, the stuffed Santa, the silver angels, the red and green wooden block letters my sister always rearranged to spell S-A-T-A-N. A dinky menorah languished off to the side.

  “The best of both worlds,” family friends told us, clucking approvingly. “What lucky girls you are.” But what did they know? Their families’ biggest holiday dilemma was whipped or mashed; ours was only begotten son or false messiah. December is the hardest time of the year for an interfaith family. Oh sure, it sounds great: Maccabees and magi! Candles and carols! Festive meals and, best of all, the presents, double presents, eight days of Hanukkah plus Christmas, making nine glorious days of greed. But my friends’ good-natured jealousy was sadly misplaced. The extra presents always turned out to be crap excavated from the bottom of my mother’s purse, Kleenex packets and breath mints and ballpoint pens bearing Realtors’ names. It’s hard to sustain the holiday spirit of magic and miracles when you’re staring down a stocking stuffed with disposable razors and key chains.

  The interfaith feast that followed didn’t make things any better. Latkes with ranch dressing and spiral-cut ham may be someone’s idea of a dream dinner, but it sure wasn’t mine.

  I might have been a better sport if Hanukkah didn’t get such short shrift. Hanukkah just can’t compete. It was never supposed to. A minor holiday that got trumped up because of Christmas, it’s like a cat in doll clothes, all trussed up in someone else’s party dress and not very happy about it. But we try. Hanukkah is given its token treatment. In elementary school the duty fell to me. I was the only Jewish kid in all six grades. My teachers, flummoxed, always asked me to deliver the lesson. I dutifully prepared handouts and gave a presentation each year. It was only as an adult that I realized how I’d wasted the opportunity. My classmates knew nothing about Judaism; I could have made everything up. “On Hanukkah, Jews are given high-ticket gifts by their gentile friends, who receive nothing in return. On the first night, the Jews are gifted with hair appliances such as curling irons and diffusers. The second night, it is traditional to give consumer electronics, portable stereos and the like. The third night is for gourmet luxuries like aged steaks. Throughout the whole eight days it is customary for gentiles to offer Jews the choicest selections from their lunches and to do the Jews’ homework.”

  My classmates would have fallen for it. I was the only Jew any of them knew, and they tended to over compensate trying to prove they didn’t hold my faith against me. After we first learned about the Holocaust, in fourth grade, a classmate approached me, her eyes wet. “I’m one-eighth German and I feel just awful for what my people did to your people,” she confessed. “Please accept this gum as a token of apology.”

  Yes, I thought. Bring me your reparations. All of you who’ve never received a mezuzah for Christmas, who aren’t crossed by crosses and stars, come before me and present your tribute. Bring your Juicy Fruit and your fruit roll-ups, your candy canes and your chocolate coins, all of it, anything to sweeten the taste in my mouth.

  Nine years old and I was already as bitter as the green cherries dotting the Christmas stollen. By the time I was in high school I’d cast myself as the Little Match Girl in our domestic holiday drama, a world-class sulker hosting a pity party of epic proportions. I was furious that we made so little fuss over Hanukkah and so much over Christmas, furious that we were marking Christmas at all. I mourned missing out on the December 25th experience a Jew is supposed to have, eating Chinese food, renting movies, and making obscene amounts of overtime pay at work. Come Christmas morning I refused to get excited about even the good gifts, preferring to spend the day in a holiday snit. Why should I have to celebrate Christmas? This wasn’t part of the deal, we were supposed to be raised Jewish, no Christianity in the home, it’s not fair, this sucks, this sucks, and that brand-new Atari is making it suck only a tiny bit less.

  My mother is too well-adjusted for self-pity, but I know those holidays were no fiesta for her, either. She had to deal with my fits while quietly suppressing her own. A devout Catholic, she’s spent the last thirty years celebrating Christmas with three people who acknowledge the birthday boy only by taking his name in vain. Watching her trudge off to midnight mass by herself always broke my heart, though never enough to make me join her, as that would have meant missing the late-night dating shows I enjoyed so much. But maybe I should have. She deserves that. She deserves the tree, the trimmings, all of it. This holiday business isn’t her fault; it isn’t anybody’s fault. Even if my father hadn’t caved that first Christmas, the fall was bound to come. Who can resist Christmas? It’s Christmas! Even my Jewish relatives decorate their homes with green lights and red bows.

  In college I tried to flee it, went to the most Jewish places I could think of, Jerusalem or Miami, where December 25 was just another day. No carols, no candy canes – it was what I’d wanted all my life. But it wasn’t how I’d pictured it at all. I’d imagined myself watching the sunset on a Tel Aviv beach as my swarthy escort brought me ouzo after ouzo, forgetting the holiday entirely until I noticed the date on my Herald Tribune.

  Instead I found myself looking for the nearest Santa, so desperate I would have sat in the lap of any fat guy in a red tracksuit. I missed my family and I missed the festivity. One Christmas Eve in Israel I was so homesick I went to Bethlehem. But it wasn’t like home at all. At home I don’t get my inner thighs patted down by enthusiastic soldiers, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be the highlight of my day. What a sad, sorry, inauspicious Christmas that was. The Gulf War was just a few weeks away, and few pilgrims were bold enough to brave the impending invasion of Scud missiles and CNN reporters. Manger Square was bare of any decorations save a lone, tired tinsel garland. The only visitors were a motley, disoriented, and sedated-looking choir of Korean Baptists swaying unsteadily on a set of rickety bleachers, singing off-key carols in heavily accented English, their only audience a roving band of local children aggressively selling stale wafer cookies.

  There were no magi in Bethlehem that day. But I did leave there wiser. I resolved that that would be the last holiday season I would spend away from my family, and it was. From then on I would embrace it as an opportunity to cherish my family, and my family would cherish me right back. This probably had less to do with any profound epiphany than with the fact that by the next Christmas I was of legal drinking age. We learned that the best way to get into the holiday spirit is with some holiday spirits. Now my father gets the day off to a good start by packing our muskets with cocktails at eleven a.m., and it’s smiles all day. Happy holidays, everybody. Happy holidays, indeed.

  SPRING

  It has always puzzled me that so many cultures have a springtime interval of ascetism and mourning. Catholics have Lent; Jews have the Omer; Pentecostals have the end of squirrel-hunting season. It seems contrary to human nature to mortify the flesh just when it’s getting warm enough to bare it. But perhaps that’s why these periods of subdued brooding are necessary. With
all the bees buzzing and blossoms blooming, surely we’d be leaping into orgies and binges if our faiths didn’t require us to abstain, reflect, postpone joy.

  In our house there was little risk of anyone dying of happiness in the spring. The interfaith confluence of holidays guaranteed this was the worst eating we would do all year. We were crippled not only by Passover’s prohibition on leaven but by Lent’s prohibition on meat. Also out was whatever staple food my mother had decided to give up, usually chocolate or ice cream. As bad as this was, it didn’t approach the unhappiness my cousin caused when he gave up sarcasm for Lent; he offended his friends for six full weeks, all of them so used to his tongue-in-cheek comments that they didn’t realize that by “Nice haircut,” he really meant “Nice haircut.”

  But for the rest of us sarcasm was sustenance, the manna that got us through the miserable stretch of meals. “Delicious dinner’. ‘Great omelet. I never would have thought of mixing in sardines! It’s fantastic’. ‘I wish we could eat matzo and scrod all year round.” We were cranky and crampy. Protein and matzo are constipating enough taken alone, but consumed together they form a compound that will obstruct the bowel for weeks on end. I find it no small irony that we celebrate the Festival of Freedom by eating a food that’s so very binding. Let my people go, indeed. In our house, the holiday was known as Gassover.

  One year the cat joined us in protest by appropriating the holy palm my mother had brought home from church. For an entire week he carried it around in his mouth like a big green Fu Manchu mustache, his fanged overbite making him look both dippy and pissed off. That year the parish priest had given a particularly strident speech about the importance of respecting the palm, and my mother was appalled. But there was no getting it back. When we tried to confiscate it, he either found where we’d hidden it or whined until we produced it. “Do you think that’s bad for him?” my father asked. “Well, it being a sin, yeah, I’d say it’s pretty bad for him,” my mother replied. “Let’s hope there’s no cat hell.”

  Or let’s hope there is; surely that’s the one place there’s no fish. My least favorite food, it appeared in every course when seder and Good Friday coincided. The main event was always an old Lenten family recipe called ‘Fancy Fish,” which consisted of sole dredged in mayonnaise and topped with bread crumbs, here replaced by matzo meal. Bad as it was, at least it knew its place; at least it didn’t try to be a dessert. Gefilte fish does. Gefilte fish is the Spam of the Jewish people. It is our national culinary disgrace. We eat it because it never occurs to us that we don’t have to. It tastes like cat food, but even our cat wouldn’t eat it. It is a nugget of carp-flavored cement, a clot of ashen misery. It is the color of despair, almost funerary, musty and sweet. Sweeter still was our seder wine, a screw-top kosher affair that promised notes of Marshmallow Fluff. “The label says it’s ‘cream finish’’ my father would say with a smile, filling our glasses. “I think we’re in for a treat.”

  The next day we reeled from the sulfite headaches, but what could we do? We were lucky to get what we got. There weren’t more than ten Jewish families in our hometown, so there was almost nothing available. We had to drive to the next town over just to get matzo. Our local supermarket tried, though, bless their hearts, running an ad for Passover specials that featured clip art of a glass of wine, a loaf of bread, and a cross. They got the artwork wrong, but at least the timing was right. The Hanukkah specials were offered a full two weeks after Hanukkah ended and consisted, inexplicably, of egg noodles and ‘Congratulations on Your Bar Mitzvah’ cards.

  Between the bad food and the approaching bikini season, Passover was prime time for my bi-annual flare-up of anorexia. On the alternate years, the scrupulosity kicked in. Passover is high season for the disorder. It’s the only holiday that actually demands a comprehensive hosing-down of the house and all its contents, a requirement that flipped all my scrupulous switches. Even sane people go nuts on Passover. The holiday compels perfectly normal adults to board the pets, bleach the phones, and cover all the countertops with foil. On Passover, everyone’s kitchen looks like a bad sci-fi movie set. The scrupulous take the process into another realm altogether. No amount of foil or cleaning will suffice. For the scrupulous, it’s Passoverandoverandoveragain.

  To make matters worse, there’s no room for error as there is with other commandments. You’re not to mix meat and milk, you’re to take every precaution, but if there’s the slightest contamination, it’s still kosher. Not so with Passover. Any amount of leaven renders everything it touches unfit. Leaven is a huge category to begin with, consisting not just of bread and baked goods but of all legumes, all grains, and all their derivatives, including wonderful additives like MSG. There is leaven in ketchup, in salsa, in soda, powdered sugar, pickles, shampoo. I often think how much easier our lives might be if, in their haste to leave Egypt, the Israelites had skipped the unleavened loaves altogether and had just packed, say, some underripe fruit. If we were to observe Passover with limits on produce instead of leaven, it would be a much simpler affair. Fruit is large, easy to spot, and doesn’t produce crumbs. For a week we’d have to have honey instead of jam with our peanut butter. Big deal.

  But leaven, leaven is hard. And I made it much harder. In my bursts of scrupulosity I extrapolated leaven to include not just food but words and pictures. The issue of Woman’s Day with the cake on the cover had to be sealed away with the rest of the contraband under the bathroom sink. If I accidentally glanced at the still life of bread and grapes, I had to go wash and chant and pray.

  Books were out; two or three pages in, a character would have lunch, the word sandwich would get on my hands, and I’d be contaminated. TV was impossible, with all the ads for tacos and snack cakes. It would have been an unbearably boring time if I hadn’t been so busy flushing my mouth out and inspecting the dog’s fur for crumbs.

  Perhaps it would have been easier if I’d had any idea what I was doing. Mr. Stein and I hadn’t covered the holidays yet. My knowledge of Passover customs was limited to what I’d picked up from a few half-baked seders and the annual hippie Passover potluck in the nearby college town, attended mostly by bearded grad students wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m a real man now that I’ve got matzo balls.” Educational, but not in the way one might hope.

  I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I didn’t know you were actually supposed to have a seder on both the first and second nights until I was twelve. I was horrified. My family only did the one. And so began my custom of conducting the second seder secretly in my room, in the dark, while the rest of the family was downstairs watching TV. It was lonely and weird, with me reading all the responses and pantomiming the food, but it was oddly satisfying, too. My family wasn’t there to mess things up, and with the beginnings of a bowel impaction rumbling in my colon, the invisible food was a relief.

  It was a shadowy phantom service that in its strange, bleak way perfectly embodied the subdued mood of the season, the gathering darkness of a profound depression that waited for me, a ways off but already inevitable. It grew closer and closer as I bent over my Haggadah, an ancient battered relic illustrated with stark Munch-style woodcuts of the Angel of Death and suffering Egyptians. Years before, the dog had gotten ahold of it and his bite marks only added to the gruesome specter. It was perfect. Hours later, after I finally finished and went to bed, I dreamed of dog-faced pharaohs chasing me with enema hoses, as my hands framed an O-shaped silent scream. “Let my people go,” I tried to yell, but nothing, nothing would come out.

  SUMMER

  Summer may be the simplest time of the year for an interfaith family, simply because there are so few holidays to cause conflict. For a family with an obsessive-compulsive child, however, it’s ninety days of unremitting hell. Your kid is home twenty-four hours a day, with nothing to distract her but her own wacked-out preoccupations.

  In our house, of course, we had all the handicrafts. This turned out to be a trade-off. It helped keep my obsessions and compulsions in chec
k, but not my bad taste. Every summer I produced a series of terrifically unappealing knitted vests and neckties that were no less annoying than constant washing and reassurance-seeking. Perhaps my mother should have encouraged me to take up smoking instead.

  Whatever my new hobby, it would all grind to a halt in early July, with the arrival of the Three Weeks. The Three Weeks is a period of mourning for the destruction of the Temple during which anything of interest is prohibited. Knitting, shopping, interior decorating – all of these things are out. It is forbidden to get a haircut or blow out candles, to dance or play music, to sew or shave or wear new clothes. During the last nine days there are even more restrictions: no eating meat, no drinking wine, no swimming, washing, laundering, or bathing. On the last day, the fast of Tisha b’Av, the prohibitions increase: one may not eat or drink, nor, more strangely, may one wear leather or moisturize. Given the prohibitions on booze and hygiene, it goes without saying that there is also no fooling around.

  As fun as the Three Weeks are, it’s hard to believe they’re not more widely observed. Most Jews haven’t even heard of them. My interfaith family certainly hadn’t, and they didn’t quite know what to make of it when I first introduced the concept. “Let me get this straight,” my mother puzzled. “For the next three weeks you’re not going to rearrange my furniture, play your klezmer tape, or shave your armpits?” I was shocked when she announced that was just fine with her. My family had learned to question and then forbid anything I insisted was a commandment, but they let this one go. I’d made up some weird stuff, sure, but even I wasn’t this arbitrarily masochistic. In any case, it seemed like an even trade. My family would have to put up with my BO and the scratch marks my stubble left on the leather couch, but they would finally get a turn in the shower.