The Pain & Glory of Growing up Jew-ish
“You are one quarter Jewish” said papi, his hair-sprinkled knuckles clutching the black leather wheel. I knew papi was serious because he had flipped out his yellow teeth like a Rottweiler dog and frowned his brows in a way that made his eyes split and his blue iris sparkle— but not in the cute kitten kind of way and more like a super villain with green eye-laser function way.
“You’re only fully Jewish if your mother is,” he continued, “my mother, your Oma Kladdy, isn’t. But my father, your Opa Eddie, is. So that makes me half, and because your mami isn’t Jewish either, you are just one-fourth.”
A pink pie, an exact copy from my math text book, sketched itself out in front of me and split into four equal slices. One quarter, one piece, was me. I did not know then what it meant to be a fragment of a fracture of an original whole — but at the time it must have felt kinda special because my thighs bounced up and down the backseat’s cushion so much, it made the helical springs tinkle.
I did not say a word to the new revelation for my body always did the talking for me. I was born a natural dissident of the spoken language; much like the syntax of boyhood, it felt unnecessarily rowdy and most certainly a disguise from the Truth.
Meanwhile my big brother Dani got busy leafing through a colorful children’s guidebook to Judaism. He got it from the gift shop earlier that day during our excursion to the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam. That, and a “Me-zu-zah,” Dani said with the intrigue and clumsiness that come with pronouncing a new word.
“We need to hang it at the entrance of our door.” He held up a small sterling casket adorned with blue and green gems and the tiniest paper tube i had ever seen in my life, stored in a glass frame across its length. “It’s to bless the house,” he added.
Dani was always the one to follow up any thrilling new discoveries with immediate plans of operation. Like that time he loved Holland’s miniature park so much, he replicated one in our room. A play mat with drawings of city streets, houses, police stations and hospitals laid out on the floor where our toy cars, soldiers, firetrucks, castles, and buckets of sand we had carried all the way from the beach, created the illusion of a mini miniature park. He even set up a café where after a paid visit to the park from mami or papi, he served (and charged!) a high-class menu of cheese sandwiches, cheap soda, candy and my favorite fried Dutch snack: broodje kroket.
“No, we will not,” Papi scorned with a hard stare at the mezuzah, his brows buried more deeply into his face this time.
For a while the car was silent.
Even though in school I had learned daddies are boulders, my Papi was more like grains of sand; eroded from its original mold, turned coarse and sharp, impossible to hold onto for longer periods of time.
“Being Jewish only brings you trouble,” he finally uttered, irritated. “Don’t wear a kippah, or they will spit on you and beat you up, don’t put a mezuzah on the door, or they will know we’re Jewish. and we’ll get rocks thrown through our window.” He paused, took a left turn, and finally added “just remember what happened to your Opa Eddie!”
The rest of the car ride went by with my nose pressed against the window, humming to the pop songs from papi’s favorite radio station, while Dani had swapped the Jewish guidebook for a large paper map from where he carefully snaked papi out of the city, onto the highway, and back to our front door — which had no other sign but number 59.
— — — — — —
I tell this story because to me it seeks to capture the complexity of how I grew up Jewish; the ways it was denied, contradicted, fractured. This is not so much my father’s fault for he only passed onto us what he inherited from his parents. The Shoa was always a Silence, my dad told me once in a rare moment of deep conversation, his neck hunched between his shoulders. “I didn’t even know I was Jewish until I started asking questions around the time I was twenty,” he told me. In his young adult years my dad pursued a religious, cultural and, most likely, existential quest for his Jewish roots and identity. Possibly to fill the gaps of all that he wasn’t taught or told, and maybe to make sense of why he was so different from the rest of his white christian peers. I don’t know the exact reason, he didn’t say, but as children we got to be part of his search. With occasional visits to the synagogue, the Jewish cemetery, the holy city of Jerusalem (Al-Quds), and Jewish history museums, he unintentionally also gave us some sense of our roots and cultural heritage.
But just as he introduced us to Jewry, at the same time he also denied it from us. We weren’t, nor could we ever be Jewish, my dad reasoned. But it is my belief that he was only discharging his own anguish over the fact that Jewishness is passed on through the matriarch and therefore, in the eyes of traditional Jewish communities, he was a Goy, a Gentile, a non-Jew. This sense of rejection and non-belonging could have only compounded what he was already denied as a child. And if he was denied his own Jewish identity in his upbringing, it must have surely been as a way of protection. His mother a descendant of Jewish refugees in Ecuador, his father a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, they surely wanted their son to be a blank slate, the hope of a new beginning after the Great Deluge. It is no surprise then that my father was named Noe, Noah.
In the same way Judaism was sacrificed for my dad to live without the weight of the past, as something that haunts rather than enriches, so too did our father cut the Jewish cord from us. As survival, as protection. and wishfully so, as a new ritual of rebirth.
But even as it offered the possibility of life, it also left us with another kind of death, the kind that rots inside the body til it decomposes and starts to stench, without one knowing why or who has laid all this dead inside you. And so my brother and I too started asking questions, we too started searching, and we too found ourselves with a Wall — too many walls, in fact.
But what the Wall does is force you back onto yourself, and in our case to that what wasn’t meant to go on living. At least not in this way. So instead of asking more questions and lamenting our dark past, we realized that all we could do was to make sure the dead didn’t leave behind a ghost — the kind that haunts, that whispers, that sucks you into a black hole of non-existence.
I want to tentatively say that now it’s a spirit that remains, the kind that reminds us of our rich history, that gives us the serenity of classical music, the jouissance of travel, and the depth of critical inquiry.
The broken hallelujahs of Judaism are still open wounds that stare back at me sometimes, but now, rather than suffering its injury and infecting it further, I have learned to honor its place, to see its blood as a source of resilience, of pride, and to make sure I remember to ‘dance til the end of love.’
