The Jewish Daughter Diaries (7 page)

Rachel Shukert

My mother has always prided herself on not being the typical Jewish mother.

“I'm not one of
those
mothers, am I?” she pleads with me, usually during one of our phone calls in which she has spent the better part of ninety minutes complaining how she doesn't have anyone to complain to. “Seriously. I'm not one of those really Jewish mother-y Jewish mothers.”

In many ways, this is true. My mother doesn't push food on you or ask how much your house cost. It isn't her style to meddle in your love life, although she's certainly willing to listen, endlessly and with mind-boggling patience, if you want to talk about it. I didn't grow up being told to marry a doctor or a lawyer, nor was I ordered to become one of those myself. She has never set me or, to my knowledge, anyone else up on a date, and when she gossips, as everyone does, it's generally more out of concern than prurience.

In short, my mother isn't nosy. She isn't a meddler. She prefers to watch from the sidelines, issuing her observations calmly and only when asked. Nothing wrong with that—discretion, after all, is the mark of good breeding. It's just that her observations are usually Ominous Pronouncements of Doom.

“You're right, Mommy,” I want to say to her, in response to her plaintive question. (Yes. I am a woman in my thirties who still calls her mother “Mommy.” I dare you to tell me you do differently.) “You're not a nagging Jewish mother. You're an Old Testament prophet.”

In my mother's view, every misbehaving toddler is “probably autistic. I'd get that kid tested.” Everyone who ever smokes the occasional cigarette is going to get lung cancer and die a horrible death. One too many celebratory martinis is a clear sign of acute alcoholism, which in her cutely anachronistic, faintly Old World view, is actually a fate worse than death and thus best left to the Gentiles who don't know any better. Don't ever, ever,
ever
tell her how much your purse cost, unless you're ready for a drawn-out sigh that means a bankruptcy declaration is in your very near future. She won't ask you, because she doesn't want to know.

Even joyful occasions are a cause to remember all the nasty things that might be lurking in our metaphoric woodsheds. The birthday card she sent me while I was in college in which she enclosed a pamphlet about the dangers of cervical cancer in the sexually promiscuous has become the stuff of legend in our family, and I saved an email she sent me recently, after I told her I'd finally finished my latest novel, which had been giving me quite a lot of trouble.

“Dear Rachy,” it read, in her meticulously punctuated, painstakingly typed fashion. You can practically see the one-fingered hunt-and-peck as you read. “Mazel tov on the book. Daddy and I are so proud of you. Remember, Aunt Susan
*
is having her liver biopsy this week, so think good thoughts. Also, your cousin Jake broke his arm. Some car ran into him when he was jogging, if you can believe it. Marilyn down the street is back in the hospital. They have to do something where they drain all her blood out of her body and then slowly replace it, quart by quart. Yikes. Have a good weekend.”

I read this aloud to a group of friends at dinner. Some of them laughed.

It's not that my mother isn't a nice person. She is, in fact, tremendously kind, the sort who would give you the shirt off your back if she thought it would help. It isn't as though she
wants
any of these terrible things to happen—believe me, nothing would make her happier than to be proven wrong. She'll tell you so herself. If the problem grandchild is placed in a special school or the drunk friend enters inpatient rehab, she takes no joy from the smug satisfaction of “I told you so.” Just another sigh, tragic, bereaved, concerned. The inevitable has come to pass, just as she knew it would. Such is life.

I know my mother comes by her pessimism honestly. The early death of a parent, a peripatetic and impoverished early childhood, the terrible toll of familial disease histories and doctors throughout her child-bearing years preparing her to be diagnosed at any moment with the breast cancer that would leave her girls without a mother (knock on wood, we're still waiting): all of these have conspired to shape her outlook into what it is today. My mother expects bad things to happen, because bad things
do
happen, and
have
happened—and happened to her before she was old enough to expect any different.

And yet, if you ask her, she'll tell you she's a very happy person. I believe her. Because my mother, for all her worries, has figured out the secret of life. Just as Mary Poppins could find the fun in every job that must be done, my mother has managed to find the joy in every misfortune. There's a kind of perverse pleasure in believing the worse, and a giddy euphoria when the clouds part and you realize that this time, you've dodged the bullet. Fatalism has tremendous power, because you're always prepared, and because mostly you're wrong. After all, you can only get a terminal illness once. Everything else is just a pleasant surprise. And who doesn't love a surprise party, unless they have a heart condition and drop dead?

*
Name changed

Leonora Ariella Nonni Epstein

It's a sticky August day, and I'm crammed into the backseat of my family's Subaru, wedged between a new faucet from Home Depot and a box of binders full of High Holiday sheet music. My mother, a cantor, is blasting a CD of some weird Jewish gypsy music, and in the driver's seat, my father does a dorky shoulder dance. It's the annual summer trip to Maine, and for some reason, all I can think about is the two-month-old email from my French ex-boyfriend that randomly came up in Search on my iPhone the other day:

Subject
: hey

btw, would you marry me?

PS: If you want, I could do it better.

Had he been huffing massive amounts of glue? It had been over a year since we'd broken up, and his English had obviously suffered from it. I'm still unsure what this email means (subsequent explanations were just as abstract), but the message had been haunting me because there was something slightly fascinating about entertaining my acceptance of his proposal. As I've entered my late twenties, the beginnings of these family trips tend to make me feel like something or someone is missing. Will I ever be crammed in this backseat with a partner I bring along? It would be nice is all, and my mother would certainly love it.

In a rich, operatic voice, Mom is translating the Hebrew for everyone in the car who didn't make this request. “You guys mind listening to this song one more time?” she asks as she's already hitting the Back button. I'm so hot and so uncomfortable, and no, I do not want to listen to the gypsy music again. I'd call this hell, but Jews don't believe in hell, so I'll just call it weird.

But, of course, my family wouldn't be us without being weird, and we're better for it. So I shift position yet again and watch my mother's unruly gold curls fly in the wind as I listen to her rattle off Hebrew translations, every so often making philosophical or historical connections. This is my mother. She's kooky, awesome, and unlike anyone else I know.

The moment my mother knew she was Jewish, she was a seven-year-old Protestant girl living in Boscobel, Wisconsin. The realization, of course, would take a more concrete form over the years, but she remembers it all beginning with the Druck family. They were Jewish and they had a trampoline in the dining room. Which would be enough to make any child apply for a family transfer. But it wasn't just that the Drucks were a bit wacky. Something else drew her in—they owned books; they talked about interesting things; and there was a richness to their Jewish family life that was different from all the Midwestern sameness she saw over the course of way too many moves in her childhood. Her father bounced around from job to job, selling John Deere tractors for a time, and as a result, she eventually attended four different high schools in four different years.

Then when she was around eight years old, she watched Walter Cronkite air footage of Auschwitz on a TV special about the Holocaust. As she watched images of gas chambers and Jews behind barbed wires, she had the distinct feeling that she wasn't watching them; it was also her. Either my mother had a profound, instinctual connection to Jews, or TV was just a lot better back then.

I know it had to be the former because Mom was never not a Jewish mother. She's very good at telling people what to do (start a stylish plus-sized fashion line), asking if you're any closer to meeting your future husband (obviously, no progress in that department), or making it clear that she doesn't care if you're gay, just raise the children Jewish (good to know?).

Mom converted to Judaism in her early twenties and had been an official Jew for a decade before she met my father. Both bohemian musicians, they met at a party in Manhattan, and the moment they saw each other, they thought the other was gay. I suppose that could have been an easy mistake in the '70s, when it was fashionable for men to wear flamboyant velvet blazers with gargantuan lapels and for boho women hanging with a certain crowd to dress like equestrian power lesbians. They fell deeply in love and were married in our living room under a makeshift chuppa.

I'm always struck by the beautiful contrast between my parents—choosing to be Jewish vs. being born into it—as Mom ended up marrying into a family with extremely strong Jewish roots. My great-great grandmother, Judith Epstein, served as president of Hadassah (the Women's Zionist Organization of America) before and after World War II, and played a significant role in the Zionist movement. The stories I hear about Grandma Judith and her husband, Moses, are fantastic tales of New York in the '30s and '40s.

They entertained often and were friends with fixtures of the Jewish cultural elite. Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Leonard Bernstein, and countless others sat at the mahogany art-deco table that now sits in our dining room. I have only vague memories of my great-grandmother, but I do remember that she sounded just like Eleanor Roosevelt (a result of elocution lessons), and that they had “help”—a real maid.

People did not anticipate that my mother, an animated Midwesterner and a converted Reform Jew, would please Grandma Judith. The stories I heard of Judith paint a picture of someone quite proper, what with her fake British accent (“'Tis good, 'tis good,” she used to say), and perhaps even a bit of a snob—she didn't ever really “have fun.” She was a formal woman who was stubborn, superior, and demanding.

My mother, on the other hand, is more of a character. She's someone with a jubilant presence who loves to laugh, will burst out in song at any time or any place, and tends to go through life being very much herself. No matter how much it embarrassed me as a kid. Or fine, sometimes still as an adult. But that's who my mother is, and I love her for it. Surprisingly, Mom and Judith were very fond of one another, and when my mother decided to get a clerical degree in pursuit of a career as a cantor, Judith was completely down.

Somewhere inside of me, I feel strongly defined by both these women. One who was a Jewish activist for all her life, and another whose entry into Judaism is a symbol of confidence and self.

I'm actually a bit jealous, because as I get older, I find myself wishing I had a larger sense of personal Jewish identity, or that I was more spiritual. If I'd found a community somewhere and practiced Shabbat, maybe I'd have more faith that things would all work out in the end. Or maybe, you know, I would have actually met a nice Jewish boy at the synagogue by now.

But, like my response time to emails that make me cringe, I've been slow to explore my Jewish identity and it's something that I'm realizing I've felt lacking in my life. Seeing my parents and the magical amalgam of roots, philosophies, and values that has made them work makes me happy and hopeful and curious about the world. Is it so wrong to admit that I'd like to get married under a chuppa and have someone to share all the wonderful holidays—Passover, Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah—that we've always had in our home? And to maybe one day have all those things in my home?

As one of those career-oriented, go-getter females, I feel awkward admitting these things out loud, lest I seem too girlie and weak. Except I don't think that Mom and Grandma Judith would agree.

The thing is, I really want to make my mom proud because she's the greatest role model you could ask for. She blossomed from a young Midwestern girl who didn't quite fit in to someone who has the most inspiring relationship with the world. Living life through a Judaic lens, you can feel her sense of belonging and connection and desire to do good. It's what you feel when she sings songs in the car.

So I'd like to bring this sense of place and identity with me as I grow older. I've started slowly. I sometimes go to Shabbat alone. I ask my mother to explain certain Jewish principles. And when she delivers her “sermonettes” (her word for a spiel of life advice that is supposed to last for only a few minutes but invariably lasts for an hour), I actually listen. I never thought I'd say this, but I really do want to be Jewish when I grow up.

I don't know exactly where my faith will lead me, but I'd like for it to be a part of the bigger picture. After all, one day I would like to have a family of my own. And if they end up being really, really weird, I'd definitely be okay with that.

Jenny Jaffe

We are in Florence on the Piazza della Repubblica—my mom, dad, sister Brooke, and I, just the four of us, for the first time in a while—when an old man falls and hits his head on the cobbled street.

The more I tell this story, the more blood there seems to be. At first it was just a trickle, and this is probably the closest to the truth. But I like to keep myself on my toes, and so in subsequent retellings, it became a bit more of a gush, and then a geyser, and before I could stop myself, I was regaling my friends with the story of how my parents saved the life of a man whose blood was running through the streets of Italy like bulls through Pamplona.

What's important is that he fell, and while a crowd gathered around to gasp and gawk, my parents ran to his aid, immediately and without question. My dad checked his vital signs, and my mom kept the gathered crowd and the man's wife calm, and that's my parents. That's them, as succinctly as I can possibly draw them. The image I have of both of them that evening, but especially my mom, has stuck with me. Her running into the fray to be a mother to everyone around her simply because it is not in her nature to do anything else.

(An aside: Somewhere in all of this, Brooke and I ran to find a police officer, to get them to call an ambulance. Neither of us speak Italian, so it ended up being a failed game of morbid charades, each of us attempting to do our best “sounds like: old man fell to the ground” at the baffled cop who, let's be real here, probably spoke English. I bet we looked like assholes.)

My mom pulled out the pack of wet wipes that so many moms seem to have—I'm pretty sure they just give it to you along with the epidural—and used it to clean off a bit of the blood. Depending on which version of the story I'm telling, she either used one wipe or emptied the pack cleaning up the wreckage. She then instructed my sister to take me (I have a pretty weak stomach for these things; after all, I write comedy) to go sit down across the piazza.

My parents met working at a hospital in San Francisco in the '80s when my dad was a resident and my mom was head of social work. Apparently, my dad asked out my mom after their patient died, in a how-we-met story that barely even qualifies as romantic (which infuriated me as a child, like
Have
a
less
tragic
meeting, guys!
), but they've been happily married for twenty-six years so, romantic story or not, they're doing something right.

My mom is the perfect foil for my father. My mom gets big ideas and jumps into them, headfirst, which is how we've gotten most of our family dogs. My dad has come to begrudgingly love all of them. Except our golden retriever, Bob, who I'm pretty sure he's always loved like the son he never had.

My mom is quick to big emotions and often to righteous anger on behalf of those she loves. My dad is astoundingly even-keeled. My mom is effusive, and my dad must practically be moved to tears before he'll even call something “neat.” My mom has never met someone she couldn't make friends with. My dad is reserved. My mom doesn't think fart jokes are funny. My dad totally does.

My mom believes that her family is the most important thing in life, and in the doctrine I've heard her repeat my entire life—“Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.” She's had a happy, fortunate life with a wonderful network of friends and family around her, and so she gives all of it back.

The kind of good-doing that my mom is capable of boggles the mind. Providing care and aid to elderly Italians that night barely begins to skim the surface. She's impossibly good. Intimidatingly good. She is the Jewish mom my friends wish they had. She is the mom to whom I feel as though I could say anything, although it's always been clear that she is my mom and not my friend. But if she weren't my mom, she would be an awesome friend. I wonder, if we were friends, would we play less or more Pictionary?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that despite the fact that my mom stopped working so she could raise my sister and me, she never stopped being a social worker. My dad helps fix problems practically, and my mom is endlessly concerned with the emotional and mental well-being of those around her.

Back to the piazza—

The rest of the scene played out in tableau. I watched my dad talk to the old man to make sure he was awake and coherent. I watched my mom put her arm around his wife and make sure that everyone in the vicinity knew he'd be fine and that an ambulance was on its way. I later learned that neither the man nor his wife spoke English. As I wasn't up close to hear all of this, I'm not sure how any of these conversations went down.

(A second aside: as my parents were waiting for the ambulance with the old man and his wife, I watched a mandolin player spot the scene from his busking post and run to the man's side to—I guess—serenade him? Or maybe mandolin music is just a widely accepted form of emergency medical attention in Italy.)

When the ambulance got there, my dad calmly explained to the EMT what had happened and helped them get the old man inside. I saw him joke around gently with the man—my mom always talks about how much she loves my dad's bedside manner—and tell him that he was going to be okay. My mom, arm around the shaking wife, helped her into the ambulance next to her husband. She made sure the EMTs knew that his wife was scared and asked that they keep her fully informed of what was going on.

When the ambulance pulled away, the gathered crowd—like a hundred people at this point, though again, this all depends whether you're hearing the version of this story that actually happened, or the one where the man's head became a crimson fountain that small children came from miles around to play in—dispersed.

My mom casually collected my sister and me, and the four of us went off to get gelato. This was the most natural thing in the world to her. Maybe it's a Jewish mother thing. Maybe it's a decent human being thing. But she is the most actively caring person I've ever had the good fortune to know, and I just get to call her mom.

I embellish a lot. But if anything, I am underselling this.

I could go on for books about my mom as a fashion icon, as a chocolate chip connoisseur, as the world's absolute biggest Paul McCartney fan—and if you challenge her on this, I swear to god she will fight you. But this essay is about the woman who raised me. And it's about the sense I got, watching her from across the piazza, that I was raised by a superhero.

The old man was just fine.