Members of the Tribe

I
was fifteen years old when I first met Vernon and Mary Lou. One Friday night they simply turned up at our temple, sat down in the front row of the sanctuary, and joined in the Sabbath service. In our congregation, which had the social pretensions of a country club and the interlocking family connections of a Berber village, outsiders stood out; outsiders like Vernon and Mary Lou stood out a mile.

People like them usually came to Temple Beth Jacob to fix something, or as gaping guests at the annual Baptist-Jewish Brotherhood Week service. That first Friday night, Vernon wore a black Robert Hall Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, a lurid floral tie that choked his throat and turned his moonpie face purple, brown shoes, and, inevitably, white socks. His wife was dressed in the Bess Truman mode, with accessories by the Beverly Hillbillies. They couldn’t have been more conspicuous if they had come dressed in white sheets and carrying a flaming cross.

After services that first time, Vernon and Mary Lou wandered around the social hall, self-consciously speared a few cookies off
the hospitality table, and then left. But they came back the following Friday night, and every one thereafter. They always sat in the front row, sang the hymns with fervor, and joined the responsive reading in a modified Tennessee holler. After services they sought out fellow worshipers, he pumping hands (“Hey there, Brother Horowitz, how you doin’ this Shabbes?”), she calling the Hadassah ladies “hon.” After a month or so the entire congregation knew that Vernon and Mary Lou had decided to become Jews.

The temple was split over the issue. Its president, board of directors, and general membership were adamantly opposed to the conversion of Vernon and Mary Lou, while the pro-conversion camp consisted of me and my friend Ackerman. We delighted in the consternation of the establishment and adopted the couple as heroes. One of our favorite pastimes was putting them in imaginary situations. Vernon on Jewish history: “
Whoo-ee, them Maccabees shore did whomp the shit out of ole Antiochus!
” On religion: “Rabbi, what ain’t kosher, the ham or the eggs?” On the family: “Y’all know my boy, Morris Bob? We’re havin’ his bar mitzvah at the Indy 500.” And so on.

Under pressure from the congregation, the rabbi tried to discourage the prospective converts, but they were determined to become Jews. For months they attended temple activities with a fanatical ubiquity. And then one day, mysteriously, they disappeared.

Ackerman and I speculated on their whereabouts. “
Boys, we decided to hook up with them Chasidics. They got that ole-time Yiddishkeit
.” We laughed at the picture of Vernon in a
strimel
and blue suede shoes, Mary Lou warning customers at the truck stop not to mix up the milk and meat dishes. We laughed, but in truth we missed them.

Then one day Ackerman spotted Vernon downtown, coming out of the Kresge’s on Saginaw Street. “Hey Vernon, you old Yid, where you been hiding?” he shouted. Vernon turned and regarded him sadly.

“Well, tell you the truth, me and the missus decided to quit.”

“What do you mean quit?” asked Ackerman. “I thought you liked it at the temple.”

A look of grievance passed over Vernon’s round face. “We quit because nobody would tell us the secret,” he said.

“What secret?” Ackerman demanded, sensing something great.

“Come on, now, you know what I’m talkin’ about. The secret. The secret of how you all get so rich.”

I laughed when Ackerman told me the story, but a part of me understood what Vernon meant. I knew from my own family that not all Jews were rich by any means; but I also suspected that there
was
some sort of Jewish secret, something that nobody had let me in on. It was a suspicion I had harbored for a very long time.

I was raised to regard myself as an American who happened to be Jewish. Judaism, as taught to me at Sunday school and at home, was simply another American religion, theologically boring and socially respectable. My parents encouraged me to invite Christian friends to our Reform temple, and to attend their church services in return. It was a nothing-up-our-sleeve approach, open and midwestern. We were like Christians who didn’t believe in Jesus, and what was the big deal about that?

And yet, I had the feeling there were undercurrents I didn’t understand; something a little mysterious about being a Jew.

Somehow this feeling was connected with Passover. Every year we would leave our non-Jewish neighborhood in Pontiac, Michigan, and drive to my father’s parents’ home in Detroit, half an hour away. And there, at the ritual Passover Seder, I witnessed a peculiar transformation. My uncles, greengrocers and petty merchants, reclined on pillows and chanted strange Hebrew incantations. They proclaimed that they had once stood at Mount Sinai with Moses, flung open the doors of the small apartment to greet Elijah the prophet, flicked drops of sweet red wine on their plates to commemorate the plagues in Egypt, and implored God to pour His wrath on their enemies. In my grandparents’ living room I was suddenly no longer an American boy. I was not even in America. By some magic I had been transported to the table of fierce desert strangers.

It was always a shock when the Seder ended and we drove home. Suddenly I was back in the USA, listening to rock ’n’ roll
on WXYZ as my father and mother lapsed back into their American personae. We whizzed by crowds at the Dairy Queen and the A&W, and I thought: They don’t know where I’ve been tonight, they don’t know who I really am. The deception thrilled me, and puzzled me. I wasn’t sure who I really was myself.

Once on Chanukah a friend of mine named Jimmy came over to play. As far as I knew his family was originally from Mexico, although his parents spoke American English. Our families didn’t socialize but they knew one another, and when Jimmy’s father came to pick him up, my parents invited him in for a drink in the small-town midwestern way.

Jimmy and I went on playing, uninterested in the adult conversation going on a few feet away in the living room. Then, suddenly, I heard a sob and turned to see Jimmy’s dad with his eyes full of tears. My father put an arm around his shoulder and led him into the den. A few minutes later, he emerged dry-eyed and took Jimmy home.

“Why was Jimmy’s father crying?” I asked. “Is something the matter?”

My father explained that Jimmy’s father had choked up when he saw the candles burning in our Chanukah menorah. “The man is a Jew,” said my father with barely controlled emotion. “He remembered his grandmother lighting candles, but she never told him why.”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had told me that Willie Mays wore a yarmulke under his batting helmet. “He’s not Jewish, he’s a Catholic,” I said with certainty.

My father explained that Jimmy’s family had once been Jewish in Spain, but long ago they had been forced to convert to Christianity. “It happened five hundred years ago,” my father said in an awestruck tone that reminded me of Passover. “His family has been Christian for
five hundred years
, but he still has a Jewish heart.” How do you get a Jewish heart? I wondered; and how do you get rid of one? The incident with Jimmy’s father became another part of the Jewish mystery.

My father’s family was from Europe, but I could never figure out exactly where. Whenever I asked my grandmother, she would frown and say, “the old country,” without specifying which old
country she meant. When I got a little older I once brought her a map of Europe and asked her to point out the place where she had grown up. She peered at the map for a moment and gestured vaguely in the direction of Russia. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It isn’t there anymore. Hitler wiped it out. Anyway, America is better.”

My mother’s family, on the other hand, was American. She was born in Milwaukee, and her mother—my grandmother—was born in Sterling, Illinois. But although she had been a suffragette and knew nothing about the “old country,” my American grandmother had her own thing—Jewish cartography.

Pontiac never had enough Jews for a Jewish neighborhood, but from the time I was a small boy I was aware that it had a special Jewish geography, and my grandmother was its da Gama. She would point out an unremarkable brick home on a leafy street and confide, “That’s a Jewish house.” Downtown she would pause near a certain store and say, “This is a Jewish business.” Occasionally, when we passed a parking lot, she would point out a Chevrolet or Plymouth and say, “There’s a Jewish car.” None of these cars, shops, or houses impressed me as being especially Jewish, but I was prepared to take her word for it.

At first I thought that mastering Pontiac’s Jewish geography was some sort of Sunday school lesson, like memorizing the Hebrew alphabet or the kings of Judea. But as I grew older, I realized that my grandmother mapped out the town reflexively, more for her benefit than mine. Jewish houses, stores, and offices were safe havens, places she could count on if, for example, she needed to use a bathroom, or was being chased through the streets by a sex-crazed cossack rapist.

There were very few Jewish children in my school, and only one other in my class, a girl named Beverly. Like me, she had only the slightest Jewish education. All we knew in Hebrew were a few scattered prayers, but occasionally we would show off our erudition by turning them into conversation. “
Baruch atah adonai
(Blessed art thou, O Lord),” I would say casually, and she would reply, “
Eloheinu melech ha’olam
(Our God, king of the world),” just as coolly. “What are you talking about?” the other kids would ask, and one day Jesse Stephen, the son of a black preacher, came
up with the answer. “They speakin’ the secret language of the Jews,” he informed the class.

It was Jesse who put me into a special racial category. One day, during a break from a half-court basketball game, he turned to me and, imitating his father’s delivery, intoned, “Noah had three sons—Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Now Ham, he was the black boy. Japheth was the Gentile boy. And Shem, now he was the Jewish boy, and he was red. That’s what you are, baby—you red.”