(Not That You Asked) (37 page)

David Almond’s counterpart on the maternal side, Morris Rosenthal, was a
yeshiva bocher
in White Russia, meaning that he was kicked out of his house at age six and forced to become an itinerant student of the Talmud. Later, he was conscripted into the czar’s army, where he spent two years trading his sausage rations (not kosher) for potatoes and onions. As a young scholar fresh from the army, Morris attended a physics lecture at which the professor produced a rainbow by shining light through a misty veil of water. This demonstration was apparently enough to shake his faith in the Almighty. I suspect the privations of the clerical lifestyle played a role here as well. In any event, he emigrated to the Bronx and became, at age forty, a dentist of notorious methods. My mother still speaks shakily of her visits to Grandpa Morris’s office; he did not believe in anesthesia. Morris remained a student of the Old Testament throughout his life, though in the oppositional sense. He devoted his later years to the writing of a book which set out to prove God
did not
exist.
²

I mention this history by way of making a simple point: The family’s proud rabbinical tradition was in fact marred by eccentricity, not to mention cranky despair. The children born to both men—can this come as a surprise?—turned away from formal modes of Judaism.

My paternal grandfather Gabriel endured a thorough Jewish education, then went off and became a famous political scientist. His basic attitude was that God had done some interesting work early on, but hadn’t published much lately.

The most influential member of the family, in regard to our own peculiar Chanukah ritual, was Gabriel’s wife, Dorothea. She was the only child of a wealthy German banker and a socialite, neither of whom was particularly observant. Dorothea and her parents escaped Germany before the worst of the atrocities, mostly because they were rich enough to get inside information about how bad it would get. (Other members of the family weren’t so lucky.)

But I don’t think Dorothea ever fully processed the experience. She remained intensely identified with German culture. Let me be more candid: She struck me as tacitly anti-Semitic, as if any acknowledgment of her Judaism would be an invitation to more upheaval. She was active in the Unitarian church. And it was she who insisted that the family gather at her home on Christmas Day, so that we could enact some good old consumerist gluttony in the name of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Do I sound bitter? I had hoped to avoid bitterness.

The obvious question is where my parents were in all this. They were where they always were during my childhood: in the land of Doing Their Best Under the Circumstances. They had three aggressively anxious boys to manage, after all, plus two complicated careers, and the aforementioned family ghosts.

My father was never permitted to experience his Judaism. The story that has always struck me as emblematic of his upbringing has him singing Christmas carols with a bunch of goyische buddies in Princeton, New Jersey. Among those serenaded was none other than Albert Einstein, who waved to them through his living room window. There is something almost unbearably tender and deluded to this image: my father (a Jew) singing “O Holy Night” to Einstein (another Jew); the benevolent, collaborating wave that passes between them. In my conjuring of this scene, I have put snow in the background, a golden nimbus of light all around, and, behind Einstein himself, a Christmas tree sparkling with ornaments.

I’m not saying I blame my dad. He was the eldest son of a spectacularly self-absorbed academic and a distant mother. He was shuttled around the country as a kid. He wanted to fit in.

My mother’s situation was in some ways more extreme. Her parents were those crazy card-carrying Communists. Although culturally identified as Jews, they believed religion was the opiate of the masses. They were also scared stiff during the fifties. My mother never fully understood what all the anxiety was about as a child, which might have made matters worse.

As should be apparent, neither of my parents was given much grounding in the upside of Judaism. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the Jewish influence took shape exclusively in the secular realm. They were people of ideas, intellectual, ambitious, socially responsible. To the extent that two professionals could, they embraced the heady idealism of the counterculture movement. They were not naïve or self-hating about their Judaism; they were simply overrun by competing interests.

And so our religious inheritance was, to put it Yiddishly,
moyshe kapoyer.
Consider our names: David Emmanuel, Michael Isaac, Steven Benjamin.
³
Or consider our education. We were sent off to Sunday school for a few years, but I remember almost nothing of the experience: being forced to eat prune cookies at Purim, the acrid waft of a sun-softened blacktop. For the most part, we were public school kids, trying our best not to get our asses beaten by the toughs.

The apotheosis of our quasi-Jewish upbringing was the bar mitzvah ritual. I have implied on previous occasions that my bar mitzvah took place in our hot tub. This is not actually true. But it was a D.I.Y. home bar mitzvah, overseen by my father (as opposed to a rabbi). And it did feature a somewhat exclusive hot tub after-party. First, of course, came the traditional prayers, speech, and buffet, which took place in our living room/dining room, into which we crammed 150 folding chairs and a metric ton of cold cuts. My father, blessed be his mishagoss, helped us compose our speeches
⁴
and prepared cheat sheets with the required Hebrew prayers spelled out phonetically (
baw-rooch ah-taw ad-doh-noi…
). I am hazy on the other details, mercifully so. I remember the itch of my blazer, a certain disembodied anxiety. I wanted very badly not to screw up and embarrass my pop. The comment that perhaps best sums up the liturgical experience came from my grandfather Irving, a man renowned more for candor than tact. “Was that supposed to be Hebrew?” he said to me, while forking sliced tongue onto his paper plate. “It sounded like you were speaking Spanish.”

Yes, well,
yo no hablo Hebrew.

And why didn’t we join a temple? Good question. My parents have expressed considerable regret over this in the past few years. They feel—and I tend to agree—that we could have found a larger community in this way, and relieved some of the pressures that beset the family. We were living in Palo Alto, after all, a suburb with no shortage of congregations. But the possibility never came up for discussion. And so the only time that religion impinged on our lives at all was during the holiday season.

Which brings us back to why, year after year, we schlepped over to the ancestral home on Old Trace Road and took part in our bizarre Chrisnukah ritual.

This, like most everything else in life, boils down to family politics. Dorothea was the one pushing the Christmas agenda, and she was a control freak of the first order. My mother was a control freak too. But she discerned pretty quickly that fighting Dorothea on the Christmas thing was wasted energy. Dorothea had the conviction—however misbegotten—and the material advantage. Because let’s face it: When you’re a kid, your allegiance to holidays boils down to loot. From this perspective, Chanukah has never stood a chance against Christmas, with its mighty, sleigh-riding, toy-pimping saint.

My parents did remind us that, despite the
schweinfest
at Grandma and Grandpa’s, we were Jews. Most years, we conducted an informal Chanukah ceremony, which meant gathering around the kitchen table to light the candles after dinner. What I remember of this ritual was the moment, just as my mother reached to light the candles on our battered menorah, when my father would turn to us and begin to sing the blessing in his soft baritone. The expression in his eyes was one of excruciating yearning. He wanted to know which of his sons would join him. Most of the time, we left him high and dry. Who were we to act all Jewy? It felt like a put-on. It made us squirm.

More occasionally, my mother would prepare a Chanukah feast: latkes with sour cream and applesauce, which meant for me (picky little shitheel that I was) a quart of applesauce for dinner. Of the gifts, I recall only the chocolate coins in gold foil. The first time I saw a dreidl, I thought it was a piece of candy and popped it in my mouth.

No, the big day was always Christmas, because this was when the serious giftage came out and you had to dress up and behave with a modicum of respect in order to get at the goods. My grandmother presided over these gatherings in a state of nervous exaltation. We were not to climb the furniture or lick unapproved surfaces. Her house was filled with strange artifacts—vases and delicate clay figurines—kept in museum-style cabinets. She could be ferociously tidy, though she tended to leave perishable foods such as butter out on her kitchen counter for hours at a time. When it came time to open gifts, we would bumrush the tannenbaum, while she admonished us in her sibilant German accent not tear the wrapping paper. The family albums are filled with pictures of her grandsons joyously shredding all available wrapping paper.

The strangest thing, of course, is that none of this seemed strange at the time. And it
should
have been strange, because the bottom line is that Christ—as conjured by the zealots of the Church—has meant nothing but misery for the Jews.

I could argue that the actual event (the gathering, the food, the presents) was so watered down as to qualify as theologically neutral. And I could further argue that Chanukah isn’t much of a holiday at all. The episode from which it derives plays no significant role in the Old Testament, and the miracle at the center of the ritual boils down to a maintenance issue. It’s more like a late-inning retail counterstrike.

But these feel, finally, like rationalizations. We were purebred Jews acting like purebred Christians.

Honestly, it makes me sad. It makes me sad to think of our family, so unmoored from its own history, spinning in our private orbits of obligation and grievance. It makes me sad to think of my grandmother embracing the culture that sought to annihilate her.

I don’t mean to suggest that celebrating Chanukah, or affiliating ourselves more broadly with the traditions of Judaism, would have solved things. I mean only that our inability to unite as a family under the umbrella of our heritage suggested a glaring crisis of identity. We lacked the willingness to fold ourselves into some larger human brotherhood, which is the central and enduring appeal of religion.

“We weren’t joiners,” my father has often explained.

But I think our dilemma was more fundamental.

What we actually lacked was belief. I don’t mean belief in a higher being, but something closer to an emotional capacity for hope. Our house was too full of insecure machismo to allow for much hope. We were too embarrassed to express such feelings, which implied weakness and dependence and left one vulnerable to mockery. We all felt the jones for connection—to each other, to our history. It simply went unrequited, as it so often does in troubled families.

It’s no coincidence that I decided to spend half my sophomore year studying in Jerusalem. I kept hoping, as I wandered the old yellow stone of that city, that some mystical, transformative spirit would seize me. It didn’t happen.
⁵
No, I was an atheist through and through. God was, to me, a lovely dream, a brave make-believe daddy who provided comforting answers to those who couldn’t bear the prevailing evidence.

My appreciation of Judaism had more to do with pride. I viewed my people as the pound-for-pound champions of consciousness—Christ, Marx, Freud, Einstein—stars of the longest-running ethnic drama on earth, and, what’s more, authors of our single greatest work of literature! (Hint: Every hotel room has one.)

It was also true that I simply liked Jews more than other people. They were, as a rule, funnier, more curious and self-reflective, than goys. They loved food. And they knew how to talk. They were talkers. My mother’s people represent the purest example of this verbal bent. Not coincidentally, they are the side of the family that grew up speaking Yiddish. I cannot begin to express my adoration for Yiddish, the official language of the shtetl Jews and the most emotionally precise vernacular ever devised. More than any holiday ritual, Yiddish is the legacy my mother passed on to me. I once actually wrote an entire cycle of poems (awful, all of them) devoted to the Yiddish word
schmaltz.

My wife is, in her own words, a “recovering Catholic.”
⁶
I am happy to report, however, that she shares my affection for Jews. Early in our engagement, she surprised me by announcing that she wanted to convert to Judaism. I was flattered, flustered, quite close to asking if she was nuts. She explained (calmly) that she’d always admired the religion’s emphasis on ethics and learning, and that she liked the idea of raising children in one faith.

And now that we have a daughter (one who arrived just in time for Chanukah), I’m seeing the advantages of this arrangement. My wife, after all, will have to undergo an education to convert formally, and this should mean that at least one of us will know the blessing spoken over the candles, which I forgot long ago.

As for the rest of my family, they have all shown a greater interest in Judaism as they have grown older, my father in particular. He became a member of the chorus at a local synagogue and spent several months studying Hebrew. A few years ago, he visited Israel for the first time in many years. He sent me a postcard in which he confessed, somewhat joyfully, that he had burst into tears as he stood before the Wailing Wall.