Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  I’m not Jewish,” I told Jenny when I returned to San Francisco.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I described what had happened in New York.

  “But your parents converted you, so what difference does it make?”

  Yes, my parents had converted me, so technically I may have been Jewish. Even that I wasn’t sure of. But I couldn’t look at myself the same way.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if your mother’s Jewish, then you are too. And if she’s not, you’re not.”

  “But your mother is Jewish.”

  “Not my birth mother. She’s the one who counts.”

  It was no longer clear what made me Jewish. Had I been Jewish only because I thought I’d been born Jewish, and now that I was wrong, I wasn’t a Jew? If my parents hadn’t converted me and everything else had stayed the same—the sabbath, the kosher home, the Jewish day school—I wouldn’t be a Jew no matter what I thought. I couldn’t be counted for a minyan at synagogue. Now that I’d stopped being religious, my parents’ revelation worried me even more. I was living with someone who wasn’t Jewish. I had nothing to fall back on.

  “Let’s say someone’s mother is Jewish,” Jenny said, “which makes that person’s mother’s mother also Jewish. How far does it go back, anyway?”

  “To Abraham.”

  “You think every Jew is descended from Abraham?”

  I was inclined to say yes. But that sounded about as reliable as claiming that the world was five thousand years old.

  “Fine,” she said, “then you’re not Jewish. It makes things easier for both of us.”

  “If only it were so simple.”

  It bothered Jenny the way my parents behaved, always kind and polite when they saw her, but also always distant. Even my mother, who, under other circumstances, would have loved Jenny (they had a lot in common, I thought), could be curiously remote around her. My mother herself wasn’t religious; she’d simply compromised for my father’s sake. I was surprised that it was important to her that I marry a Jew. But it was important to her. She quietly allied herself with my father, who thought my relationship with Jenny would someday end, who still phoned me with the names of single Jewish girls, with the silent breathless weight of his hoping.

  I thought of turning to a rabbi. But I didn’t know any rabbis. Before I’d gotten my birth mother’s letter, the only times I went to synagogue were when I returned to New York. The day her letter came, however, I chatted with the rabbi after services in Berkeley. He struck me as a decent man. When I called him now, he agreed to meet with me.

  Rabbi Stone’s office was in the back of the synagogue. The air smelled familiar, the sweet fermented scent of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where my father grew up and where our teachers took us to see matzo made by hand and the sabbath wine bottled.

  Rabbi Stone told me a little about himself. He had grown up in New York City, in an assimilated Jewish home on Central Park West. He’d gone to the Trinity School, where the students attended chapel every morning despite the fact that many of them were Jewish. His parents had had a Christmas tree, although they’d called it a bush and decorated its branches with Stars of David. Jesus was Jewish, his parents had said. They liked to remind him of that.

  When he got to Princeton, Rabbi Stone found God. He studied at a yeshiva in Israel and came back to the United States to prepare for the rabbinate.

  He was more or less my age. Several times since I’d met him, I’d seen him on the streets of Berkeley carrying a knapsack on his shoulder, not looking like my idea of an Orthodox rabbi. He had no beard. His head was always covered, but sometimes he didn’t wear a yarmulke—instead sporting a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap with the peak turned slightly to the side. I’d watched him from afar at Berkeley Bowl, strolling through the produce aisles with his infant son in a front pack.

  He asked me now about my religious education. I’d told him that I’d gone to Jewish day school. He wanted to know if I’d studied Talmud and if my Hebrew was fluent.

  I’d learned Talmud, I said. I could still speak Hebrew and make my way through the prayer service. The day I’d met him, I’d been surprised by how familiar the liturgy sounded. My grade-school teacher, Rabbi Appelfeld, had described Jewish learning as a car without brakes: either you were going forward or you were going backward. But there I’d been in synagogue that morning, and all the tunes came back to me.

  “You wanted to talk about adoption,” Rabbi Stone said.

  I nodded. “But first I need you to promise not to judge me.”

  “Why would I judge you?”

  “Because you’re an Orthodox rabbi. You think a Jew’s supposed to live a particular way, and by those standards I don’t do very well.”

  He looked kindly at me. His eyes were gray, the color of quartz; they sparkled briefly in the synagogue light. “I have my beliefs. But I only preach to those who want to be preached to. Besides, that’s not what you’ve come to talk about.”

  He opened a volume of the Talmud and read to me. “Kol ha’migadel yatom b’toch bayto, ma’aleh alav ha’katuv ki’eelu yilado. Kol ha’milamed ben chavayro Torah, ma’aleh alav ha’katuv ki’eelu yilado.” He translated: “Whosoever rears an orphan in his own house is considered by Scripture as if he fathered the child. Whosoever teaches Torah to the son of his companion, Scripture considers him as if he begat him.” King Saul’s daughter Michal reared the children of her sister Merav and therefore was considered their mother. Even Batia, the daughter of Pharaoh, was deemed Moses’ mother for having saved and reared him.

  For most purposes, Rabbi Stone said, my adoptive parents were my parents from the perspective of Jewish law. When they died, I should say kaddish for them. I was obligated to obey them, as the Torah commanded.

  Still, he said, adopted children were like orphans. They should be treated sensitively.

  “I’m not an orphan,” I said.

  “Not literally.”

  “Not figuratively either.” Behind him, on a bookshelf, the volumes of the Talmud were lined up. Next to them were the Five Books of Moses. Squeezed on other shelves were scores of commentaries in Hebrew and Aramaic. Some I’d heard of, some I hadn’t; some were almost a thousand years old. It was depressing how much there was and how little I knew. I, who in many ways was an educated Jew, had turned my back on this tradition without fully learning it.

  “I have two parents who love me,” I said.

  “Of course you do.”

  “But you consider me an orphan.”

  “Not exactly.” He opened his desk drawer and removed a sheet of paper. It was a bibliography he’d prepared for me. I felt bad for having been rude to him. He didn’t even know me. It wasn’t clear what I’d done to deserve his kindness.

  “I didn’t mean to be impatient.”

  “Jews are an impatient people.”

  “But I wasn’t born Jewish.” I felt as though I were sitting before a great arbiter of law, before God himself. I hoped that Rabbi Stone would release me, that he’d recast my life with his long rabbinic fingers and tell me I wasn’t Jewish.

  “You’re a Jew,” he said. “If your conversion was valid, as I gather it was, if you were raised a Jew, as you say you were, if you continued to practice even after your bar mitzvah, then you’re a Jew according to the law.”

  I felt great disappointment and great relief.

  He spoke to me in Hebrew: “Yehoodee hoo yehoodee af al pee she’yechetah. Do you know what that means?”

  I did, I told him. I’d heard those words from Rabbi Appelfeld. A Jew is a Jew even if he sins. It was impossible, Rabbi Appelfeld had said, to convert from Judaism.

  My father’s words came back to me. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. I was a Jew, but I wasn’t. I didn’t care what Rabbi Stone said. I didn’t, and I did.

  I got up from my chair and shook his hand. I thanked him for meeting with me.

  As I reached the synagogue doors, he called out. “Come back anytime.”


  “To synagogue?”

  He was standing in the shadows at the front. The light from the ark shone on his head, casting him in swaths of orange. “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe in God. It would be hypocritical for me to go to services.”

  “You came once.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And you’ve been before. The door’s always open.”

  “Thank you. I don’t expect to come back, but I appreciate your offer.”

  Three weeks to the day after her letter arrived, my birth mother called. She was flying to San Francisco the following afternoon and wanted to meet me the day after that for lunch.

  Perhaps she, like my parents, would spring news upon me. You’ve inherited a terrible disease. You’ve been bequeathed ten million dollars. I saw myself at lunch with her, still numb, thinking: You’re thirty years old, and you’re meeting your birth mother for the first time. What are you feeling right now?

  I didn’t feel anything.

  Two days later, I waited for her at an Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I loved Ethiopian food, this restaurant especially. I wanted to show her my good taste. This is my town, this is my restaurant, as if I myself had cooked the food.

  But now I wasn’t sure I’d made the right choice. She lived in Indiana. Perhaps a hamburger would have been better. Briefly, on the phone, I’d asked her what she looked like so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in the restaurant, moving from patron to patron, asking every woman whether she was related to me. But my birth mother hadn’t been specific. She looked average, she said. I’d seen a magazine cover with a picture of the “Average American” on it. It was a computer composite of various races, weights, and body types. Maybe that was my birth mother, a goulash of strange people come to find me.

  She’d asked on the phone if I would pick her up at the airport, but I’d refused. I would see her, I said, though not at an airport, a place constructed for reunions. Maybe she would try to hug me. I didn’t want her to, and I didn’t want her not to.

  At work the day before, I’d kept glancing at my watch, waiting for the time her plane would arrive. While lecturing on Jim Crow, I tossed my chalk from hand to hand; I found myself looking out the window. She seemed to be everywhere now that she’d arrived. I almost expected her to land outside school and get off the plane and greet me.

  I thought of her as a homeless woman, pushing a shopping cart off the airplane, showing up at the apartment with her bric-a-brac. In the morning I’d wake up and find her stuff on our floor—magazines, chewing gum, old packets of tissues. She’d comb through our fridge for leftover food, leaving cellophane wrappers crumpled on the counter.

  A woman walked toward me in the restaurant. The black leather pocketbook slung over her shoulder thumped against her side. “Ben,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “Susan Green.” She was smaller than I’d imagined, almost a foot shorter than I was. She had a wide symmetrical face, while mine was longer and narrower, and pale green eyes, while mine were blue. Her skin was darker than mine, but we both had sandy hair. Her nose was straight like my nose; her nostrils were evenly parted. But what I noticed most was how young she seemed. She looked like a Catholic schoolgirl.

  “Hello, Mrs. Green.” She wore a navy blazer and a gray wool skirt; around her neck was a string of pearls. In each earlobe was a tiny gold stud in the shape of a star; I smelled perfume on her. Her hands were small but muscular. I was struck by the strength of her grip, and by the ease with which she held herself. I’d been expecting someone more retiring.

  “You recognized me,” I said.

  And she said, not unkindly, “Mother’s intuition.”

  She looked around the restaurant. I’d been right to second-guess myself. She seemed unsure about the place, glancing up and down the aisles. Then I saw what was bothering her. The patrons were eating on the floor.

  “We can sit on chairs if you want.”

  She seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s Ethiopian food, right?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I’ve never had it.” She reached into her pocketbook and took out a tissue, then rubbed it gently across her lips as though she were worried there was something there. She checked the pockets of her blazer to make sure the flaps weren’t stuck inside. “They don’t use utensils here, do they?”

  “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

  She hesitated. “We don’t really know each other.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Maybe next week.”

  “Maybe next week what?”

  “Maybe next week we can eat here.”

  “Next week?”

  “Or the week after.”

  How long was she staying in town? Part of me hoped that she planned to stay forever, that she was uprooting her life for me. But if she told me that, I’d panic and bolt. It would be like a first date. You had just met, and the girl was already saying that she wanted you to meet her parents.

  “There’s a Chinese place across the street,” I told her.

  Before I could say anything else, she was out the door and crossing Telegraph Avenue, weaving through the traffic.

  But when we reached the Chinese restaurant, she changed her mind. The place was too dark, and the menu had pictures of all the items. “It’s like Denny’s,” she said. “It’s the first time we’ve met, and I don’t want to feel like we’re eating at a Denny’s.”

  We walked up the street toward campus. We passed salad bars, taquerías, sandwich shops, and pizza joints. We stopped in front of the restaurants and glanced at the menus, but at each place something else seemed slightly wrong. We were dancing around each other: You choose; no, you choose. We really must have looked as if we were on a first date, all elbows and knees as we walked up the street, unable to find the right distance between us, several times almost colliding with each other.

  Finally we settled on a combination restaurant and music store across the street from campus. We sat on the landing, where the menu offered sandwiches, quiche, and fresh-squeezed juices. On the floor below us compact discs were for sale. Classical music came from the speakers.

  “Do you feel comfortable here?” my birth mother asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. In truth I was nervous.

  She closed her eyes. She was concentrating on the music, a plaintive strain of cello and violin. “Do you like classical music?”

  “It’s okay. My parents played it all the time when I was a kid, but I never really was interested in it.”

  “I like classical music.” She paused for a few seconds. “What do you like?”

  “In general?” I tried to think of a good example, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I was uncomfortable with the conversation. It felt like an interview, my birth mother asking me lots of questions, trying too hard to learn who I was. “What do you like?”

  “I like the beach,” she said. “I like a good meal. I like Italian food. I like getting the chance to meet you, Ben. That’s what I like most right now.”

  “I’m glad to meet you too,” I said.

  “You don’t have to be polite.”

  “I’m not being polite. I really am glad to meet you.”

  She smiled at me, then took a sip of water. “I like to read. I like to open a good novel before I go to bed.”

  “What do you read?”

  She thought for a while. “Danielle Steel and Rosamunde Pilcher. I like the kind of book you can take to the beach.” She smiled tentatively, as if seeking my approval. “I like James Michener too.”

  Danielle Steel. Rosamunde Pilcher. James Michener. I also love to read, I always have; on the way home from school, I often stop at the public library. I make sure to read at least a novel a week. I wished my birth mother had mentioned an author who surprised me—André Gide, Paul Bowles, even someone as popular as Jane Austen—anything to suggest we had more in common than I thought.

  “I like Marcel Proust,” I sa
id. Proust was a great writer, but I hadn’t read that much of him. Was I simply trying to contrast myself with her, to make her tastes seem philistine?

  “What else do you do?”

  “I play basketball,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought this up. Basketball was fine. I’d played in high school, and at Yale I’d spent a season on the junior varsity bench, getting beaten up under the boards during practice. I still played pick-up twice a week, but basketball wasn’t my life. It wasn’t the best way to describe myself.

  “Your birth father played basketball.”

  “He did?”

  “I used to watch him on the playground after school.”

  His image came to me, this man whom for years I’d thought of as Abraham. Every Abe I’d met, every Abraham: I’d examined him as if for a mark, wondering whether he was related to me.

  “Did you love him?” I asked.

  Her eyes grew moist. “Very much.”

  “Didn’t he love you?”

  “For a while he did. For a while we both loved each other.”

  “But then?”

  She looked sadly at me. “Then we got older.”

  What, I wondered, had gone wrong between them? If I’d been their son—if I’d stayed their son—maybe I’d have been able to patch things up.

  We went to the counter to get our food and then returned to our table. My birth mother raised her sandwich to her mouth. “I want to know everything about you,” she said. “I want us to catch up.”

  That was what I wanted too. So why did I feel compelled to tell her the truth? “We can’t catch up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m thirty years old. We can sit here and talk. We can be cordial to each other.”

  “But I want us to be more than cordial.” She reached her hand across the table. For a second I thought she was going to touch me. For a second I wanted her to.

  “You’ve never been part of my life,” I said.

  “I know that.” She looked downcast. She had her hand on her water glass. Her fingers made slender imprints in the condensation.