Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  I should mention that I had decided to wear red jeans that morning, which, it occurred to me as I was entering, might not have been the smartest fashion choice given the circumstances. However, once inside the small sanctuary, I was relieved to find that all the people attending this service could easily be mistaken for a troupe of supermodels on break between Vogue shoots. The women were tan, thin, and lustrously maned; their wrists were bedecked in bangles, their necks draped in silk scarves. The men were equally lovely and well-groomed. Boy, they sure make good-looking Jews in Paris, I thought.

  But after I had digested all that, I noticed something else. There was a real service going on, with a rabbi on a bimah in the center of the synagogue surrounded by men in prayer shawls, singing songs I did not recognize, lyrics I could not place. All of these people clearly knew one another; I was the only stranger. They had been coming to this synagogue for years, nurturing their own traditions, passing down their unique melodies and prayers. All the while I had been growing up in a Satmar sect in Williamsburg, these Algerian Jews had been doing their thing, as legitimate and authentic as their Hasidic peers.

  How had I never realized that there might be Jewish communities all over the world whose practices and perspectives had nothing in common with my own, yet were just as connected to our shared heritage as any other?

  As I left the synagogue, an old, wrinkled woman wrapped in a metallic-threaded shawl was lighting candles off to the side. She looked at me with bottomless black eyes.

  In that moment, gazing at the flames she hovered over so protectively, I knew I had found a piece of my new identity. I was a global Jew, someone who could be open to everything it meant to be Jewish, who could discover the complete length of its broad and colorful spectrum. I would never again think in terms of limiting myself to one dot on that map when I could be the epitome of the wandering Jew, absorbing the diversity of the Jewish experience anyplace I happened to be.

  I tried to express this later, as Sabine and I sat down to a lovely lunch in the newly trendy Gambetta neighborhood. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a boutique hotel called Mama Shelter; its ceiling was low and made of slate, with poems and designs sketched on it in colored chalk. For a moment it felt like we were in SoHo. There was nothing old-school glam about the environment here on the outskirts of the fashionable, chic core of Paris. I no longer felt like such a tourist.

  Sabine interrupted me to introduce her friend Amélie, another Jewish denizen of the city. Amélie was beautiful in a throwback way, slightly plump with high cheekbones and a full head of curly red hair. She did not seem Jewish, but when I shared that observation, she pulled out a Jewish star from under her black turtleneck. In heavily accented English, she said with a laugh, “Now you know I really am!”

  I turned to Sabine. “You’ve worn your Jewish star everywhere—I’ve never seen you hide it.” I turned back to Amélie. “Do you feel self-conscious wearing it?”

  “You can’t wear a Jewish star in the open in Paris,” she insisted in a hushed voice. “Paris is—how you say—very racist. You can’t be Jewish here.”

  After everything Sabine had shown me, I was convinced that the Jewish community was undergoing some form of renaissance; Sabine’s brazen announcement of her ethnicity to the world had felt like an indication of the nascent boldness of the contemporary European Jewish community. I looked at her questioningly as Amélie took a seat at the table.

  Sabine acknowledged my look with a cringe. “It’s not quite so bad . . .” she said, trailing off as she made a face at Amélie, as if her friend was just being a bit hysterical.

  “No, really it is,” Amélie insisted. “You don’t know because you coming from New York,” she said in her heavy accent, “and Sabine tells me in New York it’s all Jews, nothing but Jews. This is why I want very badly to go to New York. Here in Paris, Sabine, she only spends time with Jews. She doesn’t live in the real Paris. I live in the real Paris, and you cannot be Jewish there.”

  “Is that true?” I asked Sabine, shocked.

  Sabine hemmed and hawed. “It’s partly true,” she acknowledged. “Although”—she looked pointedly at Amélie—“I do have some non-Jewish friends, but I admit I choose to spend most of my time with Jewish people. I have very strong feelings about my heritage and my identity. I want people around me who support that, who allow me to strengthen that identity.”

  I asked Amélie, “How is it that you are more assimilated than she is?”

  “Because my parents are more scared,” she said. “They did not want to put me in a Jewish school, or send me to a Jewish camp, like Sabine’s family. When they came back to Paris after the war, they changed their name, pretended their family had never been Jewish. It was very bad then to be different. Where I live, there are no Jews. I never belonged to a Jewish community. My boyfriend is a Catholic, and his mother knows and she hates me.”

  “It’s like the Dark Ages,” I said. “Who still reacts that way?”

  Sabine sighed. “That’s how the goyim are in Paris. Very different from America.”

  “But Sabine, when you went out with me to that fancy restaurant the other day, why did you wear your star if you knew the environment would be more discriminating? Why not tuck it away?”

  “I refuse to be intimidated. I want people to look at my star, know who I am, and then observe me and see that I’m just like them. I’m always polite and friendly. What fault can they truly find with me besides that star?”

  I hadn’t considered that every time Sabine ventured outside her community, she was being brave, standing up for an entire people. I couldn’t have even fathomed that in New York.

  When I said good-bye that day, I hugged Amélie and Sabine very tightly, thinking that in some ways these girls were more Jewish than I was, despite where I’d grown up. They were making sacrifices for their identity daily, just like our ancestors did. They couldn’t take their Jewishness, or other people’s acceptance of it, for granted.

  The next day, before I left, I had lunch with Amélie one more time. The waiter overheard us speaking in Yiddish and shared with us his own memories of a Yiddish-speaking grandfather.

  “What is your name?” I asked the waiter.

  “Denis,” he said.

  “We’ll give you a nice Jewish name,” I kidded with a smile. “How about David?”

  He nodded happily and Amélie giggled.

  I noticed that Amélie was wearing her star outside her sweater that day, and I remarked on it.

  “You’ve only just met me, after my whole journey into Judaism. I didn’t always wear a Jewish star,” Amélie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My grandparents had different names, after the war. They were hidden children during the Holocaust, so my parents didn’t even really know we were Jewish. I found out when I was seventeen, and I literally had a nervous breakdown. I lost my mind; I started getting panic attacks. I developed agoraphobia. I even had to be institutionalized for a month.”

  I was gaping at this point.

  “Now I’m okay, but then . . .” she trailed off. “My psychiatrist asked me what was wrong, why I was suddenly feeling so terrible, out of the blue, and all I could say was ‘I’m Jewish!’ He didn’t understand, but I now had to worry when I walked out on the street, if people would still love me, or if I had to work harder to earn their love, to somehow compensate for this new flaw in my personality.”

  “I definitely know what that feels like,” I said.

  “But then I went to Israel! For the month that I stayed there, my symptoms completely disappeared! I felt like I was home. I thought I was cured. Then I came back to Paris, and my anxiety resumed immediately. Now I’m on a whole cocktail of medications, and I still have to employ all these methods of distraction when I’m outside, like I can’t walk on the street unless I’m listening to music. Otherwise I just wonder if people
are judging me, if they’re looking at me and thinking I look Jewish. This is why I want to come to America, to New York. In New York there are so many Jews like you! I want to live there, or in Israel. Somewhere that’s Jewish.”

  “It’s like we are going in opposite directions,” I said. “Yet we have so much in common.” She was trying to be as Jewish as possible to resolve her internal crisis, and I was running as fast as I could from a leash that someone was trying put around my neck, with a little tag hanging from it saying “Call this number if lost.” At least that’s what it felt like. Everyone seemed to think they knew better than I did about my Jewishness, whether I was or wasn’t, or what sort I should now become. “We’re different, but our anxiety and feelings of displacement are the same,” I told her.

  I wondered how I could tell Amélie that America doesn’t feel like home to me when she thought I was lucky to be from New York. I put my feet on European ground for the first time and immediately experienced the sensation of roots growing deep into the hallowed soil. It is here in Europe, where to be Jewish-identified is now an anomaly, that I feel most clearly defined. I may not have visited Israel, but I have seen my Zion. The land of my ancestors, the map of the diaspora, this is my Israel. It is the wandering that is home, at least for now.

  My son knows he’s one of very few Jewish students in his new school in the rolling hills of New England, but I always encourage him to share his culture and heritage with his peers as much as possible. I think of my experience in Paris and am thankful that he doesn’t have to be wary of that sort of blowback, that he can at the very least trust that most people won’t try to exclude or deny him anything because of his blood. But I also want him to know that a form of rejection is a part of his history. How to explain that to him without scaring him? I would never discuss the Holocaust with him at this age, or any of the other great persecution epics like the Spanish Inquisition, but I want to tell him the ethnic story of the Jewish Diaspora, about how his ancestors lived under very different conditions than we do now. I decided to show him Fiddler on the Roof, to explain to him what Jewish life had once been like, without exception—that it had taken a big war and a lot of change for us to live the way we were living now. As I watched him try to process that, I realized just how different the two of us were—I had never been able to see myself outside that identity, and he was struggling to place himself inside it. Had we really made the break then? Had I freed him from an imposed legacy and allowed him to define himself?

  On his Thanksgiving break in 2012, I took him to southern Spain. He had been learning Spanish in school, and it was an opportunity for him to practice his language skills. I showed him the grand mosques and cathedrals that dotted the Andalusian landscape; we were transfixed by the flamenco dancers who still carried on a tradition that represented a merging of Gypsy, Moorish, and Jewish musical influences. This was the seat of Jewish thought in Europe, I said to him. It was the first port through which Jews entered the continent, and it was because of the Inquisition and its consequences that they were scattered in all the countries to the north. Maimonides had studied and written here, I said, remember Maimonides? A sculpture was erected in his tribute in a square in Córdoba, the ancient Roman city where he had lived. I still have a photo of Isaac dancing excitedly around it.

  We stepped into the tiny room that constituted one of the only three restored synagogues in the whole of Spain. It was smaller than my first apartment. Etchings and carvings in the stone wall had been recovered, but otherwise there was nothing on display except for a brass menorah in a case on the platform.

  “Why isn’t there any stuff?” Isaac asked me. I didn’t know what to say. We had been to so many lovingly restored cathedrals, all of which had been large and grandiose and had boasted many beautiful objects and artworks. He had a point.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe because everything was destroyed and they couldn’t find it.”

  The synagogue didn’t take more than three minutes to walk around, that’s how small it was. A box asked for a donation of fifty cents on the way out. I remembered the pricey admission fee to La Giralda in Seville and felt irritated at the comparison. At the Sfarad House across the street, a similarly low fee was charged—and like the synagogue, the Jewish museum was incredibly small, with limited offerings.

  I asked the man working behind the desk if he was Jewish, or if anyone who worked there was.

  “Unfortunately no, ma’am,” he said apologetically in a strong accent, “but all of us care very much about the history of the Jewish presence in Spain and are working very hard to the interest of preservation.”

  “So are there any Jews left in Córdoba?”

  “Very few. We used to have eleven, but then the rabbi’s son went to England to study, so now we have ten.”

  I couldn’t fathom how ten people managed to hold on to the idea of a community in the historic wasteland that was southern Spain. I had not come across any other reports of Jews in the region.

  “But they are all older, and their children move away, so it is expected that there will not be any Jews anymore, in the next generation in Córdoba.”

  “What about la convivencia?” It was a term I had heard tossed around in every museum and tourist site. Spain was trying to rewrite the history of Andalusia by pointing to a nonexistent “golden age” of tolerance and claiming it was a model for peaceful coexistence in the modern world. La convivencia was the label for this idea, and I knew the museum employee would recognize it.

  “Unfortunately it’s just an idea. It’s not really quite possible for Spain to recapture the time when many different cultures thrived amongst one another. That era was before Spain became a real independent state.”

  Isaac was very excited to explore the museum and he raced ahead, calling to me when he saw something he wanted to show me. I was very pensive as I walked through the small house. Any one of the garments on display, of those that were real and not created based on a design that was surmised to be authentic, could have belonged to a man who was tortured and burnt at the stake. Yet that feeling faded as I realized that almost everything in the museum was an “inspired restoration,” as opposed to a real found object.

  I looked down at the one-sheet guide the man had given me. It talked about the history of Jews in Córdoba. We were now in what was still called the Jewish quarter, but according to the document, any homes that had once been occupied by Jews were destroyed by riots in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  On the way out, I pointed that out to the man. “So, if the so-called Jewish quarter was completely razed after the Jews had already been expelled, why still call it the Jewish quarter? Not even the ground I’m walking on is Jewish! It’s been inhabited by Christians for centuries.” He must have felt put on the spot. I’m sure no one had asked him that many questions.

  “It’s called the Jewish quarter in memory of the people who lived here before.”

  “But look around,” I said. “This is now your cool neighborhood! This is your SoHo, your Village, like we have in Manhattan. Do you have any idea how insulting it is to have your trendiest, most expensive neighborhood invoke the memory of the people who were oppressed and tortured here? Spain has made no effort to reach out to the Jewish community or welcome them back. The right thing to do would be to give this neighborhood to them. No wonder there are only ten Jews left.”

  I wouldn’t live here in a million years, I thought. It would make me sick. I walked out of the museum feeling flattened.

  “You’re upset because they don’t have any more Jews here, right Mommy?” Isaac asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so. But I also thought there’d be more to see. This was the biggest Jewish community in Spain. We’ve been touring mosques and churches everywhere—those weren’t destroyed. Why couldn’t they have left just a little bit behind for us?”

  I was ready to leave, but on the way out of the q
uarter, now mobbed with model types sipping cappuccinos, I passed a small jewelry boutique. There were handmade Jewish stars on display in the window. The jeweler was an old man who didn’t speak English, but I pointed to the one I liked and he gave me the price. I laid the money on the table, and he opened the case and gently lifted the necklace from it. He looked at me, and motioned putting it on, a questioning look on his face.

  “Yes, I want to wear it,” I said.

  And I walked out of that shop with that star on my neck, not hidden under my sweater. I held my head high and walked down the street holding Isaac’s hand, making sure to meet everyone’s gaze. I was Jewish. My roots were right here.

  When we landed back in New York, I felt for the first time in my life like a full container, one my grandmother would have said was worth opening a door for.

  I still feel the need to establish my Jewishness immediately. “Can’t you tell just by looking at my nose?” I ask jokingly. “Hand me a bagel and shmear.” However, it is precisely in the parts of the world where Jews are underrepresented that I feel most Jewish. The irony of this does not elude me, of course. And yet, to discover my authentic Jewish identity, it feels almost as if I need to have a space cleared for me in which to do that, a space clear of preconceived notions, empty of past or communal influences. Besides, there’s nothing like being surrounded by goyim to make you feel the need for a nose job.

  One of the first things I did when I moved to New England was befriend one such goy. Richard T. Scott had just moved into his new studio when I met him in the spring of 2012. Tall and slender, with red hair, freckled skin, and a high forehead, he looked distinctive and out of place in such a casual environment. He wore linen pants, aviator sunglasses, and wide-brimmed straw hats. He was a contemporary figurative artist, he said; and then his appearance made sense. The work that hung on the walls of his atelier seemed to combine the elegance of classical style with the disturbingly haunting subjects of the modern world. It was an odd yet moving juxtaposition.