After the service ended, Milena and I rushed to the metro to make it in time for a celebratory holiday dinner hosted at her aunt’s garden apartment in the neighborhood of Belleville. We entered the house from the side, through a pair of sliding doors that opened onto a secluded, leafy yard. Inside, we found a brightly lit, noisy room teeming with people. Twenty friends and relatives were there in total, from all over the world. At least six languages were being spoken at once. Food was already being eaten and distributed, and while I noticed the familiar gefilte fish and pomegranate seeds, there were a lot of foods that looked exotic and unfamiliar. One man wore a colorful woven headdress; others had knit white caps draped over the sides of their heads. Milena sat across from me and introduced me to everyone in French, but I couldn’t find anyone to communicate with. The couple next to me was Israeli and spoke only Hebrew; the man on my right was Hungarian and spoke neither English nor Yiddish. Finally, a young woman across from me identified herself as German, and I attempted to Germanize my Yiddish for the first time, just enough to be understood.
I looked around at the lively group and marveled at how I had believed, based on what I was taught as a child, that there was only one way to be Jewish, that everyone else was just faking it. Even when I had widened my circle to include the American Ashkenazi Jewish population at large, I was still faced with the same homogeneous approach to Judaic practice. It had never occurred to me that just over the Atlantic Ocean lay a whole new world of interpretations and traditions.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, I resolved to visit the old Jewish quarter in Paris. I biked nervously over the Seine, trying to avoid being knocked off the road by street traffic. I had never biked in a city before, yet here I was, biking in Paris! I felt like a girl in an advertisement for a French perfume.
By the time I made my way into the heart of the Marais, wide boulevards had given way to the narrowest streets I had yet encountered in Paris, so that when I looked up, the roofs seemed to cave in toward one another with only a sliver of sky visible above them. On the rue des Rosiers, a short cobblestoned alley said to have been the original main street of the Jewish quarter, the air was redolent with the smell of fresh falafel. Everywhere I turned, tourists stood holding foil-wrapped pitas, trying not to drip tahini everywhere. After a quick look around, however, it seemed that falafel was the only thing remotely Jewish that the rue des Rosiers had to offer. I bristled: just because there was a Star of David on the store’s awning didn’t make falafel suddenly Jewish.
I walked my bike over to the center of the street, where it formed a T shape with a longer alley that led out into the rest of the Marais. I passed chic clothing boutiques and quaint bakeries that claimed to sell “Yiddish specialties” like knishes and rugelach. No one inside these bakeries could speak Yiddish or boast of any knowledge about where their goods were prepared or whether the recipes had been passed down or simply reinvented by French pastry chefs. Certainly the challah looked nothing like the fluffy braided loaves I had grown up with; they were simply brioche under a different name.
But at the center of the rue des Rosiers stood a small, unassuming machine, looking almost like one at which you’d buy metro tickets. Its touch screen leaped to life when I put my finger on it. I could choose from a dozen videos, in French with English subtitles, which turned out to be testimonials collected from people who had actually lived on the rue des Rosiers, describing what life was like back when that street was the heart of the Parisian ghetto.
One of the videos featured an older man, identified as a professor now living in the United States, and in the interview he recalled the shame he had once felt when revealing his original address. “It was like saying you had failed to make something of yourself. The rue des Rosiers was a place of stagnation, where only by the pulling up of your own bootstraps could you hope for something better.”
He’s talking about a ghetto, I thought. I certainly knew of the lost ghettos of Europe and their conditions. Even the Lower East Side of Manhattan had once been a stagnant, stinking ghetto for Jews, the Irish—any poor, oppressed immigrant, really. And then it struck me: Williamsburg was a ghetto. I might have been raised in one of the last ghettos in existence. Although the original ghettos were mandated by society and the government, and Williamsburg had been a self-imposed isolation, the result was the same: a bubble, an invisible wall that effectively divided the lives of those on the inside from those on the outside.
The man in the video seemed both nostalgic and dismissive. He clearly had nothing wonderful to say about the rue des Rosiers as a place to grow up, and yet his voice was tinged with regret at knowing that the place of his birth was gone for good, never to return. It made me wonder what exactly I was mourning, having shown up here expecting something and feeling angry that anything remotely Jewish had disappeared. Did I want to bring the ghetto back? Of course not. But it would have been spectacular to have discovered a world in which, for once, I could find the familiar, could feel instantly at home. It was roots I was looking for, thinking that of all places, the ghettos of Europe would most likely feel like they were a part of me and my past. It would have been comforting as well to see some sort of modern, thriving Jewish life in its place, instead of this cold absence, this hollow commemoration.
I walked onward, toward the end of the street, where I had spotted a sign that read judaica. But the shop was closed, and the posters framed in the window were crude and unflattering portraits of Hasidic Jews sweating and lifting dumbbells, part of a collection titled “Oyrobics.” I flushed with shame at the insult, which still felt like it was being made at my expense, although no one could have connected me to those caricatures in the frames.
Then, suddenly, as I was about to bike out of there in a huff, I heard the most incredible sound. It was a shofar, loud and steady, coming from the upper stories of one of the buildings nearby. I raced toward the sound, shaking with excitement at the prospect of a real live Rosh Hashanah service in what had once been the Jewish ghetto. Could there still be a Jewish community in the Marais after all? Alas, I couldn’t find an entrance to a synagogue anywhere on the street. Bystanders watched me zoom from doorstep to doorstep with bemused curiosity, the hands holding their falafels frozen in front of their mouths as they waited to see what would happen next.
And then I saw a young man, dark-skinned, with thick, curly hair covered by a small kippah, a knapsack weighing down his thin shoulders. “You’re Jewish!” I exclaimed triumphantly. “Do you know where that sound is coming from?”
He seemed taken aback by my urgency. In broken English he said, “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Wait here and I will ask the falafel salesman.”
He emerged from the storefront a few moments later, saying that he did not know where that particular shofar was being blown but that there were apparently two synagogues nearby. Two whole synagogues? I found myself following the dark-skinned man down a dimly lit alley and wondering about the likelihood of any situation that involved following a strange man down an alley ending in a happy conclusion. But a second later, there we were, in an archway that led to two doors, one to a Turkish synagogue, the other to an Algerian one. He went right, I went left, and suddenly I was behind a thick velvet curtain, in another world.
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 models 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. But after I had digested the scene, 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 these people clearly knew one another; I was the only stranger. All the while I had been growing up in a Satmar sect in Williamsburg, these Algerian Jews had been practicing their own Judaism, as legitimate and authentic as their Hasidic peers, if not more so. 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. In that moment, gazing at the flames she hovered over so protectively, I knew I had found a piece of my new identity. I had stepped back from my Jewishness enough to achieve some kind of global perspective, to grasp the diversity and complexity inherent in it. Perhaps I could be some kind of global Jew too, someone who could be open to everything it meant to be Jewish, who could discover the complete length of its broad and colorful spectrum. Why would I ever want to limit myself to one version?
* * *
—
Returning to New England this time, with its manicured lawns and white picket fences, its sporting goods shops and genteel country inns, I felt that familiar sense of discomfort more than ever. I couldn’t recognize myself in America, or perhaps it was that I couldn’t recognize America in myself, but it was startling to compare my return to the United States, and the flatlining of my emotions that accompanied it, with the experience I’d had each time I’d arrived in Europe, that immediate, reverberating sensation of making contact with something old and almost, but not quite, forgotten. To ease the impact of my arrival now, in the fall of 2013, I told myself that I would soon return to Europe, that even if I was stuck here, in a place that felt impersonal and foreign to me, I would make going abroad a regular occurrence. I supposed that my passion for the European continent would become simply a part of my identity, that my trips would instill the rhythm that would define my future life here, that I would be a “Europhile.” Of course a part of me believed that if I had another chance to feel that incredible sensation again, maybe I’d understand what it was and how to prolong its influence in my life so that I didn’t always have to arrive home to a devastating sense of loss, this ridiculous, incomprehensible misery that can only be described as homesickness.
* * *
• • •
During those months when I was bound by routine and obligation to stay still, I tried to find methods with which to stave off this painful yearning. Back then, I was convinced that this phenomenon pointed to a character flaw in myself, a restlessness that could never be assuaged. Only years later would I learn that I had been longing for a home I did not yet consciously know, though it was known to me on some level nonetheless. For when I finally found a place to stay, this gnawing feeling that had accompanied me all my life would disappear for good, and I would be vindicated against those who had made dire predictions about me, for there is really no greater triumph in my life than that of having found my way home. Now, however, I did not have the comfort of this vindication, and I felt much like a woman whose lover has gone to war, forced to console herself with occasional messages scribbled from the front. That was my strategy, then, to devour the entire canon of European literature, more specifically the literature of those who had written of Europe, recognizing it as some greater, magical entity, the consummate strengths of which were matched only by its weaknesses. Now for the first time, I stumbled upon writers I had never heard of before, writers who had not achieved any kind of widespread notice in the States the way those authors I had read in college had done, but whose works shattered and remade me in their clarity: Jean Améry, Gregor von Rezzori, Czesław Miłosz, Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, Joseph Roth, Mihail Sebastian, Salomon Maimon, Tadeusz Borowski, to name just a few. I began to notice a strange pattern; that is, when I read the works of these authors, especially those of the generation that had survived the war, I had the oddest feeling that I was communing with the souls of the people who had raised me, that through these books it was as if my grandmother herself was speaking to me, as if my ancestors on all sides had reached through time and grasped me by the throat.
* * *
• • •
Around that time I came across a poem by Anna Margolin in an anthology of Yiddish poetry, and as I murmured its words out loud, following them line by line with my finger the way I had been taught to do with the psalms as a child, I sensed that it was not a poem at all, but an incantation.
All of them—my tribe,
Blood of my blood,
Flame of my flame,
The dead and the living mixed;
Sad, grotesque, large,
They tramp through me as through a dark house,
Tramp with prayers and curses and laments.
They shake my heart like a copper bell,
My tongue quivering.
I don’t recognize my own voice—
My tribe speaks.
—Excerpt from “My Tribe Speaks” by Anna Margolin, translated from the Yiddish by Richard J. Fein
Instantly I knew the phenomenon she was referring to. I recognized that I too had been raised to be a vessel for others, a being through which the dead could live again. I did not have the privilege of possessing my own life, my own spirit; I had a debt to the people who had come before me, who had fought to survive so that my existence was possible. In my own story I had to keep their stories alive.
Each time I lost myself in the bygone world referred to in the texts I had accumulated during my visits to used bookshops, it was jarring to come up for air, to go about my daily life in this idyllic, prosperous corner of America, where everyone around me was fully immersed in a benign present, while a part of me always remained in that forgotten, drastic time.
* * *
—
In the early spring we celebrated Isaac’s seventh birthday. The weather was unseasonably warm that week; I planned to host the shindig at my house so the kids could all run around outdoors. My mother, who at that point played only a marginal role in my life—a role that only diminished over time—took the train up from New York, loaded with party favors and balloons she’d found in a ninety-nine-cent store. I purchased the snacks and cupcakes.
The day of Isaac’s birthday happened to be Grandparents’ Day at his school, so I dropped Isaac and my mother off in the morning and returned home to blow up the balloons and make other sundry preparations. When I picked them up at lunchtime, they’d created a wreath together, Isaac being the designer and my mom wielding the glue gun. They got along well with each other, having none of the baggage that my mom and I grew up taking for granted when it came to our families. To Isaac, she was just my mother, just another person who loved him, and it was uncomplicated.
Isaac knew that my mother hadn’t raised me, but he never asked why. I would have liked for him to be able to take for granted that a mother was always there for her child, but I could already tell, by the way he clung to me, that he didn’t see me as the immovable caregiver most children saw their parents as. He already sensed that I came from an unstable, cryptic world, and that made his world seem somehow less certain.
In many ways, I was a repeat of my mother’s life. Perhaps that is why I’d always struggled with feelings of anxiety and fear when I was around her. Was I doomed to simply relive her life experience and pass it on to the next generation in an unstoppable cycle of misery? Her marriage was also arranged when she was a teenager. She too was forced to have a baby with a man she didn’t love. While I was being raised mostly by my grandparents, she was working menial jobs to put herself through college, an act that constituted her final rejection from our family and community. My father had presented three wives with a religious divorce by the time she was able to obtain her legal one.
My mom and I couldn’t talk about t
hese things, even now—she rejected my every effort, saying it was too painful to talk about the past—but talking about books was our safe conversation, the one thing that bound us together. She told me about how she too used to sneak out to the library as a child, filling her days with books by British authors, like the Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton. She was a child of divorce as well, a symbol of scandal among her peers.
I had no doubt my mother was happy. Her life had begun as mine had, it progressed as mine had, and yet here she was today, accomplished, educated, and independent. Yet I wondered when she would trust me enough to finally talk honestly with me about the past and thereby grant me the closure I needed to allow our relationship to develop. Until then, we treated each other like mere acquaintances; our connection felt superficial and tenuous.
I had asked her recently, after exhuming the old file on my family’s past, what she knew about her own ancestors, wondering not only if she could supplement the patchy documentation I had collected, but also if she herself had at one time or another been possessed by the same driving need to know more about bygone times in order to shore up her own development. “I’ve never had one iota of interest,” she had responded sarcastically. “Why would I care about those people? They were ignorant and traumatized and I’m glad to be free of them.”
Exodus, Revisited Page 14
