44B
Friday-, September 28, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Continued from preceding page
that this mattered to me somehow.
The Judaica section at Brentano's
on Fifth Avenue started to draw me. I
bought books about Judaism and read
with more hunger than understand-
ing, searching, I now realize, to find
what Judaism meant for me, could
mean. I didn't know enough to decide.
Christmas at a friend's house with
Bev. The tree decorating was fun, but
hearing the host read from the New
Testament seemed unnatural to me,
embarrassing. The carols at the piano
drove me to another room. I didn't be-
long there, I knew it, felt it, believed it.
This was not my holiday or my place. I
had always felt uncomfortable during
New York's Christmas madness, but
never so intensely. I told Bev that. The
presents under the tree I'd helped
string lights and popcorn on were gifts
of love, but not appropriate to whoever
I suspected I was. The hostess and I
had once disagreed about the pos-
sibilities of Jews being conscientious
objectors: "Look at the Bible," she'd
said. "It's full of violence." And I had
then only secondhand words for reply,
none of my own.
We did not get married. I knew
more and more clearly I could not
marry a non-Jew, no matter how much
I loved her. What pushed me over the
edge? Imagining Christmas, so much a
part of Bev's life, in "our" house. I
couldn't do it or ask her to give it up. I
couldn't confuse our children. I wanted
a Jewish home. No — it wasn't that
affirmative. I realized I couldn't have a
non-Jewish home. When I told Bev,
painfully, reluctant to hurt her, but
forced to the truth by her coming de-
parture, I closed that door forever.
But I made a claim on the future.
When I returned from seeing Bev
off at Kennedy (she was headed for
England), I found a package on my
desk at home. My first selection from
the Jewish book club had come: a
heavy one-volume encyclopedia of
Judaica. I was too bitter to laugh, too
stunned to cry.
M
y brother decided to marry the
second generation Polish
Catholic he'd been dating for years,
the woman he said he'd never marry,
the woman my parents saw as the
enemy," I'm sure. Up at school in
Massachusetts, I received a phone call
from him • asking for help. Mom was
"getting hysterical," crying. Dad was
upset for her, for himself. My brother
was stubborn, angry, his girlfriend
understandably incensed: if she was
good enough to come to dinner, then
why —?
I made calls, wrote a frantic letter,
said anything to keep what little fam-
ily we had from destroying itself in
bitterness and violent regret. It
sounded like a catastrophe — I could
imagine them getting married, my
parents not coming, and me in the
middle. I'm not sure how much I
helped, but things calmed down —
they had to. My brother would marry
whomever he wanted, we all knew
that, but the shock and resentment on
all sides were inevitable. Later I felt
betrayed: I had not married Beverly,
how could my brother go back on his
word? I wished my brother hadn't
taken something away from the family
by not marrying a Jew, but now I be-
lieve he had nothing to give. My
brother is a Jewish Almanac Jew, the
kind who likes knowing which movie
stars changed their names.
The impending crisis (I knew
about the wedding before my parents)
sent me to Yom Kippur services in
Amherst, Mass., to a steepleless white
clapboard ex-church, unused to being
the scene of Jewish prayer, where I sat
in a crowded balcony, hardly com-
prehending the Machzor's (prayer-
book) English, but crying unexpec-
tedly, moved by melodies I somehow
knew, moved by the cantor's hall-
filling eloquence, the crowds, even the
children tramping on the stairs and
the fact that I was there, suffused by
the beauty, the solemnity of group
prayer for forgiveness, a publicly
shared intimacy.
I was deeply moved without
understanding how or why, or what it
all meant. I came home that night to
share my wonderment; they approved,
just as they did next Pesach when I
didn't eat bread even though my mat-
zah ran out. They approved, and might
even have been proud, but like those
who have stepped off a path, turned
back or never even begun the search,
they could not sense that I had felt the
presence of a new possibility in my life.
My first synagogue service, my
first Yom Kippur not listening to Kol
Nidre on the radio or on a Jan Peerce
record: I was 23.
My brother's wedding, which took
place in the United Nations chapel,
was performed by a half-Jewish priest
and a rabbi who looked Episcopalian. I
was moved by the ceremony, espe-
cially by. the Hebrew which I did not
understand. But the experience was
strange for me; I was too uncertain in
my own Jewish identity to condemn
what my brother was doing or feel
comfortable with it.
I
srael. I was 24 tired, of grad school,
tired of my friends, my problems,
almost hysterically eager to drop it all
and run from my confusion. It was a
dark time and Israel was a bath of
light, two weeks of escape from a home
I hated to one I did not know. Israel:
heat, long political conversations, bus
rides, tourists, surprising people with
how much Hebrew I picked up, meet-
ing my mother's brother for the first
time, speaking Yiddish to his wife be-
cause her English was minimal. Is-
rael: seeing a photo of his brother, the
man whose middle name I bore: Lev,
the man lost in Russian battle. Israel:
a dream more real than the dream of
America — older in the mind of God. I
returned with a new name as my first,
Lev, determined to. speak Yiddish at
home, to reclaim something of the past
and with a knowledge, undeveloped,
unrefined, of a deeper meaning of my
life. Israel was another way, a differ-
ent, difficult path, but far more re-
warding, one that could silence my cry
for meaning.
But I didn't take it. I had not even
become a Jew — how could I become an
Israeli?
he feelings of that Yom Kippur
T
service at Amherst lay dormant
for two years, what with finishing my
degree, getting a part-time teaching
job in New York, writing, starting an-
other degree, living at home again and
re-experiencing why I'd wanted to
leave: the constriction, the coldness.
But I started subscribing to Commen-
tary, which might seem laughable to
some; for me it was a big step. I learned
a great deal in its pages and felt, how-
ever tenuously, more Jewish. Teach-
ing at Fordham, I had the opportunity
of giving a January Project, a course
different from regular offerings. One
fall night it hit me: I would teach
Holocaust literature. All that I'd read
came back to me in a rush. I made a
book list, syllabus and plunged into
three months of intensive research,
reading at least four books a week: his-
tory, fiction, psychology, sociology,
theology. I was certain the literature
had to be grounded in the reality it
attempted to deal with and in in-
terpretations of that reality.
I knew little before I began, had
wanted to know less because the
Holocaust had stolen my parents' past
from them and from me, made
memories bleak and distressing. But
the drive to learn and teach was inti-
mately bound up with my search for
Jewishness. The course, a difficult and
intense month of readings, films, re-
M.F.A. in
Gre e Writing from the
University of
Massachusetts at Amherst
where he won the Harvey
wados prize for fiction. A
4 ed wivriter, he is a
eandidate in
kah Studies at
Michigan State University.
His fiction has appeared in
Redbook.
ports, surpassed any I'd ever done. I
was steeped in the material, lived it,
believed in what I was doing, what I
had to transmit. The students, two-
thirds Jewish, ventured along with
me, bravely, confused, awed, horrified,
searching too. What did it mean? we
all wondered. How could we think of
it?
The most memorable student was
a short, hostile Jewish woman con-
temptous of the Jews' supposed "col-
laboration" in their death, who
underwent a challenge of those beliefs
and emerged so changed, so much
more sensitive and tentative we could
read the transformation in the very
lines of her face. Another student, an
older Polish man who'd left long before
World War II, wrote in his journal
about the question of resistance: "It is
very easy, sitting in a comfortable
West End Avenue apartment, to talk
about courage."
If anything, we all learned the ex-
tremity of conditions in the ghettos,
the camps, learned that New York
standards of behavior did not, could
not apply. And I emerged wondering if
perhaps, as a son of Holocaust sur-
vivors, I hadn'd found a mission. If
Emil Fackenheim's 614th command-
ment was to keep the memory alive,
then perhaps that was what/ could do,
teach others, give from my own special
experience, transmit, interpret the
.past. I wrote a somewhat autobiog-
raphical novel about a child of sur-
vivors and that experience, intense
and private, moved me past feeling I
had that particular mission in life.
Something else was calling to me.
Teaching about the Holocaust, vital as
it was, could not make me a Jew. I
found out what could a year later.
1 'd ordered a pamphlet from the
I American Jewish Committee about
ethnotherapy for Jews, group' therapy
to help those who had poor self-images
as Jews, who had absorbed cultural
stereotypes about themselves. This lit-
tle pamphlet unexpectedly ripped me
open — the ugliness inside finally
came to light: I realized that I had not
one Jewish friend, that I hadn't seri-
ously dated more than one Jewish girl,
that I didn't particularly like Jews.
It was something of a revolution. I
tore unread books from my shelves and
plunged into them that week, sub-
merged in discovery: Howe's World of
Our Fathers, Ozick's The Pagan
Rabbi, Steinsaltz's The Essential
Talmud, the Penguin Book of Jewish
Short Shories, a book on ancient Is-
rael, and Milton Steinberg's Basic
Judaism. That last, the most impor-
tant, was a relic of my days with Be-
verly; I'd read it then, underlining
everywhere, entering nowhere. Now I
read slowly, absorbed, proud almost,
released from the slavery of pride and
ignorance. I loved his book; it seemed
so wise and clear to me and I knew
then that Judaism, my religion of
birth, could be my religion of choice.
At Michigan State University's
Hillel I'd given a talk on Holocaust
literature, written a paper for a con-
ference and decided to do my disserta-
tion in the area. But it was the. Yom
Kippur service, my second, that spoke
to me most. I didn't fast, I wasn't read
to, but I achieved a nearness to prayer
that spurred a decision reading the
pamphlet made certain: I would move
into the Hillel Jewish Students' Co-op.
I would live and eat and associate with
Jews for a change. What attracted me
the most at Hillel, however, was not
the laundry room or the huge kitchen
or the color TV — not even the well-
stocked library, but the small shul up-
stairs where an Orthodox minyan met.
When my Commentary subscrip-
tion ran out, I sent away for Midstream
and then Judaism.
L
iving with Jewish students was at
first unsettling for me — did I fit
in? Would I feel comfortable? As the
routine took over, I realized we were as
much students as Jews, perhaps more
so. This Jewish Co-op turned out to be
more cooperative than Jewish, and not
much of either. We did have one kas-
hrut fanatic and some people attended
Saturday morning services on occa-
sion, but the Jewishness was one of
concern for Israel and anti-Semitism,
a Jewishness of discussion and jokes,
of atmosphere and self-parody.
It was at services that I found a
pathway. The people were relaxed and
friendly and one young couple invited
me for Shabbat lunch; the easy way
they shared their learning delighted
me. The transitions were smooth: one
Shabbat I donned a -tallis, another I
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