ti

Honesty
As A Verb

Lauren Cohn
is a four-year-old girl
from Huntington Woods.

SUSAN RADIUS JOFFE

SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

>=-D

/-'

Somewhere between then and
now, I discovered that being hon-
est about myself, about things
that mattered to me, was the in-
fluential force behind my ac-
tions. As a child, growing up
with an Irish Catholic mother
and a Jewish father, I never un-
derstood — nor was honest
about — the tensions that their
bond brought to each other. In a
time when mixed marriages
were, at best, tolerated, my fa-
ther — the son of an Orthodox
immigrant from the Ukraine —
married my mother, the daugh-
ter of an Irish American immi-
grant. Oy.
As I grew, wedged in every
sense between the two, my fa-
ther embodied the tradition of
Torah. Indeed, in his family,
one's presence was not fully ac-
knowledged until one emerged
as a scholar. Only then did full
personhood exist. Sitting at the
Pesach table, my father, on one
side, would serve me the kre-
plach, the kugel. My mother, on
the other side, would as quickly
remove it from my plate, lest the
food be too different for me to tol-
erate. Isn't projection amazing?
Both acted from their hearts,
believing themselves honest and
their course to be the righteous
one. My father, long suffering
the belief that any practiced re-
ligion indicated intolerable
weakness, would say that his
Susie would choose her own path
when she was old enough. Yet
the expectation persisted that
I'd go to seder, and that I would
march in behalf of Israel.
My mother, in turn, was the
more tortured. That I practice
religion faithfully, specifically
hers, seemed to help absolve her
of the guilt she felt at having de-
parted from her family's norm.
With time, I realized that the
pain of religion — which was the
only way I'd known it as a child
— could be obliterated. I tried to
live the paradox, praying to a
God (any generic God would do)
just in case one did exist. Alter-
natively, I tried to totally ignore
the concept.
With the growing honesty
that I was, in my core, a Jewish
person, I realized that being hon-
est about religion meant coming
to peace with Judaism. So it was
no surprise that I married a Jew-
ish man; that I completed the of-
ficial conversion that had
already occurred in its own per-
sonal way; and that I proudly
gave birth to two truly Jewish
children.
Honesty makes you work. In
time, I asked, how could I be a

HONESTY

page 26

She has eight Barbie dolls.

Two jump ropes.

Fifteen coloring books.

And every Disney videotape.

She also has leukemia.

If Lauren doesn't get
a bone marrow transplant soon,
she'll have nothing.

The "A Match For Life" Donor Drive will be held at Rock Financial,
The Mortgage Bank, 30600 Telegraph Road (South of 13 Mile Road) 4th floor
Saturday June 22 from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, Sunday June 23 from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm

"Pc NAcri-th For Lifr"

(810)540.6626

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