8 | AUGUST 17 • 2023 

PURELY COMMENTARY

T

here are a dozen little 
girls stuck inside of me, 
entrenched in similar 
but separate worlds, trying to 
access the outside world past 
a perspective that overwhelms 
them with its constancy. It’s a 
lot easier for me to view my 
past personalities as isolat-
ed individuals 
that caused one 
another rather 
than an ephem-
eral, shifting 
one. 
When I look 
at myself at 6 
years old, I press 
her beneath two slides of glass 
and magnify the settings on 
the microscope. When I reach 
the age of 13, I am required to 
pull out a telescope and trace 
my path across the sky like a 
shooting star. And my current 
self I am too close to inspect 
— just as I would be to those 
girls should I connect to them 
in any way whatsoever. 
I grew up in a tight-knit 
community and a family that 
used to feel like a tiny con-
tinent at war. Through the 
microscope, I can tell that I 
didn’t realize just how much 
of myself was determined by 
the opinions of others, by the 
conventions that would turn 
to swarming anxieties behind 
closed doors — my cellular 
membrane was constructed 
of the bows and ribbons that 
classmates wore, my mito-
chondria a prism-like thing 
that reflected back whatever 
surrounded me. 

I was scared to ask too many 
questions, though they coated 
my tongue in layer upon layer 
of sugar, so thick that cavities 
festered. I used to throw beau-
tifully prepared lunches in the 
garbage because they were too 
different from the white bread 
and chicken that was being 
eaten around me. 
I was a Jewish girl, but no 
one had ever told me what 
that meant, because you can’t 
explain that to a 6-year-old 
in a place that dealt in facile 
answers to complex questions. 
I was a kid, and it was impos-
sible for me to see outside of 
myself, so “Jewish” became 
synonymous with “everyone 
else” — and because the more 
I grew, the more I found it 
impossible to fulfill that specif-
ic set of requirements, I began 
to resent the very idea of 
Judaism, hated the rituals and 
the holidays and the history. 
This bitterness at my dis-
connect with my religion fixed 

a very ugly disposition in me. 
At 7, 8, 9, I had taken on the 
burden of avid defense in favor 
of non-Jews, largely at the 
most inappropriate moments. 
There was an abject struggle 
inside of me to reconcile the 
fact that the only people I 
had ever known growing up 
— Jewish people — were an 
oppressed group when they 
ostensibly oppressed me. The 
connection that this proclivity 
toward sameness was, in fact, a 
survival instinct, residue from 
thousands of years of victim-
hood, was not made by me. 
So I yelled. I was told off and 
judged. My sisters regarded 
me with distaste; my teachers 
furrowed their brows and 
cocked their heads. I didn’t 
care. I had found an outlet 
for my pent-up creativity in 
pseudo-antisemitism, and the 
relief greatly outweighed the 
consequences. 
It wasn’t that I was sur-
rounded by a dearth of critical 

thinking. It was that an intrin-
sic tenet of critical thinking is 
creativity, and while, to some 
extent, the intellectualism in 
that particular community was 
contingent on a certain kind of 
critical thinking, the thinking 
was circumscribed by their 
standards of convention. As 
someone who had come from 
a household that contradict-
ingly valued fitting in as much 
as it valued creativity, the 
nuances of a balance between 
the two were lost on me, and 
I sat very comfortably on a 
polarized end of the argument 
— though perhaps that, too, 
was a consequence of grow-
ing up in a place that seemed 
to disregard certain strains 
of logic: the loss of nuance. 
There is a distinct correlation 
between close-mindedness and 
fearing nuance, fearing excep-
tions to what is the moral 
absolute. 
At 11, these values had 
corroded what seemed to be 
integral parts of me, and in 
terms of insularity, I was equal 
but opposite to those around 
me. I refused to pray, never 
blessed my food before I ate it, 
paraded around the fact that I 
didn’t want to get married or 
have children (when I did, in 
fact, wish to do those things), 
and, most horrifically of all, 
had developed an interest in 
science. Subsequently, I was 
very bullied at school, and the 
Hebrew teachers seemed to 
regard me as a lost cause — at 
least until sixth grade. 
 In sixth grade, I had a teach-

Esti Klein

students’ corner

Editor’s Note: Below are the two winning entries to the Cohn-Haddow Center Jewish High School Writing 
Competition 2023. Esti Klein received a cash prize of $500 for first place, and Zeev Maine received $100 as the 
Honorable Mention. Reprinted here with permission.

The Historian

continued on page 10

