Your pink-tinted skin and lips blotted by wild flowers earned you the nickname “The English Rose.” These women worried about you getting too much sun so they pulled you into their homes saying, “Such a pale thing.” Their voices and movements leap-frogged each other in a sort of chaotic dance, and you stood silent, eyes darting, quietly soaking in the chaos. Food filled the table you sat at and they said, “Eat, eat, you’ll like it,” it was familiar, that tone, those words. That day, I watched your smile and it felt infectious.
Today, I watch a different smile, one accompanied by a nervous giggle. I’ve asked how your day went, time with your friends. You describe them as girls you can be yourself with, you don’t have to try, they get you… This description allowed your father and me to finally let go of inhaled breath collected throughout the years. We watched you navigate through a social labyrinth that screamed out at every wrong turn. For many years, you chose to keep a safe detached distance, affording only to mimic from the periphery, showing a curiosity for others but not being close enough to experience their curiosity for you.
This changed with your visit to the States. You only needed a moment of consideration before deep diving into the family. I could see it as you played with your cousins, enjoyed new foods, or listened intently to the stories about people we used to love. You eagerly squeezed into the back seat of a crowded car for an unorthodox tour of Boston, and recognised your strength by kayaking across the lake, creating bonfires and finding your way out of a hike that went wrong. With each feat, you heard the family applaud.
You observed our family’s script, the essence of my script, life according to us, that didn’t always involve all those fussy rules. A world dismissing the unnecessary, the waving away of protocols and social mores. You paused, often, mouth open, unsure, but then joined in. It was freeing for a new teenager, where invisible rules hid in every aspect of your life. “Us” that word that now included you, ensured your right to this identity and a claim to all stories told. It felt a safe place for you. I understood this because when the rest of the world felt complicated, this is where I went.
You brought that sense of belonging home, growing friendships where secrets passed through whispers and snapchats. Where comfort settled the need to understand the formula. For your birthday, we filled the table with food and you girls laughed, ate, and then escaped to just be silly. You brought that warmth home, adding it to your story.
However, today, snacking in the kitchen, you wondered where Judaism fit into that script. I looked out the window pushing my belly against the sink.
“Mam, I was on the bus and this group of boys came to talk to us.”
“Ok” I replied. I felt the warm water rush over my hands as I finished the dishes. I shut off the water, walked to you and leaned against the island to watch you twirling your spoon through yogurt.
“They were introducing themselves and then pointed to one of their friends and said, he’s the Jew boy because he lives near the Jews,” and that is when you became Jewish outside of our home, as pointed out to them by your friend. You became Jewish to the boys who stared.
You looked up and giggled. I held my breath, trying to not react. I just said, again, “OK.”
You continued, “Well, you could feel the tone change. They all started saying ‘ew Jew’ and then one boy said, ‘ Jew, get off the bus.’” You giggled again. I had giggled like that. So, had your Bubbie, my Bubbie and so on….
During that visit across the pond, you commented on how my accent changed, a little bit New Yorker, a little bit Jewish, you mimicked Yiddish words. Growing up, my cousins and I mostly saw each other during the holidays. A time when people are only separated by generations. Us, the youngest generation, would run crazy around the house, while the oldest generation, would encourage us out the door. I always thought of them as the elders, the high council. They would sit together, after a meal, digesting, and while the left overs were being stored away, they would ponder and then solve world problems: comments followed by silent consideration; sentences interrupted only by the dessert. Those fresh flowing colours laid upon antique dishes, each plate bringing stories from past generations. Fragile witnesses, to something quietly understood, held in a shared consciousness but rarely expressed.
I remember my great aunt’s drooping red lids captured what seemed to be a blue mist. I stared and it felt hypnotising bringing me in closer to watch her as she spoke of her past, a rare moment. Sitting, hands on knees, legs spread, as if ready to stand, she glanced and then nodded at her siblings, who reciprocated with their own nods. “To them, “ she said referring to her elders, “The West was filled with cowboys and lawlessness, they didn’t understand East Coast/West Coast. They saw my father as crazy. They asked why would he leave his home? His wife? His five children, all of us under 8?” And then she would laugh, “The States, this far off country, they thought was so uncivilised!” I would hear them laugh at that part of the story, followed by silence and then a whisper, “The irony.” In his 7 year absence, the children created imagined memories of their father, filled in by stories from their uncles, aunts and grandparents, who gathered to raised them in his absence.
A dangerous world affected not only their childhood but also lingered in their current world. They never spoke of it but you could feel it, the darkness that seeped into the room, intertwined with the scent of food. The quiet that came over them as “we remember.” An acceptance of their world, its threats and their helplessness amongst it. Memories of windows crashing, sweeping of glass, bloodied relatives walking with their faces downward to not scare the children, hugs given for the purpose of hiding, long walks back and forth to school where they knew to stay together. To keep safe they tried to disguise themselves, camouflaged in the backdrops of their world. Finding safety only in their home.
My grandmother never spoke of the days before she stepped on American soil. She refused to speak her childhood language. She identified as Jewish and American only, but Jewish seemed whispered unless said behind closed doors. Her and her siblings hid that world away behind their new anglicised names, but that world would not leave my grandmother, no matter, her education, job or the very American man she married to kill her roots. The little girl inside her still saw the men who starred as they leaned against her window, slurring rants that fogged the glass, banging at her door, until boredom moved them on.
My Bubbie would say, “Be careful who you tell you’re a Jew to, know that there are those that will hate you for that, be ready.” In the next breath she would say, “And for all those who died, you must fight them.” She made me promise. Her words repeated loudly when I watched my school teacher smile or when I opened the door for the mailman. Who was “that person” who hated me?
As a young mother, my grandmother, cried at the absent letters from her relatives over seas. She watched the news of the holocaust and waved her brothers and husband off to fight. My grandfather died shortly after the war, leaving only my mother and uncle to carry the weight of my grandmother’s trauma. It seemed too much for my uncle, who would never truly participate in the world.
I remember numbers on translucent skin, those of the family who “made it.” Their stories came to me indirectly, through my mother. As she spoke to me of what she overheard, we crouched down, like children huddled around a camp fire, our fantasies putting us in the places they had been. We would fight the fight they couldn’t and then maybe we could heal the wounds of those we loved, maybe I could heal my mother’s wounds. Hebrew school, echoed “I must remember,” with films of naked women waiting in line, emaciated, sexless people collecting others last belongings. It was my responsibility to remember, to say never again. As a child, I felt a warrior, but a warrior driven by the fear born in someone else’s blood.
Growing up, the hatred waiting outside our neighbourhood was pointed out to me. We heard the stories of graffiti on temple walls, bomb threats, we watched the police patrol the streets, sit in the parking lots during Shabbat. But often the prejudice I experienced directly was more of an irritant than a threat. It would come in the form of bizarre observations made, questions asked of me because “ I didn’t look Jewish. “
“So, when is the messiah coming?” Or “Why did you kill Jesus?” Usually, my mouth would dry, I would inhale before walking away, allowing them to enjoy a different form of entertainment.
When I was 18, I attended a cool person’s party. I was never cool so I hid behind a lit cigarette and a drink, watching them, listening to their language, while slowly being pushed into the inner circle. The quarterback of our high school football team stood centre. I watched his fans listen and wait for cues to laugh, what words to repeat. I joined because I could mimic, and banter flew, but then it turned racial, disguised as a harmless joke. It wasn’t harmless and it wasn’t directed to me but to the man next to me who wasn’t Jewish. As to my training, I spoke out. “Those jokes aren’t cool. People try to joke about Judaism too, but it is not ok.” The tone changed. The cool kid laughed as he looked at his friends and then me. “I can’t stand Jews.” He said this quite matter-a-factly and then continued, “In fact, we needed more of those ovens.”
That is when my world blurred with rage. I screamed as I felt my friends pulling me away, back to my car. He watched, tutting, his friends’ heads down, saying nothing. My friends excused my sensitivity, justifying it by reminding each other of my father’s recent death. It wasn’t due to the death of my father. It was due to a lineage of those with subtle accents, whispering stories of others who couldn’t scream. I became their voice. That story replayed over and over again for me as I listened to your story of the day you ingested a particular type of fear.
At your birth, they commented on your “exotic” looks and asked the origin. I said, ”Me, my daughter looks like me.” I assimilated into my new country, the UK, absorbed into my new traditions and decided that you would belong to a kinder world, instead of one poisoned by generations of trauma. I would enjoy sitting with you in this world, unlike the scared women before me. You didn’t need to know of those who hated. However, here we are, at this counter, you smoothing out your hair before twirling it again and I watching you in silence.
“I told them I was only half Jewish and that you weren’t even that Jewish.” I watched you begin to cry. “I was scared.” You looked at me, afraid again, ashamed. Even though that part of your world, the vulnerable part susceptible to those who hate, had gone unspoken, as with osmosis, it seeped in.
“Of course you were scared. You did the right thing, you kept yourself safe.”
You exhaled loudly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”
I traveled around the counter and whispered, “Of course you wouldn’t know what to do.” You hadn’t been built that way, to hate or to expect hate. No, one lurking in your world until today. Today, what I tried to create for you was stolen and replaced by the same toxins that had also infected my world. I would say that to your father later when he held me as I cried.
And then it happened to your sister (I decided to update this letter):
A few months later, the littlest one of you experienced similar on a WhatsApp group chat. A few years earlier, you were introduced to this historical hate. The teacher brought it to you in pictures of treacherous men with big noses, wearing yellow stars under the new vocabulary word “propaganda.” She also spread out pictures of men and women waiting at gas chambers, and children in ghettos behind fences staring. The little boy, three seats down whispered, “If we lived back then, they would have taken…” You looked at him to see his finger pointing towards you; the other children followed his finger to you, the only Jew in the classroom, actually in the school.
You burst through the door shouting questions, “Is it true, Is it true…How could it be true?” As you coughed through strained breaths and roughly threw words together that sketched out the lesson. Refusing to drop your bags, refusing my kiss, even refusing to eat the cookies waiting, you wanted answers, maybe you wanted me to tell you the teacher got it wrong but she didn’t. I stood unprepared, I just nodded and then picked up my shoulders.
You then breathed out carrying the words, “Why didn’t you tell me?” We both stood in the quiet, staring, I bent down, looked at you and pick up my words from deep in my chest, confirming this hate exists, chipping more away at your innocence. You struggled with that. You struggled to sleep, worrying about being taken away like the children before you, it was months before I could leave your room when your eyes were still open.
Those words in the WhatsApp group echoed the lesson, echoed what had been said to me so many years ago. Your pain reverberated and I absorbed it. Your sister held you. She understood. My shoulders raised again, this time to carry your pain, I had no other words to give.
