Forty-five years ago, when Jake had first moved to Loweville, that particular question could not have been asked. Forty-five years ago, when Jake had come down from New York state to run the Berkline factory, the only places to eat in town had been a little barbecue place out on the lake and a couple of luncheonettes downtown. Now Loweville had a country club to which Jake occasionally took Sandra, three Chinese restaurants, a passable Mexican place, two steakhouses, and every kind of fast food you could think of. Rumor had it an Applebee’s was coming soon, which had everyone excited, although as far as Jake could tell, Applebee’s just served grown-up fast food. Nothing much to look forward to there. Hell, you still couldn’t even get a drink in town except at the club, although the Mexican place served beer, and now at least package stores dotted the town. Truth was it has hard for Jake to get juiced up about any of what was new. Too much of the town remained exactly the same as always.
“Chinese?”
“All right.”
Forty-five years ago when he had first arrived, there had been a bunch of Jews in Loweville, well, perhaps if not a bunch, not enough for a real congregation, sufficient numbers so that a rabbi came once a month to conduct services in someone’s living room. There had been a warm safety in their numbers, in spite of their living on what was called the buckle of the Bible Belt. But those few golden years had not lasted long; the Jewish community began to dwindle again, the rabbi stopped coming, and everyone who went to synagogue had to start traveling an hour each way. When they all had small children, the parents would take turns driving to Sunday School once a week, all of them trying to make the long Sunday drives an adventure of sorts, to overcome the children’s objections to being different, to having to waste five hours of a perfectly good weekend day.
Jake carpooled just like all the other dads and moms, buying the kids pizza or, after it opened in the Sixties, McDonald’s hamburgers (which the children ate sitting on their knees in the back seat of the car, dropping French fries between the seats, dripping ketchup on the upholstery.) Sometimes he’d stop for Krispy Kreme donuts, hot and fresh, and he’d eat three or four on the ride home. That was before everyone knew how bad junk food was for you. On her days to drive, Sadie Shapiro would take the kids in her car to the movies after Sunday school. Jake’s daughters saw Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, all at the Park Theatre, big and old fashioned like movie theatres used to be and which served up only big and old fashioned dramas and musicals.
On those rare days, when neither Jake nor Ida had to drive the carpool, the two of them would have leisurely breakfasts without children, and then, sometimes, even go back to bed for an hour or two, relishing the quiet house, the long stretch of uninterrupted time. Ida was fat and difficult but she had made Jake’s life interesting and he couldn’t help but think that since her death life had lost a lot of its glow.
He had been so sure that he would die first. He’d always been the one getting sick: an aneurysm the doctors caught just in time, angina, diabetes, pneumonia. But Jake kept getting better in spite of the odds. Then Ida got stomach cancer and was dead in six months. Five years on Jake was still shocked by the speed of it.
By the time Ida died his girls were long grown, had gone off to college and then left Loweville for good. The Jews began disappearing in droves: even before Ida’s death more and more of Jake’s friends retired and moved to condos closer to the synagogue, shopping, restaurants; or they took off down to Florida, or moved closer to their grown children and grandkids. There was no one left he really knew. The factories and businesses were all run by the goyim. And Jake, as far as he knew, was the only Jew left in town.
Years ago with that first influx of young Jewish couples, tempted by the good life down south–a life their parents hadn’t known–there had been a sort of a heady hope for the future. College-educated, service hardened, ready to take on the challenge of working in the furniture and furniture-related industries that were springing up in and around Loweville, Tennessee, the young Jews rose high in the companies. They did well. They built nice houses and invited each other over for parties. But most of all, they shared the problems of being Jewish in a small southern town even if it seemed to all of them that they were fighting the same battles over and over and never winning any of them, Jake and his fellow businessmen continually asked not to “jew” someone down whenever they tried to make a better deal. If the undercurrent of anti-Semitism was often cloaked in gauzy southern politeness, the kids still got called stupid Jews and Christ-killers on a semi-regular basis and some kids asked to see the Jewish boys’ and girls’ horns or cloven feet.
And each spring tent revivals blew into town with the dandelions, itinerant ministers preaching fire and brimstone, leaving traumatized Jewish kids in their wake: proselytized to by their friends for weeks until the fervor died down and the tormentors grew bored. But then another revival would slip into town and it would start all over again.
At the end of her first day at private kindergarten at the Methodist Church, Jake came home for lunch to find his youngest daughter Sallie proudly prancing around the kitchen and shouting that she had been named Queen of the Jews for the next day. Upon further examination of Sallie Jake and Ida discovered that what honor had been conferred upon their daughter was that she got to pass around the juice and cookies at snack time. Queen of the Juice! The Juice, not The Jews. But that was only one bullet dodged.
In second grade his oldest, Allison, came home heartbroken because she hadn’t gotten a gold star for going to church on Sunday; the teacher told her that going to synagogue didn’t count. Meanwhile Sallie learned all the verses to Jesus Loves the Little Children and sang them lustily around the house for months.
Very touching, and touching the very heart of the experience of so many Jews around the world.
A nice reminder just before Yom Kippur that it’s never too late, it’s just that we tell ourselves it is.
Until we don’t.
Life is about the comprimises that we make,whether we know that we make them or not. And they always seem like good ideas at the time…what we do sometimes to accept being Jewish in a non-Jewish world, and we, who don’t live in a place in which there are many Jews do to make our Jewishness acceptable to the non-Jews around us.
Nice job.
This is a moving story that has me thinking about the ways that I comprimise my Jewish self sometimes. Thanks for sending it for me to read.