There were Christmas carols that most of the Jewish kids got around by singing the songs but strategically omitting the name of Jesus and all references to him, perfect attendance records were ruined by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He could perfectly recall the day Beryl Goldstein’s daughter, Marsha, came home hysterical after she had been told she was going to hell. Beryl told Jake and Ida she had rocked her little one in her arms and told her that if that were true then Marsha would be in good company. If her parents, brother and sister, Bubbe and Zayde and lots of other people she knew and loved were there with her, how bad could hell be? At the time Jake that thought that the only good answer. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
Then there was the day that Ida marched into the junior high school principal’s office to protest the tiny red New Testaments that had been distributed during phys. ed., and the week around Pesach when all the other kids made such fun of Sallie and Allison’s matzoh and peanut butter sandwiches, his girls refused to take them any more. The time a boy in Sallie’s high school class told her he couldn’t go out with her, even though he really wanted to, because his parents didn’t want him to date a Jewish girl.
When Allison came home one day and asked if they were rich, if indeed all Jews were rich because kids in her class said they were, Jake and Ida, both furious, had driven the girls out to visit Morris and Florence, the oldest and poorest members of the small Jewish community. Morris and Florence (distant relatives of a man who had since died) were taken care of and fed by the rest of the Jews in town. Although Jake had felt shamed by the tears in the girls’ eyes when they walked into the shabby and dark living room where the couple sat, drinking tea and reading the Jewish Daily Forward; and dismayed when he recalled the shock in the girls’ eyes as both noticed for the first time the blue numbers tattooed on the couple’s forearms, the visit had had to be made.
If at the time anyone had asked him about all of those things, he could only have said that he and Ida did the best they could. Who in their right mind could have predicted such things would happen to his girls? He and Ida tried valiantly to make the effort to walk the fine line between giving their children just enough information and too much; they struggled between the right kind of education and the kind that made for paranoia. He had wanted them to celebrate their differences and be neither ashamed nor arrogant. But Jake had failed, he felt; hard as he had tried he had failed.
He had failed first by moving down to Loweville, unprepared. Secondly, by bringing up his girls in such a town. He had failed further by not leaving when Ida had wanted to. He had failed in so many ways. In spite of the best intentions of both of them, the girls had been left scarred and isolated, eager to escape Loweville the moment they got the chance. Sallie was in England tying to be an actress and living with a woman. Allison had married a lawyer and had three young sons. She was living in New Hyde Park where Jake had grown up and where he had both married Ida and buried her. But while Ida grew only more stoically miserable as the years went by, Jake realized he had been, at the time, quite happy in Loweville. In spite of the moments of deep unease, the nights Ida cried herself to sleep, the troubling incidents at school and in the community, hadn’t he been happy? He had become a man, he had made a small fortune, he had done work he liked, he had provided a home and college educations for his children, he had given them everything he had lacked, all he had ever wanted for himself and more. He had sent money home to his mother, he had given to charities, he had lived the American Dream. He had been happy, he had been! It deeply pained him to realize that his wife and children had not.
Even after Ida died it had not really occurred to Jake to leave Loweville. He sold the house and moved into one of the new condominiums that some of his friends had moved into years earlier and things had been fine, for a while. But two years ago when the last two Jewish couples, George and Jeannie and Harris and Irma, moved to Knoxville, Jake found himself the last holdout. That troubled him but before he could contemplate what it might mean for his future, he met Sandra on the golf course and the pleasant inertia of life took over once again. He was glad of the company; Sandra was a good cook and pretty to look at, and if there wasn’t much sex Jake didn’t mind because after all he was seventy-seven and sex just didn’t hold the same attractions it had in his earlier years.
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.