A Light Unto The Nations

Datan, Nancy

A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS NANCY DATAN On November 24, 1976,1 wrote: "If someone had stirred wine into honey, and then given me honey and apples to eat, I should have tasted the sweetness of...

...Rabbinical debate on the question of intermarriage has taken up many pages in moment and will take up many more: I shall add only that the response given us by two rabbis— No, it is against halacha...
...You'd live with me—and if the courts wouldn't permit it, I'd steal you," and Gidon, haunted by home-lessness, threw himself into Dean's arms, sobbing with relief...
...and to our bulky dossier I added the Israel Ministry of the Interior name change certificate...
...Why couldn't this be a simple adoption casein a mining town...
...Wait, let me check the statutes—the provision of age does not apply when the children of a spouse are being adopted...
...No one remembers who thought of it first, but after a while we were all talking of Dean's adopting the children...
...A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS NANCY DATAN On November 24, 1976,1 wrote: "If someone had stirred wine into honey, and then given me honey and apples to eat, I should have tasted the sweetness of honey, the freshness of apples...
...a sophisticated child, as all children are who become wards of the state in which their parents are divorced...
...He saw me off to a convention with his heart in his mouth and speaking frankly: "Ima, what do we do if you die...
...But who would we live with...
...Dean said, "I want to marry you, Dukie—but not yet...
...Forty-two hundred dollars a year...
...Her most recent work in moment "A Dog Named Abraham...
...I think I can talk about some of the things your mother can't say for herself...
...But Tamar remained, for a little while at least, and Gidon for a while longer, and our abbreviated family prepared to usher in our first New Year without Merav...
...He's seven years older than the firstborn, and twelve years older than the youngest...
...Tamar, there is absolutely no way in the world you are going to school on Rosh Hashanah—I cannot imagine what could possibly be in your head...
...On our first date—surely a first of its kind in the history of courtship, an evening out for pizza, in which we watched for his roommates, my colleagues, anyone at all who would know either of us—at that time, no one knew both of us—Gidon, my youngest, skipped across the parking lot, his right hand in mine and his left hand in Dean's, and I searched for Dean's eyes, but he only smiled at me...
...I learned to care because I married a Jewish family—and I'm the only one on our staff who had to cancel out of the staff meeting...
...Oh, no, as long as he's at least fifteen years older...
...Ah, well, who ever said a Jewish identity was simple...
...How does it happen, my teacher Bruno Bettelheim would ask me after a while, that with such a strong commitment to your Jewish identity you have twice married goyiml A very good question, and I had three answers, all speculative: a Hegelian hypothesis, that the ongoing dialectic in the I-thou of love and marriage served to define my Judaism as well as my other selves...
...It was an act of faith, I later told Tamar: that through tears of rage she nevertheless consented to keep the New Year and break her word at school, without knowing why it mattered so much to me...
...The decree of adoption is granted...
...Howl Yes indeed, how and not when was going to be the problem...
...How had I managed, for example, to take such a circuitous route toward the world's most ordinary goal, marriage and children...
...And besides, if only you were a Jewish college professor, it would be much easier for me...
...I chose it after we were divorced, and the children took it with me...
...None of the children was fourteen years old at that point— that's legal abandonment...
...Their natural father petitioned the court to be relieved of child support in 1976, when they didn't want to visit him...
...I'll need to check that for myself," he told us, but sure enough, the statutes bore us out, and we moved to the next stage, the preparation of the adoption decree...
...Department of State...
...Though God only knows, I told him, whether any—or for that matter, all three—of these wild guesses answer your question...
...Wait a minute—/ support those children...
...But Gidon schemed, his appetites whetted by the frequent packages of cookies which made their way from Fairmount up to Morgantown...
...It's not his name—it's mine...
...Well, now...
...The experience was remarkably like a vision Gidon had had just one year earlier: that we would say our vows, and, since I had told him we were married in the sense that cooking ingredients were wed, choosing for example one of his favorites, macaroni and cheese, he specified the wedding cake: not kugel—" Are you crazy...
...They have an Israeli passport with their dates of birth, and their names appear on the American passport...
...You'd live with Dean...
...And so she stood with us in synagogue, and my heart was moved for another reason I could not have spoken of to her anger—a transfer of culture that had leaped two generations, from my grandparents to my daughter, who had spent two years in a Jewish day school in Chicago, where the rhythm of prayer entered her body, pulsing against the paradox of disbelief...
...First marriage, then children...
...Well, I'll need everything you've got, it sounds like...
...I can't tell you now—you're too angry to listen," and I couldn't...
...but he prepared the documents with care and won a place in the family heart alongside the judge who married us, in whose chambers we sat on February 5th, who questioned the children briefly—"We want Dean to be in law what he is in our hearts," said Merav...
...Come on, you'll be able to write your memoirs after this...
...I've told you—you'd inherit my insurance, you greedy rat...
...Well, now how in the world are we going to get those children supported...
...And thus Dean, her father: Aleinu...
...Yet as the realization slowly dawned on us that this was not to be a brief, tragic love, but a lasting and rather ordinary love, it was I and not Gidon who first found my way to Fairmont, West Virginia, and driving down Interstate 79 I found myself thinking that in aJifetime already past the halfway mark in the fourth decade, filled with strange deeds, this, of a great many odd events, was easily the oddest: driving south to a small town in West Virginia to meet the parents of my twenty-two-year-old whatyoumay-callit, as my secondborn daughter Tamar had begun to term Dean...
...Now, on names...
...We'd be able to win a contested case if we had to," although we didn't...
...We were married by a Morgan-town judge, who earned a small portion of the family heart which our rabbis lost, in a small homemade ceremony which omitted the giving of the bride—we never had to confront the question of bride price — but incorporated the saying of vows in Hebrew, and the shattering of a wineglass, and a three-tiered wedding cake baked by three generations: Dean's grandmother, his mother, and our rendering of a recipe I learned from a friend in Jerusalem...
...I had to rearrange interviews I had already scheduled, just like your meetings were scheduled, because the New Year isn't on anyone's calendars...
...Why should he?—/ certainly wouldn't affirm belief, it is history I believe in...
...That makes things different...
...We don't have those...
...Did you know that Tamar still plans to go to school tomorrow...
...And, finally, a crypto-mystico-genetic hypothesis: something in me that stood at attention for a certain physical type, which led to children who closely resembled me...
...as for his father, my heart determined firmly that if this was what Dean would be like at fifty, why then I was going to take him now, and things would work themselves out, and his parents would soon get used to the idea...
...So we went public, though of course we didn't marry: I had had my fill of marriage, and besides, there was a small, chilled, core of reserve—a head injury from my first marriage kept me from having safe pregnancies with Dean, and though he told me, "It would insult the three children we have now if we had more," somewhere below the belt I found myself unconvinced, and haunted by that Fairmont cheerleader, twenty-one by now, who lived on in my imagination as vividly as ever, Dean's ideal wife...
...Nancy Datan is a Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University...
...Normally, I issue the father's name to the children...
...For us it was certainly a new beginning...
...I can't tell my teachers at the last moment—they'll kill me...
...But why doesn't Dean convert...
...Signed consent came in the mail, the children rejoiced and Dean and I held hands and pondered: it was signed on a fortieth birthday, an odd date and I hoped it was chosen as a sign of a new beginning...
...You have to tell the world about your holidays, and you have to keep telling it, again and again...
...But Dean broke in...
...The only odd thing about it, though," I told Dean years later, "was that they must have wondered what this remarkable, intelligent woman could possibly see in their tongue-tied son," for Dean sat silent that night—"I was in shock," he told me—while I, who couldn't claim sweet youth, staked out professional competence as my dowry for their son...
...I don't see why what / do matters so much to you—it's my life...
...I was a cosmopolitan professional, an expatriate on two continents as I was fond of saying, a Jewish college professor with three children, a far cry from the Fairmont cheerleader I felt was the marital destiny of this goyische kid, this West Virginia shaigetz, who at 21 was only seven years older than my firstborn daughter, and closer in age to my youngest child than to myself...
...irj?» nis-wn riaa trttf jnAna —praising God, who has not made us like the goyim...
...I'll need the children's birth certificates...
...Well, since the children have had their natural father's name...
...I didn't change my name when we married...
...that she, with me, was obligated to be a light unto the nations, a voice saying this is my holiday, today I belong to history and not to you— today I am not a high school student but a Jew...
...and from this point forward our voices rose and coherence diminished and soon words were replaced by sobs...
...So when I prepared for my departure the following week, Gidon turned to Dean: "Dean, what do we do if Ima dies...
...Gidon didn't care...
...but an ordinary layered wedding cake, and on the top a bride and groom, holding their hands out to one another, and in their hands the most humongous noodle in the worldl Our cake topped Gidon's dreams, including not only the bride, the groom, and the noodle, but saffron and scarlet roses as well...
...But then why should it matter if a rabbi marries you...
...It wasn't the most romantic proposal in the world...
...And then we were on the phone with our family judge...
...we told our families, and they asked When?—a reasonable question for which we then had to find an answer...
...passport with her brother and sister on it...
...to Dean...
...Of all our secrets, the most closely kept was from Dean's parents—for if I must love him and let him go, we both reasoned silently, no need to shock them...
...But I discovered on that long flight to Dallas that I had options: I could appoint Dean as my children's guardian in a will, giving my morbid son a leg to stand on in the court battles in his mind...
...although I have no personal reservations, I do have halachic reservations—is not without its effect on our relationship to this Jewish community...
...Later I learned that Gidon had asked him, "Do you have children...
...This would never have happened in the first place if you had told us you were thinking of going to school on Rosh Hashanah—but since it has, it does not matter at all if your teachers kill you, Tamar, but I don't think they will...
...I could not tell this child of mine that she was doing battle in my name, for all the years when I was small and made to sing Christmas carols against my will...
...The oldest has a U.S...
...Give them a chance...
...They were born in Israel, so their birth certificates are on file with the U.S...
...As far as I know she hasn't changed her plans—she was talking about meetings tomorrow...
...Meanwhile how to get married was not yet answered...
...We wept...
...On Rosh Hashanah...
...It was a doomed, perfect relationship, exquisite in its brevity and its tenderness, two people whose paths had crossed at the wrong time and place...
...Dean ate no leavened bread during Passover, fasted on Yom Kippur and had learned Hebrew by accident while Gidon was supposed to be learning it on purpose...
...I certainly am—on this point I am...
...Who adopts a child, the Talmud says, is as the natural parent, and so it happened that from deep inside of each of us a cry broke out, as one stage of parenthood gave way to the next, and Merav entered Swarth-more without looking back...
...You are not just your private self— you are a Jew, and the world doesn't know much about you, and doesn't much care...
...It confirms the paradox of our marginal existence: five militant atheists who faithfully keep the traditions of Judaism, of them one who was not born to a Jewish mother...
...Now, how much do you earn annually...
...appeared in July-August 1980...
...But the children, who had had the first word, were going to have the last word too: "We want to take Rodeheaver for our middle name," and when we broke this last surprise to our lawyer, he threw up his hands: "This is going to give the Department of Vital Statistics in Charleston fits...
...and when Dean told him that he did not, "Do you want children...
...No, Tamar, it is not entirely your life...
...Only then we told the children, whose excitement probably mirrored ours and moved us one step forward...
...And this we planned, while around us Dean's friends were marrying...
...Children like us...
...He isn't...
...He isn't fifteen years older than any of the children...
...Early autumn, we said, and then decided on June 3rd—two and a half years to the day since Dean had spent the night with me and the morning watching Saturday cartoons with Gidon...
...I really didn't know what I should say to her—it's not my holiday, and I didn't know how to speak for you...
...No, technically they wouldn't, but I really don't think it would ever come to a court...
...rrrranrft .ban rn...
...Would the courts permit alight unto the nations nancy datan that...
...a Darwinian hypothesis, that I was adding, not deliberately though it turned out that way consistently enough, to the Jewish nation—my first husband converted to Judaism a week after we divorced, so it might fairly be said that we both left scars on one another...
...Though it didn't matter: I discovered I loved his mother as a comrade...
...that she was defending the family bonds against the small insidious forces of erosion that brought so many parents to our synagogue without their children...
...Not quite...
...Well, I'll have to speak to her, and I'm sure you'll hear it," and I went to confront this tempestuous secondborn child...
...and then, without knowing why, I would have felt the wine stirring in my blood...
...Dean drove her down to school at dawn, so she could tell her teachers that she would be absent that day—and they rose to the occasion, rescheduling tests, greeting Tamar and her holiday with respect...
...Are you telling me what I can and can't do with my life...
...Why can't you tell me why you're asking this of me...
...Does it matter if the father isn't very much older than the children...
...Now she recites: —a dip from the knees, the head bows, the shoulders move briefly forward—thus Tamar, my grandparents' great-granddaughter...
...The provision of age does not apply when the children of a spouse are being adopted," we told our lawyer, the first person in my lifetime who prompted me to use the phrase "crusty curmudgeon...

Vol. 6 • December 1980 • No. 1


 
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