Our People/An Emotional Time Bomb

Cowan, Paul and Rachel

OUR PEOPLE AN EMOTIONAL TIME BOMB "When I decided to become a Jew, my father blamed it on Father Divine." Jane Baron, a 32-year-old communications specialist who now lives on New York's Upper West...

...Soon they fell in love and began to discuss marriage...
...In addition, a bizarre quirk of fate disposed her towards religion...
...During her freshman year two movies, The Pawnbroker and The Fixer, made a lasting impression on her...
...When she graduated, she decided to settle in New York...
...Still, she never felt a trace of loss when she became a Jew by choice...
...I was so miserable that on weekends I would sleep until 3:00 in the afternoon, when the mail came...
...This time, she wanted her children to be a part of a community so she urged Jane and her brothers to join the non-sectarian Saratoga Federated Church...
...Her intellectual turning point came during her junior year, which she spent in the Yucatan...
...Their warmth and stability provided much of the emotional force behind her decision to convert...
...The careful emphasis on text reminded her of the Spanish philosophers she loved...
...Was she her mother's child or her father's...
...For a year, they didn't communicate with their son or daughter-in-law...
...She wants to participate in discussions between Christian and Jewish theologians...
...Like many Jews of their generation, they felt an uncontrollable grief when their son married a non-Jew...
...It took him a long time to get over that...
...He thought that life was essentially tragic and his theology expressed his agony...
...She met Neal Rechtman, an observant Jew...
...I think they'd be surprised at how much they have in common...
...Then, realizing that the environment contributed to their nervousness, she decided to comfort them by asserting that she was Jewish...
...When I decided to study Bible at the Seminary and then to become a Jew, my father blamed it on Father Divine," Jane says...
...His followers believed in celibacy...
...She loved to hear her grandfather talk about his youth in Poland and his early years in America— his stories played such a large role in her imaginative life that she wrote papers about them throughout grade school, and now plays her tape recordings of him at every Seder...
...I never wanted to turn my back on our oppression...
...She began to take courses at JTS...
...I felt happy just sitting around, watching TV with her, or listening to her gossip in her funny Far Rockaway accent...
...There, Jane began to read avidly for the first time in her life...
...Stanley and Ann had a stormy marriage—they were divorced when Jane was 11...
...Jane's grandparents furnished her with a sense of ethnicity—an emotional time bomb that would explode when she was in her 20s...
...I didn't feel as if I was converting when I went to the mikveh...
...He wanted me to use my dual background to become what he called an 'ecumenicist.' He felt that, as a Jew, I was spurning the freedom and the advantages that he'd worked so hard to give me...
...It also expressed the sense of duality that I felt, in my own way...
...Her father, Stanley, now an independently wealthy sheep farmer, thought he could find freedom by Americanizing his accent and melting into the non-Jewish world—by putting as much social distance as possible between himself and his parents' traditional Jewish home in Far Rockaway, New York...
...Jane hoped to become a social worker or a teacher, and the Protestant Union Theological Seminary had programs that promised to help her immerse herself in religious study and develop those skills...
...But they resumed the relationship when Jane was born...
...Ann, Jane's mother, was born in England and raised in the Anglican church...
...by night, she studied philosophy and theology...
...Then she explained her conversion to her parents...
...When Jane was a junior in high school, her mother moved the family to the town of Saratoga in Northern California...
...But, close up, Jane knew that he spent much of the money he received from his followers on poor people...
...Stanley's parents, Ida and Peter Baron, were first generation Americans who had made their fortune manufacturing the felt bags that contain fancy silverware...
...they thought that Jane's parents were living in sin...
...Much of the world regarded Father Divine as a charlatan, if not a thief...
...She took confirmation classes at the church, but made it clear to the minister that she didn't want to be confirmed...
...For instance, she wishes Jews and Blacks would discuss the Bible together...
...Jane Baron, a 32-year-old communications specialist who now lives on New York's Upper West Side, is the child of an intermarriage...
...Suddenly, she found herself attracted to several of the rabbinical students she was meeting...
...Her mother, who had remarried an Englishman and was now a blueberry farmer in the state of Washington, accepted Jane's decision readily once she realized it didn't imply a rejection of her...
...During Jane's early high school years, Ann Baron resettled, with her daughter and three sons, in Orange County, California...
...Soon Michael was diagnosed as a celiac baby and was cured...
...They seemed like the story of my people...
...Her grandparents were the only self-affirming Jews she knew when she was growing up...
...Rockaway...
...When I was 20 I could put my head on her lap and cry...
...Her grandparents' love, that emotional time bomb, was exploding...
...A black carpenter made a wood box for Jane's toys...
...They refused to attend the wedding...
...You know, it's funny—wherever I lived, that house in Far Rockaway was always home to me...
...Once she went to a week-long Hillel retreat in Philadelphia, and was very impressed with the rigors of Jewish study...
...their voices seemed like an oasis in that emotional desert...
...Since she knew they were attracted to her, she wondered why they never sustained the relationship...
...One of the memories Jane treasures is of her childhood weekends in Far Paul Cowan, a staff writer for the Village Voice, and Rachel Cowan, program director at New York City's Ansche Chesed, are moment's contributing editors for this feature...
...She was startled when a friend told her that, since she had a non-Jewish mother, she was regarded as a Gentile...
...I still feel very connected to the people I knew in that church group in California and to the ideas I loved when I was reading Unamuno," she says...
...But first she spent a year in Spain—in Salamanca, Unamuno's home town...
...Soon afterward, the mansion nearby was bought by Father Divine, head of an integrated community with an unusual set of practices...
...He used to serve them roast beef and chicken on his best tableware...
...That year, Ida Baron died...
...Instead, that information— in contrast to the future she could anticipate with the Polish Catholic she was dating at the time—provided an additional incentive for her to make a choice...
...By day, she taught English as a second language...
...A Jew or a Christian...
...Soon, Jane became vice-president of the youth group...
...Intellectually, that offered a chance to read the Bible in a different way...
...But they agreed on one thing: that their children should live in a secular world, with no religious education...
...That decision was the outcome of Jane's effort to resolve the dualities within herself—an effort which prompted her to write her undergraduate thesis on Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish Catholic theologian, and to study Bible at the Union Theological Seminary...
...After a while, she joined in ecumenical discussions between students at Union and at the Jewish Theological Seminary...
...During her second year at Union she got a job teaching comparative religion at the Masters School, a girl's boarding school in Dobb's Ferry, New York...
...I didn't want to do anything to deny those roots...
...Until that year, Jane had never dated a Jew...
...That was when she decided to write her senior thesis on Unamuno...
...Jane's New York family used to send her a tape-recorded letter every week...
...She went to a Conservative Bet Din and to the mikveh long before she got married...
...Nevertheless, she adored Ida...
...She became part of the dope-smoking literary scene there...
...Besides, her grandfather had died in 1971, and she wanted her grandmother to know that she wasn't betraying the Jews...
...She frequented the cafes he had loved...
...Throughout high school and college, Jane spent as much time as possible in the East, to be near her grandparents and her father...
...I was affirming what I had always been...
...Nevertheless, they were kind to the Barons...
...She immersed herself in D. H. Lawrence and Martin Buber and in Spanish philosophers like Unamuno and Ortega y Gassett...
...She knew that her grandmother was a narrow-minded woman who called Blacks "colored people" and non-Jews "goyim," who spent dull hours with her overdressed friends ("insect women," as Jane calls them) at the beach clubs she frequented in Far Rockaway and Miami...
...After the funeral, the rabbi made a remark that left Jane pondering...
...I told him I was part Jewish," she says...
...When Jane's brother Michael was dangerously ill, Father Divine invited the family home for dinner and blessed the boy...
...At first she thought they were being silly...
...When she was a child, Jane's family spent many weekends and most Jewish holidays at their house...
...That feeling became stronger when she entered the University of the Pacific in 1969...
...She wanted to tell the Jews in the group, "I don't really belong at Union...
...Jane felt depressed and isolated there...
...I loved the fact that he was struggling with religious questions," she says...
...The place was so right-wing, you felt like part of the underground when you sold UNICEF cards," she says...
...To her surprise, observances that would once have seemed burdensome, like keeping kosher, now appeared perfectly natural...
...Drawing on her experiences with Father Divine, she organized an exchange program for inner city black kids...
...When Jane was in grade school and her parents were still together, the Baron family settled in a carriage house in a suburb of Philadelphia...
...But her father resisted...
...As Jane got more deeply involved in the Jewish community, she developed ideas for projects that find echoes in her childhood...
...Most of her students were Gentiles, but the handful of Jews seemed nervous about studying the New Testament...
...In that remote town, she decided she wanted to devote the next few years to learning about the Bible...
...The episode impressed Jane, age nine, with the power of faith...
...She didn't feel rebuffed...
...I'm one of you...
...At school, Jane dated a black student one year, a biker the next...
...Though no one looked at her askance, she felt even more uneasy than she had at Masters...
...A religion is like a room," he said, "and you, with all your questions, have to decide whether you're going to enter the Jewish room or the Christian room...

Vol. 8 • June 1983 • No. 6


 
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