FRIDAY AFTERNOON JEW/

Cottle, Thoma J

OUR PEOPLE FRIDAY AFTERNOON JEW Almost every Friday afternoon, Judith Borofsky Winograd thinks about being Jewish. It doesn't happen like clockwork, the sun going down and a voice inside saying,...

...Then later on, when I was in college, I thought differently about it...
...I'm sure Catholics don't...
...I know where Jews aren't supposed to buy homes, or what country clubs they're not supposed to belong to, or what schools their kids aren't supposed to attend...
...Then she sets herself, her whole body, as if making one last effort...
...But so much of the world opposed fascism...
...Intellectually, I know there's no reason in the world to feel proud that I'm ignorant about something as important as the Middle East...
...Suddenly, on the death of his mother (which followed his father's death by five years almost to the day), Bernard Borofsky, in his wife's words, began "perspiring" with Jewishness...
...I'm sure it's the propaganda or belief system of an oppressed group, but I honestly believe we are special...
...He is affiliated with the Children's Defense Fund of the Washington Research Project Thomas J. Cottle grandparents Halting on Friday mornings as they scurried about and, with unyielding seriousness, planned the Friday dinner and reflected on the calmness that would be their Shabbat...
...They've had a hard enough time without having to go through more wars than they've already had...
...I do have my late Friday afternoon throbs, though, or whatever I should call them...
...Why care...
...I suppose," Judith Winograd is saying, "that I have a lot of anger about this Jewish thing — how can I even call it a thing...
...I sort of missed the dinners...
...I almost sound like someone who's afraid of sex or something...
...Judith Borofsky was 14 years old when her father's mother died...
...I know there's a lot of anti-Jewish feeling among the Jews...
...And I'm always a little embarrassed...
...I have to confess that I can read the newspapers and I won't even get beyond the headlines about something that's going on in the Middle East...
...But you can't force it...
...I believe they've been tortured in this country...
...But I see them now with their wives and kids...
...I won't be what I'm not...
...I don't mean the concentration camps...
...It's a dry feeling though, unhappy...
...I barely believe it's me talking, even though I do feel this way...
...She shakes her head as though wanting to clear her mind of every thought...
...Now you see it now you don't...
...Truthfully, I feel Tve been kept from things, opportunities, because I'm a woman — far more often than because I'm Jewish...
...I think hard about it sometimes, then maybe months go by and anything Jewish doesn't matI juggle Judaism...
...It was so phony...
...I want to be and I don't want to be...
...I would have been terribly upset had anyone at our wedding mentioned Christ...
...It was too extreme...
...It really isn't...
...But I just can't feel that upset by it when I know it's the Jewish experience...
...Judith Winograd, her dark brown eyes scanning the space before her as though she were hunting for some words to read, suddenly begins to grin...
...I can listen to blacks talk about a black experience and that I believe in...
...I juggle Judaism...
...I don't know, I don't know...
...Maybe someone would like to sing, Bernard always said as they lingered at coffee...
...My brothers were worse than I was, if you can imagine that...
...It was a bore, and if, as a young adolescent, she nurtured any special sentiments about being Jewish, they did not emerge on that muggy morning when the old people and the unimpressive rabbi at the temple in New Jersey said their good-bys to Rachel Borofsky...
...finally it was sickening...
...And besides, why would any of us know any Jewish songs...
...There's too much self-consciousness about it all...
...Judith Winograd, now a 39-year-old mother of two startlingly beautiful boys, the suburban wife of Harry Benjamin Winograd, a highly successful accountant, a social worker who has not practiced her profession in 14 years, from the time, actually, she became pregnant with her first son, Joshua Henry, remembers well her father's Jewish renaissance...
...it's either there or it's not, and I can't get at it...
...It doesn't happen like clockwork, the sun going down and a voice inside saying, well, it's Shabbos again, think Jewish thoughts: It's more a feeling, one that comes slowly, slips into her thoughts late in the afternoon...
...I'm not even sure I've had direct contact with real anti-Semitism...
...They were very close as a family...
...I didn't want a religious marriage — we were married, how original, in a hotel — but no mention of Christ...
...I cannot change my passions or my intellectual habits...
...I am and I'm not...
...Everything is done in the finest taste, luxurious, but not ostentatious...
...But after about five months he gave it up and my brothers started coming in late for Friday night dinner the way they always had before...
...I mean it...
...I wonder all the time whether people who don't know us know we're Jewish...
...Otherwise, I'll go to my grave very different from my father and grandfather and grandmother...
...ter at all...
...Everybody mourns in his own way...
...How can I talk this way...
...I hate that word, identity...
...Now you see it, now you don't...
...It's not only not good to feel like that, it's not Jewish...
...At one point, I even remember telling somebody I wanted him to shove it down our throats...
...It's not there when I want it, it's always there when I don't want it, or need it...
...I knew my father had been religious, but religion meant going to synagogue, and except for the music I found it boring...
...It's either some psychological block or I swear I just really don't care...
...Let somebody pick me up .by the scruff of the neck and hold me still until it takes, until it's inside me...
...In the scheme of things it was only natural he'd go back to something that reminded him of his parents...
...I don't want anybody killed, but I still can't get myself that interested in it...
...It was foolish, and uninteresting...
...But I feel positive Jewish feelings too, not just the guilt...
...Then the next minute everything was Jewish...
...I've been asking myself, if I die, when I die, what sort of ceremony do I want...
...It's all very strange...
...His wife looks at him with a serious, even grave expression, although it is not one of disapproval...
...Believe me, I don't say any of this with pride...
...Not so for Judith's father, Bernard Borofsky...
...Judith Winograd looks across the large, handsome living room of her house...
...I mean, it really seemed out of keeping with everything else we were...
...It was purely a psychological thing, a reaction prompted by the death of my grandparents...
...I know it's important and I know why it's important...
...I'd probably sit up in the coffin: 'Here we go with one of those melodramatic businesses again that nobody understands.' "You know, I find it hard to believe that there are people who take the Jewish thing so seriously...
...You know what it is...
...But as I hear myself say this...
...I'm immobilized by the question of my being Jewish...
...But there are times when in the privacy of my own head I actually feel these things...
...And if they're already dead, maybe I'd still want a rabbi...
...I wanted him to lead us to all of it...
...And besides, the way they used to treat women', in the synagogue, I couldn't stand it...
...And the men with the hats and the long black coats, they make me feel even more uncomfortable...
...You know a Jew without guilt...
...These are terrible feelings...
...But I'll think things, like, it's more important for those kids to go to school where everybody else goes to school...
...Why can't I do more with that funny, queasy mood that I get Friday afternoons...
...Saturday mornings meant shul...
...At first we were surprised...
...I knew I missed my grandparents, but I missed my father not being Jewish the way he had become...
...I just won't do it...
...And I refuse to be hypocritical with my husband and my children...
...My J.I...
...Let them start with me, mold me, show me, do something with me...
...On the mantelpiece are several photographs of her two sons and one of her parents...
...I don't think, honestly, that I deny it...
...It's like I'm afraid to let my history, my family, the religion, come together and surround me...
...There is no question in my mind that Jews value education in a way that no other group does...
...No one really brought up the subject of Shabbos dinner again...
...No Sunday school...
...I'm glad that at least somebody's keeping up the tradition...
...Her expression keeps changing, as though the ambivalence she has articulated is now being played out in some painful inner drama...
...I think I wanted him to be Jewish, with Friday night dinners, shul, Hebrew school, Yom Kippur, Passover, everything...
...It wouldn't do any of us any harm to remember one night a week what we are...
...But the preparations Papa Harry used to make were years ago, 30 years ago...
...I look at them and I feel uncomfortable...
...So Eva Borofsky tolerated, perhaps even accepted, her husband's rediscovery of Jewish ways...
...Maybe it would be better if I had...
...I like the music, but from music you don't make a religion — my God, I sounded so Jewish just then, didn't I?" Judith Winograd is suddenly deep in thought...
...PORTRAITS OF INTIMACY AND KINSHIP published by Harper and Row...
...So how about when I die...
...I'd like to be seen as special, but not if it means someone's keeping me from something I want...
...At the time I was glad it was over...
...Then it became boring...
...A wide brick fireplace stands at one end...
...Bernard Borofsky persisted in his effort to create a Jewish home...
...Maybe, you know, this being so in conflict with it all is what being Jewish will always mean to me...
...Why don't I feel it...
...They really are affected when they hear something in Hebrew...
...He couldn't get himself to call his mother a couple of times a week, he didn't see them as much as they would have liked, so when they died, he went back to the old ways...
...I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that we're a special race...
...I grew up in a Jewish community — I didn't think of it that way but it clearly was...
...I might even want some Hebrew prayers...
...His wife Eva went along with him, recognizing that her husband not only had been reared in a kosher home, but had kept kosher until his third year at college...
...But get a book on the subject...
...I cannot start again, from scratch...
...I doubt that I've even read a book review...
...But there are times when I'm sorry I am...
...Everyone despises that...
...I want them to and I don't want them to...
...Do I want a rabbi...
...In the photograph, Bernard Borofsky stands next to a bicycle in what seems to be a country setting...
...I think I need what a lot of people like me need, because I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way...
...Her whole body relaxes and she falls back against the rich white cotton fabric of the couch on which she has been sitting...
...I don't want the Arabs to take over or get some advantage, and I don't want anything to happen to Israel...
...And it is now more than 20 years since Mama Rachel died...
...He probably denied how much they meant to him...
...She knew, too, that keeping kosher at Syracuse University while he was a pre-dental student had not been the easiest thing in the world to do...
...They look strange to me...
...I wonder whether other groups feel like this...
...They never had a shred of feeling about being Jewish, unless, of course, they've kept all their feelings to themselves...
...She went to shul with her parents and fidgeted for what seemed like hours as the elders prayed and went about the Sabbath ceremony in a way that Judith recalls as overly dramatic and disingenuous...
...She traces it to the preparations she remembers her Thomas J. Cottle, whose portraits of real people appear regularly in these pages, is the author of several works including A FAMILY ALBUM...
...she seems to be asking...
...I'll struggle, but I want it...
...But his three children, Judith the only girl, would look at their father as if to say, how long are you going to keep up this Jewish thing...
...Literally nothing during these long periods makes me even think slightly about the Jews...
...Everybody feels better, so let's put up with it...
...She understood that he felt remorseful over the way he had treated his parents in their later years...
...We couldn't believe it...
...she asked her children at the height of Bernard's Jewish renaissance, as the family had begun to call it...
...So he became Jewish for a while and made us go along with it...
...He appears to be joking with the person taking the picture...
...That sounds rather familiar, doesn't it...
...Besides," her admonition to her doubting and not at all amused children went, "what's so wrong, with some religious practice in this house...
...they don't do anything that would make you think they even know they're Jewish...
...Either I should go to Israel and fall so in love with it that I'd be ready to fight in their damn army, or I should go — and I'm really serious about this — and get converted, to Judaism...
...My parents kept me from it...
...If somebody asks me, 'What are you?' I say right away I'm Jewish...
...You're dead...
...You don't have to be Jewish to feel that way...
...I never found the history of the Jews boring, but there was none of it in the services, or when there was it was dry, anti-intellectual somehow, sterile...
...I suppose I'd like a rabbi...
...I mean, I might have then, but not now...
...It is a feeling of discomfort, unease, something resembling irritability and restlessness...
...The living room is beautifully furnished and leads at one side to a newly completed tiled room for plants, and at the other side to a long slim dining room with a sleek black table and six matching chairs...
...My Jewish identity," she says with derision...
...I talk about my children looking Jewish...
...But when I see some of these kids with their skullcaps walking around Lighthall Street, on the west side, you know, I don't feel good for them...
...I think if my parents survived me I'd want a rabbi, for them...
...And that's not good...
...It is a warm residence, a friendly home, thoughtfully furnished, carefully maintained...
...There is nothing austere in the house, nothing forbidding or formal...
...I want to be Jewish, but I don't let myself feel it all the way...
...That's really the way I looked at it...
...Friday evenings meant the family together, sitting down to dinner and eating, for a change, slowly and thoughtfully...
...It's like I was telling him — although I never confronted him with this — you make me do it and I'll do it...
...Maybe I'm the same way...
...I don't freely embrace it, I don't freely reject it...
...They're probably humanitarians as no other people are...
...If you're wishy-washy on it, how do you think we're going to feel...
...Anybody could see it wasn't going to last...
...I really am immobilized by the feelings...
...Do you know that I really don't fully understand the Palestinian issue...
...What might be the best test of how Jewish one is, or better, how significant and life-giving are the feelings of being Jewish...
...I'm totally unsatisfied by it, which I guess means that somewhere in me is the need for religion...
...I'll go as someone whose ears picked up at the sounds of something Jewish but whose heart never fluttered once...
...But I just can't get myself to read it...
...Where is the real answer...
...One minute there wasn't a mention of a single thing in that house that had to do with the Jews...

Vol. 1 • January 1976 • No. 6


 
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