Alienation: Christmas Comes to a Jewish Home
Roiphe, Anne
ALIENAnON CHRISTMAS COMES TO A JEWISH HOME ANNE ROIPHE It seems that every year, just as we are taking our carefully selected Christmas tree off the top of the car and dragging it into the house,...
...The Chanuka story always irritated me...
...What would they think of their granddaughter sending away for quaint tree ornaments from mail-order catalogues and taking her children to see "The Nutcracker Suite" and watching the tree lighting in Rockefeller Center and hiding Christmas presents in every drawer in the house...
...The lights on our tree, always multicolored because the children insist on the corniest of trees, are my signal to myself, to my children: Something is sacred, holy, I don't know exactly what, some times are special, make us tender and hopeful, vulnerable to each other...
...I suppose it's like deciding to have dinner with an ex-spouse with whom one has old and bitter quarrels or a new friend whose foibles seem more distant and therefore more charming...
...Contact with the great Christian myth and art that comes each December must be a spiritual experience...
...She played mah-jongg, canasta, backgammon...
...It is difficult to be (though I know some are) both a feminist and a Jewish traditionalist...
...Unless there has been strong childhood indoctrination, ethnic isolation, when one learns enough of the nature of man there is no longer a we and a them, an aggressive, destructive other, a pagan or heathen to be avoided...
...They are second-generation Yankee fans...
...She had never had a friend who wasn't Jewish...
...My grandfather, I was told, would never attend a museum because he felt that there were so many pictures of Jesus on the walls that he would be forced to see the image of the babe in whose name his town was pillaged, his parents killed, his temple burned and he and his sisters driven penniless to a foreign shore...
...As I approach the Jewish traditions I find old angers rising...
...ALIENAnON CHRISTMAS COMES TO A JEWISH HOME ANNE ROIPHE It seems that every year, just as we are taking our carefully selected Christmas tree off the top of the car and dragging it into the house, the rabbi who lives down the block walks by...
...I prefer the stranger's ways...
...I know I am Jewish but my children are not at all clear...
...I know a few Yiddish words, my children none...
...A cat had misunderstood the occasion...
...The stories of St...
...We were not sealed off by sufficient prejudice or mutual hatred from our Christian neighbors and their ways...
...What would he think if he heard his great-grandchildren singing "Hark The Herald Angels Sing" in their school assembly...
...Spiritual need not mean otherworldly, miraculous or magical...
...Certainly it's a sign of assimilation, of a generation with dim memories of the ghettos of Russia and Poland...
...Rebellion against the anti-feminism of the Jewish patriarchy dies hard...
...She was a practical woman who loved the movies, detective novels, and Chinese food...
...We are trying to be civilized...
...It is impossible not to love the Raphaels, the Giottos, and Michelan-gelos...
...One year my mother purchased a Christmas tree...
...One Christmas morning we arrived downstairs to find the carefully decorated tree on the floor, broken ornaments everywhere...
...These myths have counterparts in tales told in Indian dances, Islamic fables, Shinto lore...
...It was in our house a secular American holiday, about presents, that's all...
...The destruction was terrible...
...My mother did the shopping, as was her pleasure...
...The story is about redemption, a joining of the human community by a man who had been so hurt he had forgotten how to love...
...I have friends from all kinds of backgrounds and so do the children...
...My mother's candle in memory of her beginnings and her past, her family...
...The Amish are absolutely right in their conviction that education in the broader society would undermine their cohesion, destroy their community...
...Why such a small miracle, just to make the oil last eight days, when the proper miracle would have been to have created Romans without the need to conquer and avoided the bloody war altogether...
...I, too, somewhat uneasy, need to understand what is happening as the children watch "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on television for the sixth straight year and I sit writing out the invitations to the annual Christmas Day party my oldest friend and I give, where we will read, as we always do, Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales," and eat fruitcake and drink eggnog...
...It was inevitable that her children should assimilate even further...
...Many make just this choice for their family...
...She belonged to a Jewish country club...
...They plan to live in Paris, to be foreign correspondents, to be doctors and veterinarians and ranchers and parents...
...We put it up again, almost as good as new...
...Somehow magical and sacred...
...Their distance from the ghetto depends on the Christian world continuing to suppress the demons within itself...
...I smile sheepishly and my heart begins to pound...
...As I look at the tree lights I remember the light of the memorial candle...
...For my children whose identity is vague, who have never heard of the Diaspora or Masada, I hope the world continues to let them choose...
...Our Christmas celebrations, ice cream molds of reindeer, holly with red berries in the vases, survived the pictures of the Holocaust that began to appear, but my religious feelings did not...
...It's a sign that the melting pot is still simmering if not boiling...
...My grandfather, although he died before I was born, before the worst of the atrocities against the Jews occurred, deserves an explanation...
...Should mass persecutions start again, I would wear the yellow star of David, which makes the peppermint canes on our trees always bittersweet...
...Being a Jew who celebrates Christmas, and there are many of us, needs some explanation...
...Anne Roiphe is an author whose books include Up the Sandbox, Long Division and Torch Song...
...I've asked myself this seriously...
...Nicholas, "The Night Before Christmas," the TV specials about Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph, and Kris Klaus are about good triumphing over evil, about the victory of the kind and the weak...
...The German maid, whose memories of Bavarian childhood ennobled her in my eyes, fixed the tree, the trimmings and orchestrated the holiday...
...My mother could tell jokes in Yiddish she had learned from her aunts...
...We might, if we avoided all signs of one Christian tradition, be more ethnic, but not purer or more holy...
...They never knew a year when there wasn't a Christmas tree in the house, a stocking hung up with care and a holiday smell in the kitchen...
...The children cried...
...The ghetto was gilded, but for her children it had lost its religious energy...
...Obviously it has something to do with education—out of the ghetto, away from the cheder into college, into philosophy and history of art, into history of revolutions and psychology, of isms and anthropology comes a sense of belonging to the entire human community, not merely one small tribal band...
...Eventually I married two of them, one Jewish, one not...
...She had not graduated high school and had never been to a charity ball that was not for a Jewish organization...
...I thought of the rebuilding of the temples...
...I wondered if only in Jewish homes did the trees fall...
...1978 by the New York Times Company...
...Agnostics became my friends...
...My mother went to temple twice a year, on the High Holy Days...
...If all that Christmas offers my family is a commercial blast, a quick thrill of new possession, then my grandfather's instinct to avoid contact was correct and the future seems even narrower than the past as we lose tribal connections and replace them with emptiness...
...Each year my husband reads Dickens aloud to the children and the story of Scrooge is mythol-ogized into our family ritual...
...One spring at the family seder, which was as routine and irreligious as our Christmas ceremony, I heard as if for the first time of the plagues God sent the Egyptians, of the death of their first born, of the soldiers swallowed up by the Red Sea, and I left the table...
...Still, it had a certain shine and excitement to it...
...The symbol of Jesus is just a symbol, an excuse for human bravado against the void...
...The world was too full of variety and difference...
...Their beliefs were, like mine, rational, humanist, skeptical, existential, uncertain, vague...
...The glory of the human eye and hand lie there...
...Jehovah was too cruel...
...Why not choose the Chanuka ceremony to satisfy mythological and communal needs...
...They say they are feminists, humanists...
...What God would choose his people for this...
...I unwrapped packages and gazed with happiness at this Christian version of the burning bush...
...But we do not sink gently into this anomie...
...And through the 18 years of combined marriages there has always been in my house a Christmas, no longer any seders, no more High Holy Days at the temple, no masses, no born again conversions, just Christmas, a sacred event in our family life...
...What would my grandmother with her kosher kitchen think of my daughter who played the Virgin Mary in the holiday pageant...
...I can see humanity where my grandfather saw only the march of cossacks...
...She also lit a memorial candle for her parents and its light burned on her dressing table (where it sat among the cosmetics, the perfume, the bits of jewelry) mysteriously, a sad, sacred light...
...We see ourselves in the Samoan or the Buddhist, the gypsy and the Navaho, and simultaneously become more and somewhat less...
...Each year she bought a new outfit for the occasion...
...Reprinted by permission...
...It can simply mean an awakening, an acknowledging of what is best in the human situation...
...She could not resist the bright bulbs, the artificial snow base, the wax Santa Claus candles anymore...
...I would not celebrate a God who was so tribal as to bring harm to one group for the sake of another...
...It's a signal, all right, of religious and ethnic breakdown...
Vol. 4 • January 1979 • No. 3
