A Me Grows in Dayton

...Then, in the tiny synagogue, we listened to a ; service that was intimate and close, as if the congregation had been to a single dinner, widening the circle still further...

...This is her first appearance in moment...

...But it is the first seder of Passover at their house last year that I remember most clearly...

...here you can find a woman imploring, "Make it a nice assortment, I want it should be a little special," like anywhere in Brooklyn...

...We recited the story of Passover in English as I had done, with my family, for so many years before...

...The "Mazel Tovs" were shouted as always upon the breaking of the glass, reminding us, in our most joyful times, of the destruction of the Second Temple—and symbolizing the idea that our life together should be as long as the time it would take to put the glass back together...

...I wondered...

...here, we have to know where we can go to allow ourselves visibility, where we will feel at home...

...For how can one describe kosher—not just what one is or is not allowed to eat, but the origins of the practice, and finally, our own feelings about it—if we have not begun to read, to study, to discover for ourselves...

...It might, at first, appear strange that someone living in such an intensely Jewish environment would only become consciously Jewish upon arriving in the Midwest, a place with few Jews and still fewer Jewish influences...

...And what once gave me a feeling of claustrophobia, as if I were stuck in the back of a crowded elevator, unable to do anything more than stare, with my eyes closed, at the familiar backs of too many complacently nodding heads, gives me now, many goodbyes later, a feeling of Whitmanesque joy: a sense of me and all of Brooklyn squashed onto the Staten Island ferry on a windy spring day, gliding smoothly through the same port that my ancestors—and those of my Brooklyn friends, co-workers, taxi cab drivers—once entered Brooklyn through, albeit somewhat less smoothly...

...He might not have said that he loved me—not with words, anyway...

...Not even to ourselves...

...my grandmother hiding under the shade of trees, shopping daily in air-conditioned supermarkets for the items no longer needed: two old people who had worked too hard, worried too much, and for whom it was too late to be at peace...

...It was a warm and brilliant spring after another devastating Midwestern winter, but we had to walk quickly, our eyes partially closed, to get moving at all—our exams, papers, and the like taking precedence over all else...

...Of course, not everyone develops this same feeling out in the Midwest...

...There is no real contradiction here, though it might appear so if one believes in only a single definition of kosher...

...Just over a year ago, during a holiday visit to New York, my grandmother died suddenly, in Florida, of a heart attack...

...And still it is mine: my Jewish home...

...I had come to the Midwest to get away from one routine, to define myself...

...But it is not death which is finally bringing me home...

...And it seemed, in those first few weeks, that this shtetl extended its protection even as far as a place where Brooklyn was just another name of a city, the birthplace of Coney Island and its famous hot dog...

...I remember, quite clearly, my anger as I read the paper again and again, which changed to disbelief and fear until I felt, instead, ashamed—of myself...

...Of course, she shared a sink with these women and their treife...

...I have not fully undergone a conversion in these four years in the Midwest, my stopping ground...

...It was not to be my only experience with anti-Semitism, and I was more surprised than I should have been...

...I had forgotten— or I had never realized—that a shtetl has no walls...

...For as I went to hug him—afraid, by now, that I would not have the strength to leave—I saw that it was he who was crying: my calm, rational father, who never cries...

...those, like my grandmother, who were immigrants to this country and who spent most of their lives in crowded tenements now shoved too close to one another in death...

...but I was no longer playing with shoeboxes and glue...

...What were we crying about, really...

...It served everyone's needs...

...We felt like Jews...

...and to those who have lived here all their lives, it is simply the way things are...

...Here, if we're young—in our twenties and thirties, let's say—we have many non-Jewish friends, with a sprinkling of Jews mixed in, unless we don't want to be selective...

...For what was the difference, really, between my own rebellious feelings, bred out of experience, and those of my student, who was uninformed and misguided...

...Three Jews, four Gentiles, we sat around the table laden with the things that made this Passover, and our faces were glowing—could it have been the wine?—our voices sounded sweet as we chanted the blessings— even mine, normally off-key—our non-Jewish friends helped by transliterations our hostess had carefully prepared...

...We held each other's hands, smiled into each other's eyes and those of our family and friends, and began our life together, from the start, whole: as individuals, as Jews...

...It was Rosh Hashanah and my husband—then fiance—had come from Dayton, where he was working, to share it with me in Bloomington...

...My friends were Jewish, my parents' friends Jewish, schoolmates and then office co-workers, shopkeepers and cab drivers, all Jewish...

...and thus we have, really, denied what so many Jews are calling assimilation, intermarriage, or simply a loss of faith—for we have created a future that reaches far beyond ourselves, and at the same time, holds us in its blessings...

...Our stumbling block had been the actual, necessary words which would force my husband to "buy me...

...I had learned it all by myself...

...In June, my husband-to-be and I stood under the chuppah we had made from a tallis, but our decision to link our lives together was not as simple as that woven cloth...

...There are a few signs proclaiming "pareve" foods, but many customers don't know what this means...

...This is the one place in town for our Danish, our chalahs...

...The next day, a woman—obviously, wonderfully pregnant—read from the Torah in a clear, melodious voice, and what a lovely sound that was to hear...

...tools become guns...

...when they cooked together, they avoided combinations of milk and meat, or at least made sure there was always something she could eat—something good...

...This is how we consciously become Jews, then...

...In fact, after a while it seemed to me that even the owner of the Chinese take-out place possessed a bit of a Semitic look, translated from the faces of his many faithful customers...

...So we become, most of us for the first time, true yiddische kinder...

...That was how I found myself at Purdue University, with Gentile classmates and professors and a shikse roommate...

...I sat with my family as the decisions were made about where the shiva^ would be held—my grandmother's children living in Brooklyn, on Long Island and Staten Island, and my grandfather, grieving, someplace in between...

...I suppose the magic of this Rosh Hashanah started there, when we realized that his other guests were family, close friends...

...only I could not see beyond it, and try as I might, had no tools to chip its surface— only a kind of spit, a contempt...

...Or so I thought...

...And when I was back in my seat, staring at the giant cotton clouds in a bright blue sky, I was reminded of those childhood dioramas my parents had helped me design...

...what matters is.the way we begin to create Chanukah as part of our lives—an illumination, a strength, a song in our own home...

...We examined the rituals surrounding Jewish marriage, eliminating those elements which had no relation to our lives or which had not evolved out of simplicity and faith, adding to our ceremony those which would make it only ours, and retaining those traditions which would help to shape our new lives...

...But when I entered the house in my favorite blouse and skirt—having decided, only moments before I was to leave, that an external change might help my internal mood—all of the guests, my friends, were also wearing their favorite clothes...

...Conservative, mostly, but also a bit of Orthodox, of Reform...

...And after services, there were rows of tables laden with homemade strudels, cookies, and other noshes, the crowd of people crying, as if with one voice, "A gut Yom...

...Back in my house to begin the shiva, I helped to cover the mirrors, boil the eggs, make the coffee, telling my mother to sit, to mourn, that I would take care of everything— the ability to go through the routines somehow proving that I was an adult...

...They do this, simply, because their parents require that they do...

...But no longer are we merely fighting our past, or allowing ourselves to be completely unaware of it...

...I am not criticizing them for this...

...He didn't have to...

...I have thought about this day many times, perhaps too many, and maybe it is just because she knew I would that she did not yield to that so-called "typical" Jewish mother's impulse: she did not, when it really mattered, make me feel guilty about leaving her...

...In the next few weeks, as we learned about each other and began to be friends, I felt relieved, as if I had escaped somehow from that sense of persecution and prejudice I had heard so much about in Brooklyn, but had never really been able to believe in...

...And so, as if completing a circle, I boarded my plane, and said my first farewell to Brooklyn—escaping, finally, to the tiny toilet in the back of the plane so that my now-fervent cries for my Brooklyn home would be drowned out by the engine...

...No less a miracle...

...But instead, very nonchalantly, she said, "Oh, that's great, I have a Jewish boyfriend," and proceeded to unpack her suitcase...

...We still may not do much more than we used to, when we lived in Brooklyn—we do not all become religious, true believers (whatever that means) in the Jewish God...

...So I got myself ready for my journey to the Middle West^to deny that Jewish world—until, that is, the day I actually stood, bags packed, novel ready for breezy reading on the plane, at my kitchen door...

...If we're older, with our own children, we must become fully involved in our shuls, develop and then support our own Jewish network, for this is not the natural state of things...

...But she wouldn't eat meat unless it was kosher—and kosher meat being very hard to obtain in Bloomington, and prohibitively expensive if one could, she became a vegetarian...

...And when we light our Chanukah candles, how can we explain to our friends that this is not just another rite evolving out of Christmas...

...How could 1, really, have imagined Brooklyn as a stonewalled fortress, when I had thought to crack its foundation myself...

...and we did not need to explain anymore...

...What does this really mean...

...we felt, truly, a part of those days, and even more, we felt an almost Chassidic joy, as if we might at any moment begin to dance and sing...

...He was taught prejudice, that was all...

...Soon, too soon, the relationship between myself and my family would be defined by our infrequent times together, by our lives apart...

...Even more, we must explain ourselves, who we are—telling our Gentile friends about the observance of kashruth, explaining the meaning of the Sabbath, or the difference between our Chanukah and their Christmas, which is not always as obvious as it would seem...

...Not particularly amazing—except that it was she, from a suburb of Chicago in which there were no other Jews, who had brought Judaism back to her family as well as to her own life...

...Home...

...nothing more...

...What was this shuP...

...It was the release I needed...

...But my first goodbye to Brooklyn did not end there...

...Or rather, she was red-eyed, but was trying hard not to cry, and because I'd seen her cry for so many lesser reasons—my more insignificant rebellious gestures—I began to understand what my leave-taking was really about...

...I wanted to come home...

...but these things are not Jewish...

...I had to admit, then, that I was exactly where I needed to be...

...But it is more than this...

...I expected to hear a hiss of hate, or at least to see one glance at my hair for the horn marks, for what other way did I have of dealing with a non-Jew in a truly personal situation...

...It is out here too, but in a different way...

...so that there was an echo that lasted long after everyone had gone...

...But too quickly, I was back on yet another plane, going down one more straightaway cutting through the Indiana cornfields...

...At the same time, we knew that it could never happen in Brooklyn, with its overflowing congregations...

...Something seemed wrong with that world to me, growing up by its rules...

...I've said goodbye to my Brooklyn many times, and each time, it's been a little harder...

...But it was always, to some extent, a passage of faith...

...And because of that, it felt right, there in Bloomington, Indiana...

...We have developed in ourselves an awareness of Judaism which we can pass on to our children, and they to theirs...

...Yes, it is still the same place, Brooklyn, more or less...

...I was amazed then, new to the campus, at the numbers of Jews streaming towards this makeshift synagogue, as if there were no corners of this small Indiana town we had left untouched...

...we must be more than Holiday Jews out here, if we are to be Jews at all...

...Can she be this accepting...

...Perhaps it is because it was too easy there: too easy to caricature, to ridicule, the things of Jewishness I didn't like—Goodbye Columbus and all the Potemkins stand for, which seemed, in my naivete, to be all that Judaism stood for...

...Mechanically, I made new plane reservations...

...there are still many facets of Brooklyn life which I can never like or fully accept...

...My father drove me to the airport—the grey in his temples, four years ago, just beginning to show—and talked to me, in his gentle way, of simple things: that he and my mother would always be here, that I would always have a home with them...

...In Bloomington, where Indiana University is situated, I knew a Jewish woman who kept a kosher home, although she lived in a house with six other women, none of them Jewish...

...I remembered visiting them in Miami one year, my grandfather walking too briskly, too fast, inhaling the air of "God's Country" as if it could rid him of the fumes of paint and plaster from all his years of work...

...The Midwest had offered me a different perspective, true, and in so doing it had given my family and friends back to me, had allowed me to see Brooklyn whole...

...In Brooklyn, I have friends who keep kosher homes, have two complete sets of dishes just for Passover, though they do not necessarily believe in this...

...Brooklyn's Jews defined me—so much so that I felt they had left me no room to define myself...

...it is, moreover an affirmation of life...

...More expensive to those of us from New York, certainly, but worth it for that special craving...

...None of these Mid-westerners knows the story, whether 1 miracle or parable, of Chanukah...

...for if these same ties have been ridiculed so often as being out of proportion, and binding, they had also offered me security in a world that, more often than not, is a lonely place...

...It was not, I was well aware, very hard to do: spit turns too easily to yellow star...

...The difference between a city like Cincinnati, only fifty miles away, where there are, of course, many Jews, and Dayton, is that in the former, we are very visible, helping to mold the character of the place...

...whatever the outcome, I have no other home...

...For in these four years, it seems, I have come out here—to Lafayette and Bloomington, Indiana, and now to Dayton, Ohio—to become a Jew...

...When I first met the woman with whom I'd be sharing an apartment—beautifully blonde, a New England goddess—I allowed us at least five minutes for the usual rundown of our lives, and then sprang this at her: "I feel I should explain, before we go any further" (that is, because you still have time to get away) "that I'm...

...friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish, or families who will set an extra place, or two, for the wandering members of their tribe...

...But people do change...

...We could have gone to the services held for students and faculty in the large auditorium, where I had been the year before...

...resolving this as best we could, we "bought" each other, attempting to cancel out a prerequisite of generations...

...There are many traditions, after all, that are worth keeping...

...So there was a Jewish gift which my mother gave me that day: a gift of life, of such pure love that it did not need to announce its self-sacrifice...

...But this year we had been invited to Bloomington's one shul by one of my professors, an intelligent, kind man who belongs to it, and whom, at the time, I did not know well...

...How can we talk about Shabbat without lighting at least two candles, saying the brachot, and sharing our homemade cholent with those non-Jewish friends who expect—who deserve—answers to their questions...

...It didn't much help, though, not even then...

...I had not yet been here long enough to get into another, but soon I would be...

...Each member of the congregation was able to take some part in the reading that night, standing at his or her turn...

...I was not mourning my grandmother's death as much as her life, any life: too short, too filled with routines that, done too often, define one's life, one's way of living, and which then become nearly impossible to shake off...

...And what of my present stopping point, Dayton, Ohio, the "typical American city...

...I went through the funeral, took my place at the side of a new grave in one of those city cemeteries where it always seems colder, windier than it should...

...Surrounded by our family, our friends—both Jewish and not— holding up the chuppah poles on all sides, we repeated those words which had been said so many times before, and the words we had written for each other, which were as new as our own lives...

...it, too, serves as a meeting place, a common ground...

...and when we are confronted with a group which has just viewed a television Holocaust, we must reply—our voices faltering, our words coming slow—with a picture that is more real, or at least more honest...

...but we would be able to feel, from then on, as if it might...

...Brooklyn had always seemed to me a kind of shtetl (though I didn't know the meaning of that word then): a tiny Jewish village that was so well-barricaded, so protected, that no marching Cossacks or SS men would ever penetrate its walls...

...There were no revolving chuppahs, statues of bride and groom sculpted out of chopped liver, or hours of photographed wedding "rehearsals," pastel party dresses and strained smiles...

...I am, after all, a child of the middle class, which could be comfortable—only it wasn't to me...

...we know, though...

...and my daily routine—my life— which had begun to be satisfying, was no longer...

...It is not so strange, then, that I have found my Jewishness in the Midwest, among goyim...

...Until, that is, the composition one of my students wrote about the glories of Hitler and the horrors of the "money loving Jews...

...I asked myself, beginning to laugh...

...With the help of our rabbi—our friend—we were simply continuing the search that our Midwestern lives had begun...

...For my mother was not crying, as she stood rewrapping the containers of frozen stuffed cabbage she'd put together "to make your first few days a little easier...

...What is harder to understand, really, is why I could not find it in Brooklyn, within an environment which was created and nurtured for just that purpose...

...But more often than not, the Jewish friends, acquaintances, and professors I have met out here have been more intensely Jewish— even religious—than the people I know back home...

...Our Passovers are shared with Carol Ewig teaches at Wright State University in Ohio...

...and sturdy Brooklyn, my home, could crumble into dust and ash...

...on a graduate student's budget, she could not afford her own set of dishes—much less two—so she shared these as well...

...in fact, theirs is the way that traditions were passed on: a simple way...

...In Dayton, the Jewish Community Center took fifteen years to plan and build...

...And at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we must announce that we will not be students, or teachers, or workers, for a while, to the surprised looks of the others...

...Perhaps it will never really change, at least in our perceptions of it...

...I criticize from within, linking my life with Brooklyn's...

...And the Chicago Deli, where any weekend we can meet other Jews picking out a white-fish, some lox, and of course a few bagels...

...I So I have had to ask myself: What is : that story...

...We have Renaldo's here, and its owner is Italian, true, but also a Jew...

...And in time, it matters j less, after we have read all we could, that we can tell those others the story, as one telb a plot synopsis...

...The mother who, after many arguments and tears, could not—or did not want to—understand why I was leaving Brooklyn, my home, while her friends' daughters and sons were not only staying but had never thought of leaving, looked me in the eyes and did not cry, because she did not, finally, want to hold me back...

...We are not saying goodbye forever—I was just a short plane ride, a telephone call away...

...From that time, an emerging, conscious Jewishness began to shape, rather than define, my life: a Jewishness that could never be taught to me back in Hebrew school in Brooklyn, or by parental lectures, or by my Jewish friends and imagined enemies, but that I had to teach myself...

...Her roommates did more than merely respect her feelings...

...Tense, irritable, exhausted, we prepared for our Seder: searching for Haggadahs wherever we could find them, rushing off to the big supermarket for a few extra boxes of Matzos when my "CARE package" hadn't arrived on time...

...instead of feeling awkward, we felt ourselves welcomed into this small, loving circle of a family not our own...

...Here, we have to seek out Chanukah candles at B'nai B'rith or a synagogue, for they won't be displayed on the neatly stacked shelves of most supermarkets...

...Can she like Jews...