Growing Up Jewish in America
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union GROWING UP JEWISH IN AMERICA BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS For reasons I do not entirely understand, I began work a few months ago on a set of poems about growing up Jewish, drawing...
...At the dinner table we would sometimes converse in a code-language my grandmother had invented to keep our maid (always a ruddy-faced Lutheran fresh off the farm) in the dark about our "clannish" concerns...
...You think so...
...You would be foolish to forget...
...I stare straight ahead, counting the lampposts to deliverance...
...If anti-Semitism today is not so virulent as it was in my youth, it seems no less pervasive...
...But being well loved elsewhere, I could not name rejection here...
...Nothing personal: only stick-words they mass-produce so casually in forever-fluorescent factories, tinder-terms that have fueled furnaces since Shadrach went where he wasn't wanted...
...Throw me a glow...
...It's a mystery...
...Every weekday, however, I inhabited a very different sort of world: I attended a country day school where gentility and gentileness reigned supreme...
...We began each morning with the Lord's Prayer and a rousing Christian hymn, pagan rituals that I grudgingly enjoyed...
...Each dark bulb is a teardrop among the living lights...
...Were any of them ours...
...States of the Union GROWING UP JEWISH IN AMERICA BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS For reasons I do not entirely understand, I began work a few months ago on a set of poems about growing up Jewish, drawing on what I could remember of my adolescent days 40 years ago in Saint Paul, Minnesota...
...My own robed tribe, the Israelites, have known the sting of desert nights since breath of history...
...New Year, Amen (Rosh Hashonah Eve) Stale moon, climb down...
...Now do you remember...
...the sweet intimacy of it all appealed to me...
...But I wished my fellow students would forgive me my trespasses, all of which seemed mysteriously related to my being Jewish...
...This day it beckons...
...Who are these doe-eyed strangers bestriding the pink hills of my daydreams...
...There is a quiet place, a corner in your mind, candle-lit...
...How came they to beget me...
...There, beyond all weather, you may go and refresh yourself...
...Apparently we thought such devices could preserve our Jewish world, could keep it inviolate...
...Why you old sheeny you...
...As always, it comes with the territory...
...It is possible that for today's teenagers my recollections will seem out-of-date—but I don't really believe that...
...Shine a surprise...
...You can glimpse the ancient light inside, settling and settling...
...That winter morning, the new snow so white it hurt, a shouting Chevy swooped down and sucked us younger boys inside...
...Well, you'd be scared too if some big fuming-at-the-mouth dog came along and bit you...
...As the son of a rabbi (Reform) I had plenty of opportunities to be Jewish, as often as not in a public manner...
...Count the burnt-out bulbs drooping from the high ceiling...
...Clear the sky...
...But Saturday's child has to work, and here you are, chasing carts under the sun for a market that won't quit, not for you today, not for them tomorrow...
...How did I get here...
...In a climate t hat emphasizes pride over pain, complaints can seem uncomfortably disloyal...
...Love Story Her nose is freckled Her hair is yellow Her name is Pattie...
...That's a terrible thing to say...
...Now touch your mother's hand...
...What strikes me as strange is that few people nowadays talk about these matters, perhaps because the new mode of ethnic assertiveness shuts our mouths...
...he whispers, while I, a Jewish burden, sit dumbly on his knee...
...To this day I remain perplexed...
...Why is this happening...
...Bang those carts...
...I say, "They are all ours," pushing each word along like some wonderfully heavy treasure...
...The smiling music begins anew...
...All week it was locked tight like ghetto gates at sundown...
...Hello...
...My own adolescence happened to exaggerate the usual dichotomies...
...They're pictured here scaling craggy heights...
...The old question does not please me...
...Social lines, to be sure, can be crossed, but not without social consequences, and not without a certain degree of anxiety over the risks entailed...
...Struck dumb, I turn to the comics...
...I did not think any of this peculiar...
...In gratitude I fall in love with this golden-haired Christian who mispronounces everything...
...Why, after this has been lost and that has been won, do I emerge their son...
...telling me an ancient story I do not wish to hear...
...Thoughts While Sitting Upon an Anti-Semite's Knee "Why you old sheeny you...
...New Year, amen...
...Gram and the Human Race Gram is on the couch crocheting and I am on the floor reading the front page out loud: "104 Lost in Crash over Buffalo...
...Now we begin: Beam me a new me...
...In the crowded, sudden heat I find what space I can, any reef, any senior's knee...
...The anti-Semitism I encountered back then was hard to reconcile with the war our country was waging against the world's master bigot...
...The metal hooks work in and out: click click click click click click...
...Someone she softly misses: her big sister, your aunt, who cried these very prayers last Yom Kippur...
...Where does that get me...
...Now what's that supposed to mean...
...We hold each other lightly as we wiggle to the beat...
...God forbid...
...Double the "o" in God...
...Our cipher for "Jew" wasu.l., an abbreviation of the German Unsere Leute, or "our people...
...Supermarket Sabbath You must remember to remember...
...Bible Studies This glossy text is full of -iles: Hittites, Moabites, Gideonites, to name a few whose ethnic lights were doused by history...
...No room...
...Spin those wheels...
...Goodbye...
...That's good...
...What follow are poems that recall some of my inept, on-the-spot attempts to solve the riddle of growing up Jewish in America...
...Within the family our Jewish identity could assume an oddly clandestine quality...
...Let the work roll on: while the sun dances, the metal burns, the market music fills your head...
...How to Get Through the Memorial Service If restless, let little words come to your aid: drop an "e" into "fast" and enjoy the sudden feast...
...Get out of town...
...But some," she says at last, "may be more ours than others...
...In a mile or two it will be over and a simpler sort of schooling will recommence...
...Let her feel your light...
...If there's one thing that scares me," she shouts, "it's rabbis...
...The music stops...
...Fresh moon, arise...
...If restless still, peek at your mother...
...she says...
...Ever so slightly I shift my weight, hoping not to arouse history's knee jerk...
...Not him," I heard...
...And those who do talk about them often write whole books to persuade us there is no longer much that needs to be said...
...See the teardrops wet her cheek like melted snow...
...The Jewish adolescent's basic problem of living with a dual identity probably looms as large as ever...
...Anyone who has confronted the dilemmas of dual identity will understand the hazards of pluralism as experienced from deep within the American Melting Pot...
Vol. 68 • August 1985 • No. 10
