Returning, p.33
Returning, page 33
What was happening—why the dramatic effect? Access to this aspect of Jewish life, of the lives of my family going back hundreds of years, through an unimaginable variety of circumstances, had been shut off to me, as firmly as a metal door being welded shut. That must have upset me a great deal, even though I wasn’t consciously aware of being upset about it. Now the door was open. I was weeping over the poignancy of my parents’ doomed hope that other doors would open if they closed this one. Over how liberating it felt to permit myself the luxury of particularism, of membership in a people, instead of having to insist that whatever I felt and wanted was an expression of universal values, aimed at the benefit of all. Over submitting to the undeniable power of ancient, prerational wisdom.
So maybe this project wasn’t actually merely about Alex and Theo. It was about me. The idea that the tradition would continue, no doubt through unforeseen misfortunes, into another generation, and that this was something to proclaim proudly, no matter whether it might seem foreign to non-Jews—that broke through to some very deep place in my soul. What’s obvious, if you want to be analytic, is that the way I was brought up, supposedly so liberated, so carefree about what it meant to be Jewish, actually amounted to a heavy burden to bear. The rest of the world seemed to care a great deal about Jewishness, no matter how much we had persuaded ourselves that it wasn’t really very consequential. Why couldn’t we, or more to the point why couldn’t I, make it consequential too? In which case, it might have a positive rather than negative meaning. It’s also the case that some things are beyond reason, even for somebody who has been trained to revere reason. The Torah is a sacred object. It contains all the truth in the world. Its continued vitality is a miracle. It is responsible for the unlikely continued vitality of the Jewish people, my people. There, I’ve said it. I know educated, liberal, open-minded people like me are not supposed to have such thoughts, but I do.
As Alex came into range of his teens, I conceived of the idea of having him bar-mitzvahed. With a group of friends, some of whom were in mixed marriages, I arranged for a Reform rabbi to conduct an abbreviated training program that would culminate in a group bar mitzvah ceremony. This was so as to avoid what seemed to us parents like an insanely rigorous regime of preparations—four hours a week, for years—that was required by the synagogue. When I told Mother and Father about this, during a visit to New Orleans, in the mid-1990s, it did not go well. Father, ever the gentleman, didn’t say he was upset, but I could tell he was. He was quiet, his face became grave and drawn. Mother, always less restrained and by now accustomed to acting as Father’s proxy in these matters, immediately exclaimed, “That’s child abuse!” I have a hard time explaining their reaction to people, or at least to Jews who think of their children’s b’nai mitzvot as pretty much the greatest days of their lives as parents. It wasn’t entirely rational. Father had been confirmed, though not bar-mitzvahed, at Temple Sinai—I have a photograph of some kind of costumed tableau that was part of the ceremony, with him in the front row, a young prince. In Mother’s childhood, most Jewish boys, including her brother, were bar-mitzvahed. Still, I don’t have any trouble understanding it. We are all prisoners of the limitations of our immediate surroundings—even people as worldly as Father and Mother. A bar mitzvah wasn’t just completely out of the context of their adult lives in New Orleans, it was threatening. Some forms of nonconformity are tolerable, others are not. That it was not was an acknowledgment of our high awareness that, at least in our surroundings, everything about Jews was not okay. That was why it was so important that we establish that we were unusual Jews, not like most Jews.
If this had been a movie, I would have stormed out of the house and initiated a breach with Father and Mother. That kind of thing wasn’t our style, and anyway, I didn’t want to have a breach with them. I sensed that on this issue, because they were still at home and I had left, they were more vulnerable than I was. We negotiated. Mother and Father agreed to put aside their reservations and come to Alex’s bar mitzvah, and in return I agreed that I wouldn’t invite anybody from New Orleans outside of our most immediate family or, when I was back home, mention that the ceremony had taken place. At the ceremony, Father was polite and Mother was actually moved by the sight of her adored first grandson, in a suit and tie, being officially a man for the first time. I think she had a picture in her mind of the ceremony’s being filled with black-clad guests, the women in wigs, the men wearing side curls, so she was relieved to see a crowd of denizens of the suburbs whose appearance was well within the range of what was familiar to her. The one Lemann relative who came—approved for the invitation list because she didn’t live in New Orleans—was a cousin of Father’s who lived near us in the New York suburbs. Afterward, she wrote me a note saying that it had been a lovely ceremony but that, because she’d had such a good relationship with her father, she didn’t feel the need for God as a substitute for something missing in her life. That struck a familiar chord: the idea that a blowtorch-intense rejection of anything Jewish was properly understood as the healthy, normal, relaxed approach, but a tug in the direction of the way most Jews lived was evidence of an untreated neurosis.
Judith
Judith was at the bar mitzvah, as a presence in my life still new enough to limit herself merely to hinting that by her lights the ceremony was less a decisive break with everything I had known than a very small step in the right direction. Dominique and I were divorced by then. I had bought a house a couple of blocks away from the one where we had lived together, and we were raising our sons as joint-custody parents. Judith had just gone to work at a new magazine started by a friend of mine; he had the idea that we might be a good match, so he suggested that I take her out to dinner. Hmm. Judith and I both inhabited a tiny subculture, intellectually inclined journalists, where everyone had at least heard of everyone else. She had a reputation for being intimidating, the kind of person who had mastered most of the difficult books that frightened the rest of us off, probably by reading a version that hadn’t been translated into English.
We had actually met once before, a few years earlier. Judith was editing a small magazine that covered the academic world, with a saucy edge, and she’d suggested we have lunch to talk about the possibility of her giving me a writing assignment. She struck me as exotic. I was a rising political journalist by then, married, a father, living in the suburbs. Judith was single, with short curly hair, wearing black clothing and thick-framed glasses, a denizen of a world of people trained in literary theory that was completely unfamiliar to me. We had lunch at a noodle restaurant I’d never heard of. I pictured her life as being a round of smoky, late-running parties in lofts. When my friend made his suggestion, I hadn’t seen her except for that one time. I invited her to come out from the city for dinner at my house. That may have been a way of making myself exotic—How often did someone like her take the commuter train to the suburbs?—and it was also a way of making it clear right away that my life had a lot more circumstances than went along with what I imagined to be a typical single man she’d meet.
I remember hearing Judith approaching my house, because, in her context but not mine, it was fashionable for women to wear large, clunky elevated black sandals, along with bright crimson nail polish. I picture her bursting through the door, a big presence, full of gossip, health bulletins, excited reports on newly discovered cultural treats, provocations, warnings of looming danger, digressions. She said things that were more candid and unpredictable than you’d expect to hear at an early encounter. We went through our basic histories. Her grandfather, her father’s father, had come to the United States from what is now Belarus, alone, as a young man who spoke no English, in the early 1920s—just under the wire before the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, the severe 1924 immigration restriction that closed the gates of America and forced subsequent waves of fleeing Jews to Palestine. He made his way to Detroit and soon started a business washing the soiled overalls of workers in automobile repair shops, a task so dirty and onerous that nobody else wanted to take it on. The washing initially took place in the kitchen sink of a small apartment, but it grew into a substantial business. After a series of family disputes, Judith’s father had wound up running an offshoot of the original business, an industrial laundry in Puerto Rico. She’d mostly grown up there, as a rebellious, reading-obsessed child living in a small outpost of diasporic Jews: refugees from Hitler, refugees from Fidel Castro, businessmen attracted by the local government’s tax breaks.
I countered by giving Judith the outlines of my own family’s story. It was instantly clear that I had tapped into a deep reservoir of bad feeling. “Oh! So you’re one of the people who met us at Ellis Island and told us we couldn’t stay in New York, so we had to go to Detroit,” she said. Well, it wasn’t me personally; even conjuring up a picture of my grandfather, arms determinedly crossed, personally barring Judith’s grandfather from entering New York City, resonant as it was, would be accurate only emotionally. But of course it was true that established German Jews had launched a series of projects to steer Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the American provinces, and also that the two distinct Jewish cultures we’d grown up in mutually disliked and feared each other. Jews like me were raised to think of Jews like Judith as the people who had ruined everything for us by coming here in such overwhelmingly large numbers and by being so obviously foreign in every way. Jews like Judith were raised to think of Jews like me as the people who looked down on them and who, with rare exceptions, hadn’t been able to summon enough solidarity to do anything to help European Jews when they were in dire distress. They had a derisive nickname for us: yekke, Yiddish for “jacket,” meaning someone with money and fine clothes who held himself apart from his countrymen.
For the two of us, though—a Jewish mixed match, I suppose, each of a type the other had been raised to resent or even to dread—the otherness of the other carried a high-voltage charge. That’s how it looks to me now, at least. Judith was presenting herself as a deracinated, stylish denizen of the downtown cultural world. This was, in its way, a not much less marketized way to live than being a trader on Wall Street, except that the commodity being continually repriced wasn’t a bond or a futures contract, it was you. It didn’t make Judith content in any deep way; she’d started occasionally turning up at synagogues. Her mother, as a housewife in San Juan, feeling the same kind of dissatisfaction that Mother had felt during her early years in New Orleans, had gone through an extraordinary effort to become, in middle age, a member of the first cohort of female ordained Conservative rabbis, which had required her father’s agreeing to relocate to New York City. Judith had grown up around this yearning of her mother’s. That it went unfulfilled during her childhood made its power only greater. Who doesn’t wind up repeating patterns from parents’ lives? It didn’t require superhuman insight to see that Judith was feeling a strong tug toward a more religious life. Judith was pretty much the only person who knew Judith to whom it wasn’t obvious that some version of her mother’s evolution was in store for her.
In the days when we were getting to know each other, Alex and Theo were living half of every week at my house and half at Dominique’s house. One of my routines was to make a large pot of bolognese sauce during the weekend and then transfer it to small containers and freeze them. Then during the week I would defrost the containers one by one and pour them over pasta, which would take care of the boys’ dinner. Once Judith came out to my house while I was doing this—gradually pouring small ladlesful of milk into a slowly simmering pot of ground beef. I saw a powerful, involuntary startled reflex, a horrified recoil, as if she’d seen something outside the ordinary bounds of decent human behavior. “What are you doing?” she said. I said I was making bolognese sauce—what was unusual about that? “But it’s milk and meat!”—the most basic kosher restriction. This had never occurred to me, but to Judith, who had insisted to me that she didn’t keep kosher and didn’t intend to, I had violated a fundamental taboo that lived deep inside her, below the level of consciousness.
This moment didn’t displease me. I knew by then that I wanted, or even longed for, some access point to what being Jewish meant, not just as a surface cultural style or as a set of political positions but as something profound, something that existed outside and above the standard routines of my life, which were beginning to seem inadequate to my most insistent needs and longings. I didn’t know how to get to that—but maybe Judith did. And I had an instinct that I would not be able to find what I was looking for without making some trade-offs, because I had already seen that the option of dropping anything about being Jewish that might inconvenience you in the non-Jewish world leads to a washed-out and unsustainable version of being Jewish. That was why the original version of Reform Judaism had lost its audience: so much had been subtracted that what remained did not have the power to transport you to a different way of being. In the short run, in deference to Judith, I could substitute picadillo (no milk) for bolognese sauce. That’s minor. But surely the adjustments wouldn’t end there. A meaningful Jewish life can’t be entirely frictionless, if you choose to live in the non-Jewish world to any extent. You will always find yourself negotiating the differences between one and the other. That means you always have to be aware of your Jewishness as you proceed through the tiny decisions people make in the course of every day. Maybe that’s the point—that kind of always-on awareness is what life in the Diaspora requires if you want not to lose the thread.
If both of us were being drawn toward what Judith called Yiddishkeit (a word that I had never encountered), it’s obvious what was in our pairing for me, but what was in it for Judith? She was always hyperaware of Jews who were more Jewish than she was, both in how they lived and in their adeptness at Jewish skills. I think she would have found it difficult to make an adult Jewish life for herself if she had placed herself among these (by her lights) superior Jews who (she imagined) were constantly judging her harshly. If called upon to perform at Sabbath services, would she be able to do so flawlessly, or would she make a mistake in pronunciation or cantillation that those in the know would notice? She certainly didn’t have to worry about this with me. Her project could proceed. And there was a kind of bred-in-the-bones Jewish anxiety that sat with her often—with me, generations further down the line, less often. Being with me was calming.
Separately but mutually, I think, we had begun to grow weary of the all-encompassing professional worlds that we had worked assiduously to enter. In the New Orleans of my childhood, people didn’t care very much about what you did for a living or even whether you did anything for a living. “What was your mother’s maiden name?” was a more typical establishing question than “What do you do?” In the Jewish Puerto Rico of Judith’s childhood, most people operated family businesses. In both cases, the lives of people who were bound up in their ascent though major institutions seemed impossibly distant and alluring. We didn’t know people like that. But when you make yourself into one of those people, perhaps especially in journalism, with its focus on minutely tracking the doings of important and powerful people—their advances and retreats, the readjustments of their alliances—you begin to understand the psychic shortcomings of living that way. Being Jack Burden, tormented, questing, and rebellious, was not at all the same thing as being a high-achieving journalist in New York; the inside of a Balzac novel isn’t such a happy place.
At the synagogue in Pelham where we were members then, people knew we were journalists, but they weren’t tuned in to the fine gradations of status within the category, any more than we knew whether the members of the congregation who were accountants were major accountants or minor accountants. All of us who belonged were bound together by something different from professional status. That came as a relief, a vacation from professional anxiety. Being active members, which we were once Judith and I were together, entailed a great deal of mundane activity: making gift baskets for Purim, figuring out who was going to bring the food for the Kiddush after services, settling minor disputes within the community. This formed a kind of foundation, a base camp from which one could scale the religious heights and get a glimpse of something holy. It didn’t always happen. It didn’t even usually happen. But you couldn’t skip to it, so there you were, mired, much of the time, and not unpleasantly, in the everyday. I remember once in the early days getting to the end of a Saturday morning service, which hadn’t seemed any more or less enthralling to me than services usually were. We sang the final song, Adon Olam. Judith turned to me and kissed me full on the mouth. She was happy. I was happy. Maybe we were even something beyond happy.
After Mother
One holiday season, before we were married, I brought Judith, Alex, and Theo down to New Orleans. Mother, now in her early seventies, was living as an invalid, her body ravaged by decades of arthritis and of heavy doses of cortisone. She usually moved through the world in a wheelchair, when she went out at all. What was on my mind was that I wanted Mother and Father to get used to the idea of Judith as a member of the family, but something different was on Mother’s mind. At the end of the visit, she drew me aside and asked me to come back soon, by myself. Why? Because she was going to die. I thought she was being melodramatic, but one doesn’t decline an invitation like that, so I returned a couple of weeks later. What didn’t happen that weekend was some kind of emotional reckoning, or a summing up, or the revelation of a secret. We just reminisced and gossiped. I arranged with a movie theater to use a special entrance so that I could take Mother there in her wheelchair. We saw Shakespeare in Love. I left still thinking she was being melodramatic. Not long after that, Judith and I were engaged.
A few months later, Father called to say that Mother was in the hospital. I remember his tone as being almost apologetic. We both knew that somewhat mysterious trips to the hospital, usually associated with her heavy intake of pills, well beyond what her doctors had prescribed, happened regularly. This one would surely be like the others, brief and not to be explored deeply. But, for some reason, one of the doctors had asked him to call Nancy and me and ask us to come to New Orleans right away. It was surely unnecessary but he would have been remiss in failing to pass the message on. Both of us instantly booked flights, Nancy from Washington, me from New York.
