I was pushing my son’s stroller along the main avenue of our Brooklyn neighborhood on a bright fall morning, when I was stopped by a bearded man in a top hat, his long black coat flapping.
“Excuse me, are you Jewish?” he asked.
I stared at him, stunned for two reasons: The simpler of the two was that it was my understanding that Hasidic men did not approach strange women on the street. But the second, more complicated reason was that I had never in my life been taken for Jewish. In fact, people often expressed incredulity when they found out I was Jewish. “Really? You? Impossible.”
This had always made me uncomfortable; I found it vaguely antisemitic. And so I tended to lead with my Jewishness, to announce it at the earliest possible opening.
“Sorry, no,” I stammered.
I felt uneasy as I continued to walk. When is it ever appropriate for a Jew to disavow being a Jew? I know why I did it: The last thing I felt like dealing with was the lulav he was thrusting at me, the etrog — he wanted me to say the Sukkot blessing. I was overcome with images from my childhood: My father’s strong square hands holding the lulav, shaking it gently in each direction; the sweet, lemony smell of the etrog as he lifted it to my nose. I wanted my childhood back, but my father was dead and the holidays of my youth were long gone. I didn’t want to say a lonely prayer on a crowded Brooklyn avenue with a bearded stranger. I tried to justify my lie to the Hasid by telling myself that to him, I was not a Jew. Not a real Jew, though family yichus would have impressed him: My grandfather was one of the founders of a prominent Manhattan shul, and a well-known philanthropist who had built many yeshivas in Israel. My uncle had been president of the Orthodox Union. But as a grown woman I didn’t even belong to a temple. I had moved far away from all that. So far that the words slipped from my mouth, a slippery, bitter pill: No, not Jewish.
I am most Jewish when I sit down to write. It’s not a conscious thing, the cadence of the words, the way that characters who were amorphous to me become clearer, suddenly sharper, when they assume qualities I think of as Jewish. Guilt, for instance. My characters often feel guilty. They are plagued by vague, unknowable dread. And oh, are they hypochondriacs! Every earache is a brain tumor. Every tingle or twinge, a stroke. And while I know that Jews don’t have a lock on these neuroses, if I were to attempt to write, say, an Irish Catholic character, I wouldn’t know where to begin. What are Catholic neuroses? Episcopalian? Muslim?
So I stick to the Jews because that is the music I know. Because when my mind wanders freely, when I am taking a bath or a walk, or rocking my baby to sleep, in the repetitive motion, what I hear is the melody of “Ain Kelohenu” drifting through my head. Because in moments of fear, what I say is the Sh’ma.
Flannery O’Connor once said that any writer who had survived childhood had enough material to last a lifetime. If this is true, my material, until I reached age 15, was deeply Jewish. I went to a yeshiva until I was in the seventh grade. I was the only child of an Orthodox father and a secular mother, and my religious observance, or lack of it, was often their battle ground.
So as I was forming as a person, these conflicts were also forming inside of me, adhering to my bones. It should come as no surprise, then, that my material, in three of four of my books, has concerned itself with themes of rebellion, assimilation and passing. As writers, our obsessions become our themes. The question is always, what obsesses you? What makes your blood rush? What unanswerable question are you trying to answer for yourself over and over again? And yet, if you know too much, if your answer about obsession comes easily, intellectually, if you have psychoanalyzed what haunts you to the point where the words are polished like stones, you lose the power to transform the obsession into art.
So here is what I know, and I try to stay dumb about it so that paradoxically, it remains within my grasp as a writer: I am a woman, a mother, a wife, a Jew, an urbanite, a daughter, a teacher. I am all these things, not necessarily in that order, and I am other things, as well. I am someone who lost her father young; I am twice divorced; my mother recently passed away. Any morning that I sit down to write, any of these things may be at play in my mind and emerge on the page in unexpected ways, just as the detritus of the day — that morning’s headlines, the car alarm blaring on the street, a wrong number — might also appear.
Which is not to say that creation is random — far from it. What continues to amaze me, in observing both the process of my own work and that of my students, is that the unconscious has its own coherence. If I get out of my own way, I will write something. And once I’ve written it, once the words are there on the page, then I have something to work with. The blank page is blank — it is nothing. It has no character, other than its opaque and sometimes mocking blankness. But then, on a good day, the steady line of words comes from a place I don’t entirely have access to or understand. Once on paper, the words have veins and texture, and a shape begins to emerge from them, rising like a ghost.
When I am singing “Adon Olam” into the top of my son’s head as I dance him around the living room, I am coming from that place I don’t understand. Or when, at shul on the High Holy Days, I remember every word of Kol Nidre even though I haven’t been at services in years, I am also coming from that place. It is indistinguishable from memory, and as I sing the words, words I don’t know, and as I fight back tears because something has been lost and found in the same moment, I am fully alive, I am all the pieces of myself that I need to be when I sit down and write.
I have promised myself that I will respond differently the next time a bearded man in a black flapping coat approaches me on the street. “Are you Jewish? Are you Jewish?” It is not safe, ever, even for a misguided moment, to disavow such an essential part of who I am. Jewish? Yes, I would have to say. And then, with the lulav in one hand and the etrog in the other, I would say the bracha standing on the Brooklyn street corner, shaking the lulav once in each direction, gently, the way my father taught me. I would sniff the etrog, my madeleine, and then I would go on, more myself than before.
Dani Shapiro is the author of the novels “Black & White” (Knopf, 2007) and “Family History” (Knopf, 2003) and the memoir “Slow Motion” (Random House, 1998).
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Dani Shapiro should not feel too much guilt. As Jews, we do not embrace proselytizing. By denying her Jewish identity, she wasn't denying Judaism; she was shunning inappropriate, intrusive behavior. Ok, next time she might say "Yes, I'm Jewish." If so, she need not engage in the beloved ritual on a public street with a male stranger.
I have sometimes stumbled upon Dani Shapiro's writings, always well-written and often about Jewish subjects. The fact she doesn't look Jewish is familiar to me, as I don't either. She has written about it before, as it must be something that bothers her. I have a friend who is black, yet she isn't. She's what people call high yellow. She's blond, blue eyed, pink skinned and firmly embedded in the black community. Often the little children she teaches don't realize she considers herself black and it hurts her. I have learned from my friend. When people question her racial identity, she feels rejected by them or denied. And when Jews say things to me, you don't look Jewish, I would have never guessed, etc, I too feel denied membership in my group. This is what Dani Shapiro must feel too.
Ok so the author screwed up, and got a paying article out of it. May she get it right the next time.
Many Jews have and do ask, why does such a question bother me? I may not live a Jewish life nor eat kosher or keep Shabbat...so why can't I answer no thanks, I don't consider myself Jewish, and get away with it? Because the question isn't directed at the person; it's directed at their soul. It's your Jewish soul that reacted so forcefully at the innocent question presented. I don't think that man meant to intervede on your privacy, nor was he proselytizing (One thing certain about the Jewish people, de facto, is that they do NOT prosetelyize), but rather interested in helping a fellow Jew do a mitvah. For a Jew is a Jew regardless of race, color or political leaning; a Jew, every Jew, contains a piece of G-d inside their Jewish soul, that yearns to be connected to G-d, and torn, worn from g-d, is crying out to be able to connec to G-d in the simple human act of reciting a blessing and shaking the fruit and willow.
Replying to people may insensitively say "you don't look Jewish" or "I never knew!"...it's on your pride. It's breaking many people's cynical misconceptions of Jews. It's standing up for who you are. There are thsouands, if not millions of people out there with the misconception that blacks can't be Jews, that Jews vote Democrat only, and it's the same misconceptions that keep people from stepping foot in an observant Jewish synagogue...and it's up to us, and it's exactly when such questions are posed, when we have the chance to break the misconception. When we should stand up and proudly say Yes, I am Jewish. Yes, I do things that may seem awfully silly or strange to some people...but we do it because G-d told us to, and in this crazy 21st century life of people striving for purpose and meaning, we were lucky enough to be born with ours. Try it...you'll gain new respect in others' eyes...and you'll find new respect in yourself, too.
Living in central Minnesota I should be so lucky to have another Jew come up to me and ask if I'm a member. Usually it's Baptists or Messianics trying to steal my soul (but fortunately they seem to be unable to find it). Now in my case I actually look like a Jew, which apparently makes me a billboard for any born-again to attempt to convert me to the Seeds of Abraham. How I would love to see a Lulav and Esrog as opposed to the pinecone and birch branch broucha I usually end up with. But this is all besides the point. For me I just wanted to say thanks for the article, in that it was as much a piece on writing as a Jew as it was on purging oneself. And of course thanks to the Forward and the interent with providing for me a sort of cosmic minyan. Sadly though I'm a day late for Simchas Torah, my still broke down and the corn liquor wasn't quite ready. "Siz shver tzu zein a yid", "It's hard to be a Jew". Big Eye
loved it. Thank you. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.
Ira-I was looking for you on the internet. This is what I found. Your old friend from Sheboygan.
I reciently found out that my Grandfather was Jewish.He was born in 1889. He was raised in an orphanage and raised as a Methodist. So was all of my family.They say you're not Jewish unless your Mother was, and my Mother was half Jewish, but her mother was not Jewish, just her father (my Grandfather).It's all so confusing. What I was wondering, is what does all of this make me? From Michele, in Pasadena, Texas
I reciently found out that my Grandfather was Jewish.He was born in 1889. He was raised in an orphanage and raised as a Methodist. So was all of my family.They say you're not Jewish unless your Mother was, and my Mother was half Jewish, but her mother was not Jewish, just her father (my Grandfather).It's all so confusing. What I was wondering, is what does all of this make me? From Michele, in Pasadena, Texas
To Michele Anne Beaver
Consider yourself lucky, and count your lucky stars. You are not Jewish, according to Jewish law. As a result, you were not born into a DP camp in Germany. Nobody ever called you Jewboy, in your case, Jewgirl I suppose. You've never had to live defensively, having to defend your very right to exist. You never have to feel guilty about not living up to having to follow some 613 commandments, including all the dietary laws. You don't have to ward off well-intentioned missionary types sincerely trying to save your soul from eternal damnation. You don't have to defend every little thing that Israel has done, or has had to do in its wars of self-defense.
So what does it make you? It makes you a very lucky lady. My advice? Don't look for trouble you don't need to have.
Being Jewish is part of your heritage and your identity. I suggest you learn about judiasm and be proud that you are a part of such a rich culture.