This is the first in a two-part series on one woman’s return to her Jewish roots. Part II will appear in the Passover magazine section April 6.
Nowadays, almost everyone has heard about “the vanishing American Jew” that Alan M. Dershowitz wrote about in the book of the same name. I, too, nearly vanished as a Jew. But recently, I have begun to reclaim the Judaism that my family rejected. Here is the first part of my odyessy.
The tale of my parents’ abandonment of their Jewishness began somewhere in Kovno Guberniya in Lithuania, and in the village of Malin, near Kiev.
Many ancestors of America’s Jews came from these same places. What seems to be different about my relatives is that most of them came to America with few positive feelings about being Jewish.
My mother’s mother — blond, blue-eyed Sarah Schaefer — arrived at Ellis Island alone at the age of 16, near the end of the 19th century, to escape the pogroms in Lithuania. Her only relative in the U.S. was an uncle, who found her a job as a lacemaker in a Lower East Side (N.Y.) sweatshop.
Throughout her life, Grandma Sarah remained devoutly Orthodox, davening at home and walking to shul every day. However, her observant Jewish lifestyle was exactly what turned my mother into a passionate feminist, before anyone had ever heard of Betty Friedan.
My mother and her three sisters wanted no part of a life in which the wife did all of the housework, cooking and child care, while her husband came home from work at night to read the paper, listen to the radio or watch television.
They had no desire to believe in a religion in which the men thank God every day they weren’t born a woman. They didn’t want to have three sets of dishes, or to speak Yiddish, or to live in an Americanized Jewish “shtetl,” constantly terrified that “the goyim” might come and beat them up or throw them out the window, as the Cossacks had done to Grandma Sarah.
Although she lived in America for 65 years, Grandma Sarah never overcame her fear of “the goyim,” or learned to read English well, or to speak without an accent. But she always urged her grandchildren to get as much education as possible.
After the war, my parents moved to a new development in Arlington, Va. We were the only Jewish family in the area. Because my mother didn’t keep kosher, Grandma Sarah would never eat in our house.
Dim memories
The few dim memories I have of anything Jewish are connected to Grandma Sarah. I remember Uncle Al wearing a yarmulke and reading the haggadah at the Passover seder at her house, and cousin Arne asking the four questions.
The rest of Passover is pretty much a blur, except for us playing under the seder table, and the grownups saying the blessing over the wine. I remember hearing the words, but didn’t know what they meant.
I clearly remember our menorah, but we never lit it. My grandmother gave me a quarter, or a dollar, for Chanukah gelt, and I think I played with a dreidel. But no one taught me anything about the holidays, and except for Grandma Sarah, no one ever went to synagogue.
We also always had a Christmas tree, so I could be like the other kids in our neighborhood. Maybe that’s because my mother’s own parents had moved to rural Minnesota before she was born and were the only Jews in town. She knew what it was like to grow up being different from everyone else.
During my six years in elementary school, I knew only two Jewish children. In junior high school, I knew one Jewish boy. In high school there were only four Jewish students besides me. I never had a Jewish teacher.
Given these circumstances in my family and education, there was nothing about being Jewish for me to like or with which to identify.
But despite her rejection of organized religion, my mother spent her whole life questioning and searching. She was a voracious reader of philosophy and poetry, and she took me to the Ethical Culture Society on Sundays. My mother’s only lifelong belief was that there are atheists in the foxholes.
Although she died an excruciatingly painful death from lung cancer, to her final breath she never said a single prayer, or turned to “God” for strength or help. Of this she was proud.
As for my father, I only learned during the past year that most of his family had been secular Jews, even back in Russia, and that neither he nor his brother had a bar mitzvah. In Malin, his mother’s parents and grandparents were prosperous manufacturers, spoke Russian and even had children who went to the university in Moscow. The only reason they emigrated here in the 1890s was to save their sons from being conscripted into 25 years of military service in the Tsar’s army.
When they got to Chicago, they worked in a cigar factory, a comedown from being the owners of a juice factory and an inn and the wealthiest people in town. My father’s associations with growing up Jewish on the north side of Chicago were that he was chased home from high school, had stones thrown at him and was called a “dirty kike.”
Everyone in the large extended family resented the fact that my Great-Grandpa Selig didn’t have a job, but stayed home all day, studying the Bible. He had come to this devotion late in life. He always wore a suit, even on the hottest days of summer, and punished the children for misbehavior at the table. He was viewed as a mean tyrant, not as a role model. Uncle Dave, a rabbi, also wasn’t respected; he was pitied for choosing such a foolish career.
I still can’t erase from my mind’s ear my father’s voice saying, “Anyone who believes in God is a fool, and any Jew who denies he is a Jew is a traitor.”
He never got over the horror of the Holocaust, although he was born in Chicago and never was in Germany. Out of solidarity with the murdered six million, he thought Jews should always proudly say they were Jewish. He personally rejected the religion and culture and ignored the holidays, but he was a great teller of Sam Lepidus stories and Jewish jokes.
Anything I learned about my Jewish heritage from my parents, who ultimately divorced, was by osmosis. They were both passionate fighters for the underdog, for liberal causes, for education, for excellence, for justice and for honesty. It was only last summer, when I was studying in an Orthodox women’s yeshiva in Israel that I learned about “tikkun olam” and the commandment to study (more about that in part II). I knew that many Jews were excellent students, and often were involved in liberal politics, but I never knew that those values came from the Torah.
Even though I went to Oberlin College and the University of Chicago graduate school, which were both heavily Jewish, I never heard of Campus Hillel or knew any students who were more observant than I was. In four years of college, I dated only one Jewish guy. In graduate school, I seriously dated one man whose family was “very Jewish,” but I felt completely out of place with them.
Then, just as my father had done following his divorce from my mother, I married a Methodist, a minister’s son who also had strayed from his childhood upbringing. My open-minded father-in-law performed our wedding ceremony, reading selections from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran and from Shakespeare, never mentioning any kind of a supreme being.
Somehow my husband and I never really discussed religion. It wasn’t until our sons, David and Jonathan, were about six and four that my husband began remembering the fun he had had in Sunday school, Methodist Youth Fellowship and vacation Bible school. And I began to feel sad that I had nothing to teach my children about my Jewish “roots.”
I wanted them to attend the religious school at the only synagogue in town, but we had to join the synagogue for them to do that. It wasn’t a question of money, because I offered to pay any amount they wanted. But I wasn’t ready to join the synagogue. “Home schooling” in Judaism wasn’t an option, since I had not yet started down the path of Jewish learning.
Because of the members only policy at that synagogue, my sons attended the liberal Congregational Church Sunday school, where no membership was required. I was so disturbed about the dilemma at the time that I consulted a Jewish psychiatrist. His advice was to “bring them up in their father’s faith,” since their mother had less faith than their father did. He said, “When they grow up, some day they will become interested in their mother’s heritage and will start searching on their own.”
My personal tale of the “vanishing American Jew” will soon come to its logical conclusion. David is going to marry a lovely, smart, kind Irish-Catholic woman, who doesn’t practice her religion either.
Thus, the “official” Jewishness of any children they may have will come to an end.
Given my own choices, what right do I have to complain or feel anything but happiness for them?
Carol Logan, who arrived in Milwaukee last fall, has a master’s degree in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Chicago and is a specialist on the former Soviet Union. She has taught Russian at St. Norbert College in De Pere and worked as a consultant at its Bemis Center for International Education, where she developed and implemented numerous bilateral projects with Russia and Ukraine. Among her other experience, she served as a program specialist at the U.S. Information Agency in Washington.
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