A Childhood in Jewish New Orleans
It’s a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That’s how Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” and Alfred Uhry’s “Last Night of Ballyhoo” begin, and also Ian Buruma’s memoir about his grandparents, “Their Promised Land.” The idea is, as soon as you show that, you’ve got the audience’s full attention, especially if it’s a Jewish audience, because it’s so peculiar.
When I was growing up, the idea that it was peculiar wouldn’t have occurred to me—all the Jews in New Orleans, at least the ones we knew, celebrated Christmas, though our family did so a little more enthusiastically than the others. Weeks in advance, we would choose our tree, haul carefully preserved boxes of beautiful and fragile ornaments out of the attic, summon an attitude of mixed reverence and joy for trimming the tree, and place wreaths and other decorations around the house.
On Christmas Eve, we would sing the standard carols and my father would solemnly read out loud Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” On Christmas morning my sister and I would arise at dawn and sit impatiently in front of the tree, waiting to open dozens of presents that had come in from across the Lemann family’s expanse of relatives, friends, and law-firm clients. Once or twice, Father went to a good deal of effort to arrange to have a grandly presented roast suckling pig, with a small apple stuffed in its mouth for decoration, which is about the most unkosher dish imaginable, as the main course at our Christmas dinner.
As I got older, I began to have a sense that there was a different American Jewish life out there somewhere. Father’s taste in reading in those years ran to Trollope, Thackeray, and Walter Scott, but my mother had novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud on her bedstand, and I would sometimes look at these when nobody was around. Or, though it was rare in those days, there would be a television show or a movie with a character you were meant to read as Jewish, who looked and spoke like nobody we knew in New Orleans.
I can’t remember Israel ever being mentioned in our house, including during the 1967 war that commanded the full attention of most American Jews. Is it possible that the Holocaust was never mentioned, either? It seems hard to believe, but that’s the way I remember it. When something utterly, horrifyingly upends your view of the world and your place in it, you have the choice of simply shutting out the destabilizing new information. Once, when I was attending Sunday school at our Reform temple, a teacher showed us “Night and Fog,” Alain Resnais’s short documentary film about Nazi concentration camps, which was released in 1956 and contained a few of the now familiar images of stacked-up corpses and skeletal survivors. She was shocked that, as far as she could tell, none of us in the class had been told there had been concentration camps, and not so many years earlier.
I can see that one might read this and ask, Why not just convert? Part of the answer is that in New Orleans, at least our New Orleans, everybody knew everybody else, going back for at least two generations. There wouldn’t have been any point to our pretending not to be Jewish, because everybody thought of us as Jewish and that would never change.
Beyond that, we were conspicuously different from most people we knew in New Orleans in ways that comported with what Jews were thought to be like. We had rooms full of books in our house, we had more money, we had modern art instead of hunting prints on the walls, we didn’t drink much by New Orleans standards. What Father wanted was for being Jewish to mean what he remembered it as meaning when he was growing up, in the days when the Reform movement’s universalism, embodied in its founding document, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, was in full flower—before the Holocaust, before Eastern European Jews had become dominant in American Jewish culture. He wanted it to be elegant, comfortable in the wider world (especially the upper-class world), not too conspicuous. Long after I’d left home, he’d question me, in his characteristic tone of mock outrage, about a wide variety of Jewish customs and practices that over the years became part of my adult life. Why did Jews wear “headgear”? Why did they wear prayer shawls? Why did they eat smoked salmon, when everybody knows that’s Scottish, not Jewish? All these, at heart, were variants of the same question: Why couldn’t things still be the way they were at Temple Sinai, a grand edifice on St. Charles Avenue, in the nineteen-thirties?
The fierceness with which he clung to these preferences was a standard, long-running German Jewish response to a new wave of Jewish exclusion, which began in the United States in the late nineteenth century and lasted for many decades. Back in 1879, a relative of mine named Lazard Kahn, an immigrant from Alsace who was a rising businessman, wrote a letter to Thomas Nast, the famous cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly. “My esteemed sir,” he began, in a strong, assertively calligraphed hand, and went on to suggest that Nast turn his satirical and moralizing attention to some recent highly publicized incidents in which Jews had been denied admission to fashionable hotels in New York. The best known of them had one of the leading German Jewish bankers, Joseph Seligman, turning up in 1877 at the elegant Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, and being told that henceforth no Jews could stay there. Other hotels soon followed suit. So did high-society subdivisions, resorts, apartment buildings, and clubs—and, even more consequentially, prestigious employers like banks, industrial corporations, law firms, universities, museums, and publishing houses. Thomas Nast did not produce a cartoon; indeed, a few years earlier, during the 1873 financial panic, Harper’s Weekly had published a cartoon that showed Jewish-looking bankers profiting from the crisis.
In New York, the leading German Jews did not react to the Grand Union Hotel incident by appealing to the humanitarian impulses of Gentiles, in the manner of Lazard Kahn’s letter to Nast. Instead, many of them came to see their new and unexpected troubles as the result of the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews which was just getting under way. Before 1880, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Jews in the United States, most of them German. By 1920, as many as three million Jews had arrived, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. They weren’t just far more numerous than the German Jews, they were more observant, more concentrated in urban slums, and much poorer. The way to combat anti-Jewish prejudice, many German Jews thought, would be to do something about them.
In 1891, three prominent German Jews—a Schiff, a Seligman, and a Straus—asked President Benjamin Harrison to pressure the tsar to adopt more lenient policies toward the Jews, and to stanch the rising incidence of pogroms, so that Russian Jews wouldn’t feel they had to immigrate to the United States. Another German Jewish project was the Galveston Plan (1907-14), which aimed to steer Jewish immigrants away from New York and other big cities, where there were highly visible Jewish slums. A third initiative was establishing a Yiddish-language newspaper called Die Yiddische Welt, or the Jewish World, as an alternative to the unmannerly homegrown press, much of which was scandalous and socialist, at least to the German Jews’ way of thinking. Still another was funding the early Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine for Eastern European Jewish refugees, which would provide a destination that wasn’t New York.
Surely there was compassion in these efforts—maybe even the enhanced compassion you would feel for people who were like you in some way. But it didn’t extend to actual mingling. As a son of the German Jewish financier Felix Warburg said about his father, who contributed or raised millions to the aid of Jews in distress, “He disliked almost everything about the Jews except their problems.”
In France in the late nineteenth century, a Jewish Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was put on trial on false charges of treason. Dreyfus’s sensational case turned him into a public enemy, and made it clear that France, the site of one of the earliest programs of Jewish emancipation, was not friendly to Jews, either. Theodor Herzl, the journalist who founded the modern Zionist movement, said he was converted by the Dreyfus case from a typically assimilated, secular Western European Jew into someone who believed that the time had come to declare the Diaspora a failure and create a Jewish nation. This did not appeal, to say the least, to German Jews in America. No idea was more threatening to our sub-tribe at the turn of the twentieth century than Zionism. We wanted to blend in, to be unobtrusive, to be accepted. Zionism was loud, insistent, separatist, tribal. Zionism called attention to the unsettling reality that millions of Jews in Europe wanted to leave—many, no doubt, for America rather than for Palestine. Reform Judaism’s slogan was that we were a religion, not a race. Zionism was a secular movement rooted in Jewish identity: race, not religion.
Just as America’s carriage-trade institutions were systematically excluding Jews, the German Jews’ Reform institutions excluded or expelled Zionists. Kaufmann Kohler, a German-born Reform rabbi, became the president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1903. He purged Zionists from its faculty; he also barred a prominent Zionist from speaking at H.U.C. In 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the national Reform leadership organization, issued a statement criticizing the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s official statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “The ideal of the Jew is not the establishment of a Jewish state—not the re-assertion of Jewish nationality which has long been outgrown,” the statement said. A few years after that, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and barred immigrants from Asia). This meant that Jews would have a hard time coming to the U.S.; Jewish migration to Palestine swelled.
In 1936, Julian Feibelman arrived as the new rabbi at New Orleans’s Temple Sinai. He wound up holding the job for thirty-one years, and so being the main direct religious authority of both Father’s childhood and mine. In 1938, he married one of the Lemanns, which also made him, to me, Cousin Julian. Julian had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi, when it was a town of around seven thousand people, without paved streets. His father, who, like most of the other Jews in town, owned a store, had the family eat matzos during Passover and take the day off on Yom Kippur, but that was the extent of their observance. They also celebrated Christmas and Easter as secular holidays.
Julian had minimal childhood religious education: he didn’t know any Hebrew until, after attending a Methodist college in Jackson, he entered Reform rabbinical school at H.U.C. He wound up spending the first ten years of his career as the No. 2 rabbi at a large, prosperous Reform temple in Philadelphia, where the services were on Sunday, where there was likely a choir and an organ rather than a cantor, and where the custom was that gentlemen should remove their hats when they were indoors, not put them on.
While he was in Philadelphia, Julian enrolled in graduate school in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He researched and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation after he had moved to Temple Sinai: “A Social and Economic Study of the New Orleans Jewish Community,” published in 1941. New Orleans, Julian reported, had fewer than two thousand Jewish families—relatively educated, secure, established, Reform. It had been spared the mass migration of Eastern European Jews, “which caused such congestion in New York City, overran the lower East-Side, and subsequently produced the social problems of the vicious sweat-shops and tenements.” These Yiddish-speaking immigrants “brought with them the habits that long years of restriction and fear had inculcated.” More recently, Julian averred, New Orleans had spared itself another set of problems, because it was the destination of very few refugees from Nazi Germany.
There’s a capitalized headline breaking up the text of the dissertation: “Jews Are Not a Race.” Reading this today generates a full-on emotional re-creation of the Jewish world I grew up in. Most Temple Sinai Jews were casual, wry, off-handed, unexcitable, and never overwrought, except when it came to anything obviously Jewish, in which case a high wall of absolute unacceptability went up. Standard-issue Jewishness went against the way we had chosen to position ourselves. It raised the possibility that we might lose what we had.
The picture of the world and our place in it that we had constructed made it almost insuperably difficult to absorb, let alone confront, the destruction of the German Jews in Germany. It was like a violation of natural law: it required believing that what seemed impossible in Germany was possible; that an all-encompassing Jewish solidarity had become necessary; that Zionism might represent the only realistic future for many, even most, Jews.
Julian had family in Germany, including his much loved step-grandmother, and he had constant personal reminders of how desperate the situation there was. He’d get pleading letters from German Jews who were also named Feibelman, saying they were his relatives. Could he rescue them? (From 1938: “Dear Cousin: We are very disappointed and troubled of not yet having an answer to my letter that I have directed to you Oktober of the past year.” From 1941: “Please, Julian, try and try again, there is no time to lose anymore.”) “There was little I could do to help or bring comfort to them,” Julian wrote in a self-published memoir decades later; he surmised that many of the writers had probably just picked his name out of a phone book. If the larger implication of the individual cases was Zionism, he found that impossible, too. He firmly did not believe that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would help the Jews. “I never wanted to see a nation,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t have any faith in nationalism whatsoever, whether it’s Jewish, German, Russian, Chinese, or what.”
Word was beginning to leak out about the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews en masse. In the summer of 1942, a secretly anti-Nazi German businessman learned about the death camps; Heinrich Himmler had stopped by his mining company’s nearby villa, just after making an inspection tour of Auschwitz. The businessman told a Jewish banker in Switzerland what he’d heard. The news passed among the leadership of Jewish organizations. Gerhart Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress, put it into the form of a telegram addressed to Stephen Wise, the head of that group, which reached Wise at the end of August. “Received alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3 ½ to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe, ” the telegram read.
A formidable, proud man, zealously liberal and ardently Zionist, Wise had carefully maintained direct relationships with Franklin Roosevelt and members of his Administration. His relationship with Roosevelt was mainly confined to Jewish matters, which led to a particular version of the court Jew’s eternal dilemma: Do you press hard and risk losing access or be cautious and keep the doors open?
Wise, choosing to play the insider, gave the telegram to a high-ranking State Department official, who asked him to keep Riegner’s report confidential until he could investigate it independently. Finally, after three months, the State Department told Wise that it was true: the Nazis had a plan to murder three million or four million Jews through industrial processes that surpassed in pure purposeless cruelty anything the world had ever seen. There would be no government announcement of this, but Wise could speak of it himself. He held a press conference, which got only moderate public attention. One can retrospectively chastise Wise for not being more aggressive—but, for contrast, there is Julian Feibelman’s reaction. About a week after Wise’s press conference, Julian devoted a column in the New Orleans Jewish Ledger to criticizing Wise, and not because he thought Wise hadn’t acted quickly enough. To Julian, Wise’s account was not plausible. Why would Germany, in the middle of a vast offensive against the Soviet Union, divert precious men and matériel to killing “poor and actually harmless Jews,” when that would not help them win the war? Also, Wise had said that one of the Nazis’ methods for killing Jews was to inject air bubbles into their veins, at the rate of up to a hundred people per hour, but a doctor in New Orleans told Julian that this was impossible. Who knew what other wild exaggerations Wise had chosen to believe?
It bothered Julian, too, that Wise had announced what he had heard directly, when it might have been more appropriate for the announcement to come from the State Department. Of course, the State Department hadn’t and wouldn’t make such an announcement, but anti-Zionist Reform Jews like Julian typically felt that Jews should not advocate on their own behalf, that the advocacy should come from others, who were more neutral. That way it wouldn’t enhance the perception that Jews are pushy, loud, and aggressive. Julian ended his editorial by asking, “Would it not have been far better for Dr. Wise to have refrained from adding his name to these accounts?”
Wrath quickly came down on Julian’s head—first from a Zionist Reform rabbi in New York named Louis Newman, then from Wise himself. Both of these rabbis were already furious about the formation of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization that a group of German Jews, including Julian, had founded in 1942. Why, Newman wrote, would Julian choose to give the world reason to doubt that the horrors unfolding in Europe were actually happening? Why would he lend his voice in opposition to the efforts to find a place of refuge for whatever Jews were able to survive? Wise’s letter to Julian was even harsher: “I am sorry for you. I pity you. I consider your attitude disgraceful in every sense. Instead of lifting a finger to help your people, you traduce one who has sought to do everything within his strength in order to touch the conscience of the American people and to avert further Hitler crimes against his people.”
In the summer of 1943, less than a year after Wise’s press conference, a member of the Polish resistance named Jan Karski came to Washington to give the still evidently unbelieving American officialdom another report on the Holocaust, then in its peak period of factory killing. Karski had managed to visit the Warsaw ghetto and a transit stop for the Bełżec extermination camp. He then secured meetings with, among others, President Roosevelt and the Vienna-born Felix Frankfurter, whom Roosevelt had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939. Nearly four decades later, during the filming of Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah,” Karski reënacted his meeting with Frankfurter. Karski rose from his seat to demonstrate how, after he had laid out his terrible story, Frankfurter declared, almost shouting, “I don’t believe you!” It’s a resonant moment in the film—but what did Frankfurter mean? Karski’s idea was that Frankfurter wasn’t reacting in the manner of Julian Feibelman, by questioning the facts. Instead, Frankfurter was saying that what he had heard went beyond the bounds of what he’d been able to consider possible, in a long life of crusading against injustices.
How could one live after learning this? Could it be put out of mind? After the war, Julian joined a delegation of American dignitaries on a trip to Europe that included a stop in Berlin. The city still lay in ruin, filled with piles of rubble and half-destroyed buildings. These conditions shocked and horrified him; he thought the United States should not have demanded an unconditional surrender from the Nazis, so that the war might have ended earlier and with less destruction. Just before he left, he stopped by the office of the Joint Distribution Committee, an organization devoted to helping Jewish refugees, to ask whether there was any news about his step-grandmother and his cousins, from whom he had heard nothing in years. As he told the story, the people in the office promised to try to find them. It would have been possible, I suppose, for Julian to pursue his search for his missing relatives more doggedly, but he hadn’t chosen to do that during the war, either. He never heard back from the Joint Distribution Committee. He returned to New Orleans and resumed his old life at Temple Sinai. With the establishment of the state of Israel, in 1948, he resigned from the American Council for Judaism, though without endorsing Zionism.
I grew up in the penumbra of the American Council for Judaism. Father was not a member, but he shared its perspective, and I didn’t encounter Zionism when I was growing up. It was only when I left New Orleans that I realized how profoundly different, in fact opposite, the Council’s views were to what most American Jews believed. To some leaders of the Council, President Harry Truman’s early recognition of the Jewish state in 1948 was not a great human-rights advance but a cynical gambit to pander to a bloc of voters and improve his chance of being reëlected in 1948. The capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina in 1960, and his subsequent public war-crimes trial in Jerusalem, which most Jewish Americans cheered, was to the Council’s executive director, an energetic Reform rabbi named Elmer Berger, a disaster, legally indefensible, because Israel didn’t have the right to snatch people who lived in other sovereign nations and put them on trial for violating laws that hadn’t existed at the time.
When American Jews—many of whom, by the postwar decades, were prosperously middle class—began to expand the network of Jewish summer camps and day schools, the Council tried to launch a campaign of resistance, because it saw these institutions as examples of Jewish self-segregation. When Jewish aid organizations launched campaigns to help Jews in Romania and the Soviet Union immigrate to Israel—another popular cause throughout Jewish America—the Council saw it as just a self-interested financial scheme, insisting that actually those Jews had no interest in going to the Middle East. In 1958, Leon Uris, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, published “Exodus,” his sentimental best-seller celebrating the birth of Israel. As the film adaptation was set to be released, the Council reached out to movie critics. It praised the director, Otto Preminger, for clearing up the book’s “obvious historical distortions and anti-Arab propaganda,” but still cautioned reviewers about the film’s glorification of the Jewish state. The central concern that pushed the Council to do all this was not primarily Palestinian rights—in those days, the word Palestinian was not in its vocabulary—but changes its leaders found alarming in the way American Jews chose to define themselves. They had to be persuaded to resist the tribal impulse.
Father left enough material behind for me to trace how he individually arrived at the version of Jewishness I remember from my childhood. He graduated from high school in 1943, enrolled at Harvard, and then enlisted. During basic training he was given a standardized mental test. The result—probably a high math score—got him assigned to the Signal Corps, the part of the Army in charge of communications. He spent most of his time in the service at a base in the Philippines, encoding outgoing messages.
The most dutiful of sons, Father wrote many long letters to his parents, some of which arrived scissored into scraps by military censors. In one that caught my attention, he told them about a friendship he’d struck up with Herman Weintraub, “a Brooklyn Jew who is thirty but looks fortyfive.” In “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” set in Atlanta in 1939, the action revolves around the appearance of Joe Farkas, also a Brooklyn Jew, whose presence in a German Jewish Southern milieu causes intense anxiety. Father was raised to react that way, but now, in 1946, he was surprised to find that he might feel differently.
Herman acted as a kind of older brother to Father, which he appreciated; Father wasn’t used to being around people who came from a wide range of backgrounds, and Herman was. On the other hand, Father knew more about culture than Herman did. He lent Herman his copy of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” (“a beautiful book Tom, a beautiful book”). They discussed Mozart. The pleasure that Herman took in these things was moving to Father. In the end, though, Herman was too far outside Father’s known world for him to allow their relationship to go past a certain point: “I know his kind,” he wrote his parents. “He’ll never amount to anything, inspite of his sensitivities and worthwhile ideas, but he has a warm and generous nature and would be a good friend.”
For Father, the standard way of being Jewish in America (including the standard relation to Zionism) was, simply put, too Jewish, requiring incessantly reminding the world of our disruptive presence as a distinctive people. Fortunately, by his lights, another path was available, the one he and my mother chose, in which you’d persuade yourself that all the main sources of oppression of the Jews over the centuries—religion, nationalism, ethnicity—would now finally yield to modernity and rationality, thanks to advances in science and a collective determination never to relive the horrors of the war. Why should we cling to the superstitions and the tribal loyalties of the past, when they were on the way out?
As he entered middle age, Father—by now a partner in a family law firm in New Orleans—took on the project, to be carried out with exquisite delicacy, of getting admitted into New Orleans’s highest social rank. His sponsor in this effort was George Montgomery, a childhood friend of his who, as much as anyone, was the master arbiter of New Orleans high society. At Father’s fiftieth-birthday party, a black-tie dinner held at our house in 1976, with servants in uniform passing out heavy-duty drinks, George stood up and said, with tears in his eyes (and Father’s, too), “The most Christian man I know is a Jew, Tommy Lemann.”
The absolute security that George felt about his own social position, plus some liberal impulse stirring within him, led him to want to take down the barriers that the Mardi Gras krewes—social organizations of immense prestige—had erected against Jews, at least on behalf of the Lemanns. One year George arranged for Father and Mother to be invited to one of the leading Mardi Gras balls, that of the Atlanteans. Afterward Mother gave me a report. The members of Atlanteans (all male) were masked. Their wives and female guests were not. They sat in a special section until they were invited to dance with the members. What did everybody think about the Lemanns being there? It was hard for Mother to tell, because of the masks. The men who had asked Mother to dance were obviously the ones who approved, but they were not supposed to identify themselves to her. Who were they? She could only guess. And how had Father and Mother done? Had they slipped up and acted in some way that could have been construed as Jewish, which is to say, unacceptable? I don’t know, but that evening seems to have brought Father’s Mardi Gras ambitions to a close. I don’t remember their setting off for any balls again.
It now looks to me as if no matter how hard Father tried, somehow, at least in the eyes of others, our Jewishness kept reasserting itself. The most obvious ways were through the social antisemitism of the clubs and krewes, or the occasional taunts that would be directed at me at the Country Day School: someone would roll a penny up the aisle past my desk, to demonstrate that, as a Jew, I loved money too much to be able to resist pouncing on it. I had a friend at Country Day whose parents were divorced, which was rare in that time and place. His father had moved away, and none of us had ever met him. His mother remarried, and his stepfather—one of us, a German Jew—eventually began legal proceedings to adopt his stepsons formally, which would entail changing their last name from Wilson to Rosenthal. My friend’s father turned up in court and gave him a lecture about how he didn’t want to go through life with a Jewish last name. He was young—he had no idea of how much would be closed off to him. Think of the jobs you wouldn’t get, the clubs you couldn’t join.
These glimpses indicated that there was a conversation about us going on out of our sight and hearing. What was it like? Who among the people we knew spoke about us as vulgar or greedy or strange, and how exactly did they put it? I think of Mother and Father as yearning for a comfortableness that people on the other side of the American Jewish cultural divide, the less assimilated side, could acquire through life in a Jewish community, but which was unavailable to my parents because of the path they had chosen. Their house, a large modern structure that they had built in the nineteen-sixties, had two libraries, a public one for entertaining guests and a private one for themselves. Their large collection of Jewish books was kept in the private one.
By the time that I was in my twenties and living on the East Coast, I felt a distinct tug in the direction of Jewishness. I didn’t know what to do about it, but it was there, not to be denied. Anything that was demonstrably Jewish—a book, a movie, a restaurant—drew my interest. Anything that was anti-Jewish—a story about exclusion, an obstacle that hadn’t come down, a disapproving enumeration of supposedly Jewish traits—was possibly more fascinating. But then what? Once or twice, I wandered into a synagogue for services on the Jewish holidays, but I felt completely lost, self-conscious. People would say prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic which I didn’t understand, sing tunes I’d never heard, stand up and sit down according to rules that everybody but me seemed to know. All I had really learned, at that point, was how to conform to the broad outlines of being culturally Jewish. What did that amount to? It was at best shallow, merely a stance that didn’t entail any real commitment, and at worst a false front.
When Alex, my oldest child, was born, a friend who wasn’t Jewish suggested that he not be circumcised. I suppose that it seemed to him to be a barbaric and outdated practice, one that entailed inflicting pain on an innocent newborn. Hearing the suggestion, I was nearly knocked over by an overwhelming wave of resistance that I hadn’t expected. No! Surely I hadn’t had such a visceral reaction because I consciously felt committed to God’s covenant with Abraham; at that point I don’t think I’d ever even read that passage in the Torah. Still, some powerful feeling of peoplehood, of a commandment being violated, swept over me. Not long afterward, we moved to Pelham, a town just outside New York City, to raise Alex and his brother Theo, four years younger, and I made a point of joining the small and relatively new synagogue there, the Pelham Jewish Center. (Much of the housing in New York’s suburbs had previously been “restricted”; the older members of the synagogue had stories about the difficulties they had encountered in getting the local officials’ permission to buy an old house and convert it.)
As the years passed, I’d go to the synagogue sometimes for a Saturday-morning service. At a crucial point, the ark would be opened, everyone would stand, the Torah scroll would be brought out, and someone would walk it around the room so that everyone could symbolically kiss it: a quick touch of the prayer book or the fringe of the tallis, first to the scroll, then to the lips. After this display of reverence, the scroll would be laid down on a podium and opened, and the rabbi would read that week’s portion aloud in a special intonation. At a bar mitzvah, it would be the spindly child, dressed up more fancily than on any previous occasion, who would be called up and handed the staggeringly heavy Torah scroll. Before beginning the procession around the room, the child would intone the essential Jewish prayer, the Shema. And at that point, I would burst into helpless tears, struggling to keep it quiet enough not to be noticed.
What was happening—why the dramatic effect? Access to this aspect of Jewish life, of the life of my family going back hundreds of years, had been shut off to me, as firmly as a metal door 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—whoosh. I was weeping over how liberating it felt to permit myself the luxury of particularism, of membership in a People. Over surrender to the undeniable power of ancient, prerational wisdom. Over the poignancy of my parents’ doomed hope that other doors would open if they closed this one. ♦
This is drawn from “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.”