Red Sea Pedestrian

Now that I've opened the door to thoughts about race/religion/heritage, lots of ideas are trying to make a break for it. Most of these half-baked thoughts have to do with my relationship to my ethnicity, and some secret guilt about betraying my progenitors by marrying outside the religion. I've not shared this with many people, but isn't that what secret blogs are for?

I'll give you some background: As mentioned previously, I went to Hebrew School from age 6 to age 10. Three days a week we attended, twice during the week after a full day at regular school. Tuesday & Thursday we learned to read, write, and speak in Hebrew. Fairly benign stuff, though our teacher often threw in some Zionist propaganda just to be complete. Sundays we attended Bible study, covering the usual Old Testament suspects (Moses, Miriam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.) The school had one teacher: Sybil. She was a single woman, living in an apartment near the temple, which seemed quite exotic to me at the time. I went there once with my mother--can't remember why--and the apartment was tidy and smelled weird. Sybil always wore a black turtleneck, black tights, and a gray or hounds tooth skirt. Even in summer. She had long black hair, showing the first signs of graying, which she wore piled on her head in a quasi-bun situation. She kept a lot of pens shoved in there. She wore glasses. Because of the size of the school, each class was comprised of kids ranging in age from 6 to 11. (After 11, you transitioned into a Bar/Bat-Mitzvah prep course with the Cantor. Years later, Sybil and the Cantor ran off together to live in Semitic sin.)

Sybil was a strange broad. She was pious and devout in her Judaism. She loved children, it seemed, and was affectionate toward us regularly. She always had snacks and cookies for us. But she also had this warped need to subject us to hours-long lectures regarding the gruesome details of life/death in the Nazi concentration camps. Our textbooks contained graphic and deeply disturbing photos of the prisoners in these death camps, and she would force us to look at them while she described their brutal tortures. I'll give you an example (IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH, SKIP THIS PART.)

One afternoon, Sybil got on the subject of the death camps and specifically the gas chambers. She told us about the death selection process, which we had heard before. We already knew about the tattoos, the shaved heads, the pulling of gold-filled teeth, the giving over of all clothes, shoes, etc. We knew that the Nazis made soap, lampshades, and sweaters from the fat, skin, and hair of their victims. She frequently reminded us that all children under the age of 15 were summarily put to death by the Nazis, so we should never forget that we would assuredly have been among the doomed. But on this day she went further, to describe how the prisoners were stuffed into the showers/gas chambers and the door was locked behind them. She told us how, when the gas began to flow, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the women, and the children suffocated. During the suffocation, their bodies would secrete a sticky gel through their pores that caused them all to adhere together in piles on the floor. After the gassing, the doors were opened and other prisoners (usually the surviving male Jews) were made to remove the bodies with a pitchfork. (can you imagine hearing this at age 7?) After being lifted onto wheelbarrows, they were carted to the crematoria, where they were burned. Some of the people at the bottom of the piles were still alive, so they met their deaths in this fiery hell.

After traumatizing us in this way, Sybil would remind her pie-eyed charges that it was our personal responsibility to replenish the world's supply of Jews by marrying only a Jew and having Jewish babies. Talk about your guilt-wielding. Not only would we be a disappointment to our parents if we married outside the religion, we would also be personally colluding with Nazis. Fuck. Inevitably, someone in class would tell Sybil that we didn't have to worry about this kind of thing because we live in the United States, where we are free to be whatever we want to be. You fucking idiot! We have been down this road with Sybil before! Don't give her the "it can't happen here" line again! But someone always would, and then we'd be in for another 20 minutes about how it CAN happen here, and that all the Jews in Europe thought it couldn't happen to them and LOOK! So we must never trust anyone who is not a Jew. "But Sybil, no one in my family died in the Holocaust. My ancestors were already in the U.S. by then." Her reply:"Selfish child. It is not always what's in your family that matters. You owe it to the 6 million to repopulate the world." Now go forth and multiply.

Certainly my parents--both of whom are Jews--made it clear that they would prefer if I married a Jew, mainly from the standpoint that that's what they did so it seemed like a good idea at the time. But they ended up getting a divorce, so this kind of took away their credibility to make demands on my marital choices. My aunts and uncles--many of whom refuse to buy any German automotive products--stated plainly that they would not attend my wedding if I married outside the faith. Of course, by the time I actually got around to marriage (at age 35) this stance was long forgotten and they were all just happy to hear I wasn't going to be an old maid. The take-away: On the shame scale, spinster trumps shagitz every time. (For those who don't know, a shagitz is a gentile man.)

I'm not sure I have a point here. I think I just needed to share. My secret guilt over marrying outside my religion has a secret but intimate relationship with my secret insecurity about whether my Korean in-laws will accept me. And my secret guilt harbors secret resentment against all the self-hating Jewish men I dated who rejected me in favor of a less ethnic model.

I'm afraid this post was not all that funny, so let me end on a humorous note. Another from my catalog of Jewish haikus:

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly
But her son is forty.