But here, our village soundtrack is a dulcet minor key, a fragile yet tenacious violin song that bursts into hummable melody, it is mournful and joyous all at the same time and makes me want to dance; we pluck our chickens and pitch our hay to the beat, our choreography is wholly expressive of our lives, our faith, our very souls.
But a reminder, a refrain: Papa is the Head of the Family, yes, who has the right, as Master of the House, to have the final word at home! He is our benevolent king, our loving, huggable tsar, the patriarch made persuadable by our female kisses or tears. He dances for us in the barn or along a dirt road, arms raised to his buddy-buddy God in both supplication and gratitude. My Papa, his name is Tevye, and he is cheerfully volatile, he dreams of being a rich man, all day long he’d biddy biddy bum, but he loves his cart horse and milk cows as much as he loves us, his wife and five daughters, he is all belly and grizzled eyebrows and scratchy beard. Papa explains to me, to all of us, the importance of our Tradition!, that
TEVYE
because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do,
how to sleep, eat, work, wear a fringed prayer shawl, cover our heads to show our constant devotion to this God of ours who is thoughtful enough to provide these Traditions!, such comforting, tidy rules on exactly how we must live our lives, how we must always behave. Such security, in that directive, instructional love.
Here in our cinematic Anatevka life, here in the home I love, it is always a burnished sunrise or sunset. Our Jewishness is the harvest gold of our kitchen appliances, the color of supermarket challah yellow with egg yolks and glistening fat bubbles of Campbell’s chicken soup. Our Jewishness is made luminous with candles and copper kettles and fresh milk. We glow with our Jewishness.
I became a Jew when I was seven.
But I was already Jewish, actually, a default Jew by birth, by blood. My father was raised a Lutheran in the backwoods of Wisconsin, trudged every Sunday by his icy single mother to the town church three miles away until he was eight years old and decided “the whole goddamn thing was bullshit”; he refused to have any more to do with God or religion or spirituality or faith of any kind. But my mother was Jewish, if unobservant, and so, according to both Jewish law and Nazi propaganda, I was born a Jew, too. My maternal grandmother was born in Poland to the village rabbi but shed both accent and religious observation as part of her teenage immigrant assimilation in America; she became even less observant upon marrying my secular Jewish grandfather, who, if anything, was an anti-Semitic Jew, a Reagan Republican Jew, disdainful of any public form or expression of religion, embarrassed by Jewish shtick or Catskills humor he felt evinced a lack of sophistication, and perpetually annoyed with Israel for always causing so much trouble. My grandparents had been members of a temple in the early days of their marriage, mostly, I suspect, for the card games and cocktail parties they loved, especially my dance-on-the-tabletop, former-flapper grandmother. But when they fell on hard times and could not afford their temple dues — a financial shame that would haunt my grandfather forever — they asked the rabbi for some temporary leniency: Help us out, please, we are members of this congregation in good Jewish standing, and were told No. No, you must leave. Their temple membership was revoked, they were cast out from the flock, disowned, dismissed, and whatever Jewishness was left in my grandfather died at that humiliating moment; he swore he was done with Judaism, forever.
And yet there remained some Jewish markers in my grandparents’ home: A small metal and enamel thing called a mezuzah nailed to their front doorframe; a blue metal can the size of a brick with Hebrew lettering on it and a slot at the top for spare coins, to raise money for some undefined Jewish organization; and a dark, to-my-child-eyes huge oil painting of a solemn-eyed, black-garmented man hunched over a book, which might have been a portrait of my Polish great-grandfather rabbi or some artist’s rendering of Shylock, or simply a generic Portrait of a Jew. I spent a great deal of time at my grandparents’ home as a child, and this painting, staring down at me on the comfy couch where I would sleep overnight, confused me, felt both comforting and foreboding. Maybe it was a portrait of God. What did I know?
My own home was an entirely Godless one; both of my parents were devout atheists, profoundly unspiritual. My family had no religious Traditions!, or none that made any sense: a supermarket challah, or matzoh brei on Sunday mornings, does not a Jewish ritual make. We always had a Christmas tree, because they smelled nice and my mother thought they were pretty and showed off our house to nice effect, and we always “did presents” on Christmas morning, not a celebration of Jesus’s birth, but an orgy of competitive, materialist consumerism. Growing up in the 1970s San Fernando Valley, in the Jewishy enclaves of Encino and Woodland Hills, half my friends were Jewish and half my friends were Gentile (not even “Christian,” just Gentile, broad-spectrum non-Jewish), and I thought that fifty-fifty split was the demographic norm of the entire world until, embarrassingly, my midteens. (Jews are only 1.7 percent of the U.S. population? Really? Oh, hello, Buddhism! Hello, Islam!) All my Jewish friends had bar and bat mitzvahs to celebrate their thirteenth birthdays, their symbolic arrival at adulthood, and my family attended these events the way we would attend any birthday party or potluck, my father good-naturedly perching a yarmulke on his blond head. I envied the extravagant parties (and extravagant gifts) that came with the coming-of-age ritual, but had zero interest in the Sunday School God stuff, the learn-a-Torah-portion-in-Hebrew part of it. We never went to temple otherwise, and sitting through all those bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies was both awkward and dull, because I felt like a fraud; the devotion to God, the displays of spiritual communion, were as foreign and meaningless to me as the indecipherable Hebrew words. Once I found a cheap, forgotten menorah tucked in the back of a kitchen cabinet, and, visions of my friends’ Eight Nights of Hannukah gifts in my head, I stuck kiddie birthday candles in it and tried to engage my parents in a half-hearted observation (something about oil miraculously lasting eight days. .?), but gave up the effort the third or fourth present-free night in.
The most Jewish we ever got was a negligible Passover Seder at my grandparents’ house, where we flipped through a few pages of the “Haggadah,” a sort of interactive, Manischewitz-stained Idiot’s Guide to Passover, something about Jews escaping slavery in ancient Egypt, frogs and locusts, right, let’s eat! And then came the afikomen (Hide the matzoh!), which I, the youngest child, was tasked with finding, which I always did within minutes and then exchanged for $1 from my Grandpa. My strongest memory is a story of four hypothetical Jewish children asking four different questions about the Passover rituaclass="underline" The wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the child who does not even know how to ask, but I could never quite remember which child asked which question (they all seemed equally irrelevant to anything in my own life), and it instilled in me a fear of ever asking the “wrong kind” of question — I certainly didn’t want to be labeled wicked, simple, or too clueless to even put a proper interrogative sentence together. But over time Passover simply blurred with Thanksgiving: A loud family affair lacking any real ceremony or meaningful observance of history, of political or religious significance, of any tradition beyond green bean casserole and potato pancakes. (Although the fried onions on top of the green bean casserole were, in fact, a holy rite.)