A Messy Draft for the New Year or L’dor V’dor.
“What does it mean to be Jewish - like culturally Jewish?” a co-worker asks me in response to my suggestion that we should include some Jewish holidays in our new cultural calendar. The kind of cultural calendar that was born from the summer of 2020 when the corporate world was forced to acknowledge that there was more to employee benefits than bank holidays and fancy granola bars. When she asks this, I think of the Velveteen Rabbit, a book my grandmother and I used to read together every Friday night and the question it poses of what it means to be real. The Skin Horse tells the Rabbit how much it hurts to be real, but that when you’re real - you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. I hurt often and feel ugly, physically and otherwise because for me, what it means to be real is complicated.
I think about what it means to be my kind of Jewish often, but never more-so than when I go away. I take a few days off from work to “replenish and regenerate,” which feels somehow Jewish in and of itself. I think I started considering time off regenerative by way of my sophomore year English teacher. Also my senior year drama teacher, she was a Jewish woman who spent her first act as the wife of a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer or something in a wealthy jewish suburb, teaching and changing lives in a real way at public schools in the city. By the time she got to me, she was winding down her teaching career and so she had us read Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner without the least bit of worry about consequence from the district or the parents or really anyone. I write about AIDS and Robert Mapplethorpe and Miller High Life in her classes and for the first time feel like maybe I am good at something. When she divorces the doctor or dentist or lawyer, she has what I can only articulate as a metamorphosis into her true self, a multimedia artist, and moves to New Mexico. She wishes everyone a “Regenerative” year on facebook for their birthday each year and I can feel the turquoise laden, lingering hug that would come along with it if it was delivered in person. Her hair is never out of place, her curiosity never ending and she is able to have her feet firmly on the dirt while still keeping her head firmly in the clouds. She is my kind of Jewish.
For my “regeneration,” I consider the Catskills but it feels too on the nose, driving to what was once the Borscht belt, but is slowly becoming the Natural Wine and Smashburger belt. I consider how guilty I’ll feel spending too much money on millennial appointed rooms. I consider a fire built by someone else specifically for me - to roast marshmallows on, to have a reason for one more amaro, and to let a fellow replenisher fumble through a choppy version of “Wonderwall,” while all of us sing along to signify that our youth might be fleeting, but we’re successful enough to buy it back for a few nights once in a while, in the mountains, with perfect strangers, just like our parents did for us decades ago when they sent us off to summer camp. I am nervous too that I will feel left out from this Rockwellian picture of new coastal Millennial adulthood. My skin doesn’t glow like the women who often show up in the pages of Bon Appetit adjacent culture after a night of martinis and carbs, it sweats. My high waisted jeans highlight a thyroid that continually underwhelms while theirs features a new whisper of abs that they named during the pandemic. In my mind they are Juliet, ethereal and flitty and I am the nurse, sweaty and grounded, but the catalyst for a bit of mischief always.
Instead of the Borscht Belt, I’m sitting beside an indoor pool in Northeast Philadelphia. It’s a YMCA with higher ceilings and a Botticelli inspired mural taking up one of the walls surrounding this crystal blue, heavily chlorinated centerpiece. Square plastic card tables are the only things that provide personal solace from the otherwise communal space. I sit on a white plastic chair and my fingers trace a crack in the plastic seat. I am mesmerized by still photos of Borscht on the closed circuit TVs mounted to the wall, its bright pink viscosity brought to life by the pixely contrast of a dollop of Snow White sour cream and a mountain of dill. Vestured in the scratchy white robe they’ve given me, bleached clean but with distinct traces of the Borscht of those who’ve worn it before, I breathe in chlorine and tobacco, sweat and fryer oil past its prime - I’ve always been more comfortable around strange odors.
My Ashkenazi blood should be relaxed here, but it’s ruddy white skin outs me. In my life, these two things are more often at odds than not - being a white woman and a Jewish woman. In a conversation about Race, I am Jewish before I am white. Judaism rushes through my blood and makes itself known on a DNA test. Even science can see the Judaism that exists within the four soft walls of my body. To the world, I am privileged to be white, but I find more privilege in the otherness, which isn’t apparent until someone wants to see it or more likely until they go looking for it. They will find it in my heavy lids, my strong nose, my medicated, but still furrowed brow and in my skin who can never find the right undertone at the beauty counter. I see it in my body, who resents it when I eat too little on purpose and spitefully stores everything in case of flight. In my body that stores the cortisol I create when I am not enough and too much.
I break off a piece of dense brown bread, slather it with cheap butter from a plastic packet with a crinkly golden top and use my fingers to top it with a piece of fish from the platter in front of me. My fingers fit in here - mittens of tiny sausages, stuffed in casings too small for them. When the conversation turns to plastic surgery, as it sometimes does I have considered liposuction for my fingers, the one part of my body that gives me away even at my thinnest. The fingers that will never be sophisticated, no matter how much delicate gold or chunky silver they are swathed in. The smoked fish, the sweat soaked cedar, the cigarettes between fat fingers - they indulge a part of this muddled identity - never satiated, primal and curious - and remind me that there is always potential for eroticism in everyday life. There are deals about diamonds made over platters of plov atop a plastic card table by two men whose robes struggle to fully enrobe them. There is the amorous dance rarely seen in public by a Hasidic man and his wife, stealing away for a midday dip. There are the lessons learned by a young girl whose father deals her a hand of cards and a plate of watermelon so she can be a part of this - his life outside of being a father. Contemporary pop psychology suggests having a “third” place in life, a place outside of home and work. The banya, outside of Philadelphia or outside of Odessa, is proof of existence of the third place long before we longed to name everything. That primal ardor that surrounds us everyday, but only presents itself when we seek it out, is my kind of Judaism.
The drive to Atlantic City, still desperately in need of a few nights “away,” is always peaceful. It’s strange saying “peaceful” and “Atlantic City” in the same sentence, but it’s a straight shot and right before you hit the strip, the strip hits you with a whiplash of the Atlantic’s briny abyss. I judge myself often for this need to “get away” and to find “reprieve.” But it is such that I don’t feel like I am worthwhile as a human unless I run myself ragged, unless I am as productive as possible, unless the only moments of the day that I am not multitasking are those I spend solving the Crossword and even then I am competing against myself. I hate competition with others, but there’s never a moment that I am not competing against myself. Like Eli Cash, I need to be a person worthy of love and do not believe that I was born with the talent. So here I am run ragged by chasing my own tail, seeking solace in Atlantic City.
Atlantic City isn’t inherently Jewish, especially these days, but if you ask most middle class Jews in the Mid-Atlantic, they’ll tell you stories passed down from the generation before them about Atlantic City. Though a first generation American born to Russian parents, my grandmother had little time for Halachic traditions and valued her identity as an artist over her identity as a Jew and valued her identity as a white woman over her identity as a Jew for safety reasons. When I traveled, she would remind me to keep it to myself, to keep my Judaism to myself. When my grandmother dies at nearly 104, we spend a night at her favorite hotel in Atlantic City, the one where she used to stay as an only child with her parents who wanted nothing more than a boy. Though a shonda to most of the Jews of her generation, her wish is to be cremated and spread in the Atlantic ocean where it meets Atlantic City, and so at the crack of dawn when no one else is watching, that is exactly what we do for her. I hate rules that don’t make sense and I break them often. Breaking rules that don’t make sense is my kind of Judaism.
In Atlantic City we engage in the bath house ritual of the non-semitic nuvo riche, the by-the-day pool club Cabana. I despise the polyester two piece uniforms the cocktail waitresses wear. Not because they are being lusted after, but because their bodies are so beautiful it’s a waste to swath them in a royal blue synthetic. I sip an obligatory frozen drink on a daybed that is far more expensive, but equally as scratchy as the Banya’s bathrobe and likely the royal blue synthetic wrapped around the winners of the genetic lottery. I press my toes into the glass wall in front of me and stare at the mirage of my wide width feet at the edge of the least beautiful span of the Atlantic ocean. I wonder if any of the waitresses have had to buy wide width shoes or extended calf boots and again feel wildly out of place. The semitic fleshiness that once adorned my Bubby and now belongs to me is on display in this land of moissanite masquerading as diamond and the pseudo-luxury for luxury’s sake makes me blush. I imagine my grandmother’s family on the beach below me, all fitting on a few towels in the sand, eating grapes and cold chicken, not minding or even acknowledging the lack of hygiene or amenity or luxury - the freedom of the beach, of the ocean, of America as a Jew in the 1930s being luxury enough. Actively acknowledging that for me, for us, freedom is a luxury, is my kind of Judaism.
Margate, a few miles south of Atlantic City, is the preferred beach town of wealthy Jews from Philadelphia. Here in the Jewish Riviera, men wear gold in overgrown forests of chest hair and the bagels are better than any you’ve had before. “It’s the water,” is something Jews say about their favorite bagel a lot. Margate mornings are marked by the spandex clad, diamond drenched plasticine bounding up and down the sidewalks and bike lanes, on their daily exodus for bagels, for kibbitz, for something else worth taking home to spread. Our shared trauma of feast or famine shows up without fear here - the strong armed tug of war between our desire for beauty, white and assimilated, the oppressed, starved history of our people and the cortisol laden fleshiness historically associated with its women - a winning proposition for no one.
Like others assimilated and assimilating, here wealth is marked by denial. Denial of aging, denial of sustenance, denial of melanoma on skin with melanin enough to be just something different. The wealth and starvation here is comfortable, mirroring the city streets in the winter, and my identity as a Jew acknowledged without question here. Delis with walls of warm bagel, fridges of fish and ice baths of dairy taunt and tempt every few blocks. There is always a woman shooing away her daughter’s request for something sweet as they wait in line for bagels with a diamond encrusted star of David dangling to the rhythm of her naysaying between a pair of breasts too high for her face and quietly worrying about the mark that her young daughters jeans leave on her stomach when she takes them off at the end of the day. There’s always a new Bubby gesturing wildly walking around the farmers market, craft stands outnumbering late August tomatoes, as she explains to her daughters husband the difference between “zei gezent” and “zai gezent.” Her urgency is always palpable. It’s up to her to maintain the yiddish tradition outside of those Hasidic communities that “give the rest of us a bad name.” The gravity of what’s apt to be lost if we don’t engage in the cultural cadence of eating outside of Halacha that belongs to us and only us is my kind of Judaism.
We want it, the smell of Bubby’s too small dining room that fits 25 somehow, the oily fish pulled off a platter with a fork, but creating a mess on your fingers somehow regardless. We want it, the success our parents’ parents desired for us, worked hard for every day. Their Judaism was something that just existed, a boring piece of identity, who they were and who the world saw them as. They didn’t have to go looking for it because it was always there for them - at home.
This is what I’m actually seeking when I need to “get away,” - to indulge this muddled identity without question. To take the time to think about it. To put myself in new places where pieces of this identity ebb and flow. In Rome on my own, I watch Chassidim dance under the 50 foot menorah they light every night of Hanukkah in the square near my hotel and spend Christmas Day in a Synagogue, under the only square dome in the city adorned with palm trees to signify shelter and eat lunch alone and let the owner and his son take pity on this beautiful American Jew, alone in Rome, and shower me with extra wine, artichokes and an invitation for a date. In Prague, it is the only Jewish cemetery still intact after World War II. In Santa Rosa, it is the temple on a hill with a Cantor who had dreams of Broadway. In Mexico City with a stomach ache, a delicatessen with matzoh ball soup and middle aged men playing the part of soda jerks - thinking about the Jews in this exact neighborhood who had to light Shabbat candles in their basements with shrouds over the windows. At summer camp in Maine for more years than is appropriate, eating most meals under “Free to be you and me” in worn acrylic paint on the beam above me. In Montreal, seeking out smoked meats and mustard and rye. In Isolation, looking most forward to sitting in my big pink chair in the corner of my living room, lighting candles on my own and watching Shabbat services continue to go forward in the midst of a global disaster.
L’dor V’dor, the generational relationship of remembrance, of what was and what is and what still might be. The shelter generations before had to provide mine, emotionally, physically. The nonstop growing pains that mark my identity, that’s my kind of Judaism.
As is my birthright, I answer my co-workers question with another one, “How much time do you have?”
