Much, much later, I realized that she was not completely
wrong. Even though she had discarded her
and my father’s Judaism early on in their marriage in favor of Quakerism, we were Jewish. The horror of the concentration camps had only
been revealed a few years before my birth.
My grandparents on both sides were Jews through and through. The fact that my mother dangled a Christmas
tree in front of my mortified Kiev-born Orthodox Jewish grandfather’s nose, was
her attempt at embracing the American culture and giving her children some fun—not
necessarily a denial of her Judaism. Her
Quakerism was more about embracing left wing politics in a way that was acceptable
for New York Jews, many of whom turned up at Quaker meetings.
Many decades later, after she’d been widowed in her early
50s, she over-compensated by embracing Orthodox Judaism. Despite that Florida photo that I waved in
her face of the four of us clutching Easter baskets that we had colored the
night before, she proclaimed “you always knew you were Jewish!” Yes, and no.
I pretended, just like she had, that being Jewish wasn’t central.
When our family immigrated to Sydney, the blond and red
headed Aussies asked me why I was so dark.
“I’m Russian,” I proclaimed. For some reason that sounded more exotic and
less offensive to me. Maybe reading ‘Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich’
was not the best choice for a 12-year-old.
I may have internalized all of that hate.
We actually joined the Quakers in Australia, not a synagogue. Gazing at the Eucalyptus trees and greenery in
Katoomba, New South Wales, through the huge glass windows of the Quaker meeting
hall, I think it felt as peaceful to her as it did to me.Later, while earning my BA at the University of New South Wales, I worked 3 nights a week as a waitress to help pay for living expenses. At the Maharani Restaurant in Sydney, one of the restaurants in which I worked, I wore a sari and pretended to be half Kashmiri and half Caucasian. Customers were convinced.
Anything but the truth. Which was that I was ashamed of
being Jewish.
By that time my parents were onto their next great adventure
. . . making aliya to Israel. My 2 brothers and older sister stayed behind
with me. Only my baby sister, who had no
choice, went along.
My mother was right to have worried about my fascination
with the hippy bearded biker R from
New Zealand who I was seeing before my parents left Australia. My mother screeched at me that R was “not of my class.” I was derailed by the mean tone of her voice
and the fact that she even thought class was relevant. But later, much later, I realized she was
worried that her dark-eyed, dark haired, naïve daughter would be taken
advantage of. The first time I slept
with R, while still a virgin, I got
pregnant. The very first time. Damn
bad luck. I was 21, clueless,
troubled, insecure, and then, suddenly, pregnant. I didn’t love R, I didn’t even really like him, but nevertheless, R was the first man I ever knew in the
biblical sense. I remember he was quite
beautiful looking. Over six feet, broad
shoulders, blond hair and blue eyes. He
didn’t delve into the nuances of language.
He didn’t dissect every human interaction to figure out what had
transpired. He just was. Plus, he rode a motorcycle
and could fix things. So different from
my dark-haired intellectual Jewish brothers who were sensitive, intelligent and
incompetent around the house, as was my father.
To R’s credit, he offered to
marry me, but I was so horrified by being pregnant my first year in Uni, where I was pretending to be a cool
intellectual, non-sexual being, that I burst into tears and proceeded to ask the
nice Jewish doctor (the one my mother secretly hoped I would marry but who was hankering
after my shiksa girlfriend) to arrange
for an abortion for me. In those days in
Australia that was not an easy feat. I
never told my mother but years later she claimed that she knew.
Later, long after my parents and baby sister had settled in
Israel—I went to visit them again. I had
already been several times, but this time I was married, with a stable job, though
still struggling to forgive her, a shameful thing to admit. One would have thought my advanced age would
have brought some wisdom, but apparently, not yet. It would be her 80th birthday and so I stressed about what to bring her. I wanted it to be something wonderful that she would treasure. I asked my older sister, who also lived in Israel by then (and that is another whole story), for recommendations. She told me that our mother collected dolls. I searched far and wide, and finally found an amazing doll in a little store in Montrose, California. She was dressed in a white full length skirt and tiny pink lace top. She had long dark curls, brown eyes, thick lashes and a lovely porcelain smile. I carefully wrapped her in bubble wrap and then gold tinted paper. I nestled her under many layers of clothing in my suitcase. When I went to see my mother, who by that time was living in a tiny apartment in Jerusalem with her third husband (the other two, including my father, having died), she unwrapped the doll, pulled it out by its brunette curls, stared at it for a nanosecond and then pushed it down on a shelf in the spare bedroom, upside down. “Enough with the dolls,” she said. “I have too many.” My heart stopped. And then the blood rushed to my face. But, as was my typical reaction to extreme anger, I said nothing.
Now I think it was symbolic, like she was discarding
me. No matter how hard I tried, I would
never be good enough. My baby brother
later said, “She never had any filters.
She always said the first thing that came into her head.” She was
incapable of understanding how it would affect the other person, in this case
her needy middle child. A true
narcissist. Maybe that is why I became a
social worker—to mitigate the damage.
I have a cousin who recently lost her mother, who was a
dramatic presence in her daughter’s life.
My cousin is struggling with the enormity of that loss. When my mother died, I struggled with what to
feel in her absence which had stretched for decades and decades. She chose to move us away from all we knew in
America to Australia. She then talked my
father into moving to Israel with my six year old baby sister, leaving the rest
of us behind. Of course, one could argue
that we were grown up. My baby brother
was 19, I was 21. My older brother was
23. My sister was 24. And they were exotic adventurers. Friends were envious about how cool my
parents were. Left wing. Quaker-Jews.
World-wide traveler’s. But it was
a shock for me to not have my parents in my life. Those were the days when you sent telegrams to
people in other countries because the telephone was too expensive. You communicated by letter, which would take
about six weeks for delivery and then another six weeks for a response. My mother did not keep in touch.
My father was to die shortly after, when I was 24. My mother was not there when I ran out of
money as a student, or when my heart was broken, or when I was awarded my Bachelor’s
degree, or my two Masters degrees, or for my marriage to my black American
atheist husband. “Not that he’s black grieves me,” she wrote in one of her many
devastating letters, “but that he is not Jewish.” I was angry at her for the first 20 years of
my marriage. Eventually, after her 3rd
husband talked her into meeting my husband on a rare trip to America, my
husband, a more highly evolved being than I was, embraced her. It took me another few years but eventually I
saw that she had done her best to love me, to love all of us. She was wildly imperfect. Just like me.
When my older sister called me 5 years ago, I was in my
office, where I raise money for a local community college. She told me that our mother was in the
hospital in Jerusalem with sepsis from a burst appendix and the doctors did not
give her long. I asked her to tell our
mother that I loved her. “Tell her
yourself,” my sister said. “I’m putting
the phone to her ear.” I stood there at
the window of my office in Los Angeles, watching students rush to class. My door was closed. “Mommy,” I said. “I love you.
You can go peacefully now. Jody
and Robin and Elfie (her sons, and baby daughter) love you, too. We all love you.” I felt I had to represent the whole family,
half of whom lived in Australia. She
hadn’t seen us for many years. I thought
I heard an intake of breath. I couldn’t
be sure.
My mother died shortly after that. When I told the people at the college that my
mother had died and I was going to take a few days off, I felt like a
fraud. They sent me this elaborate
flower arrangement with a fake bird in it.
I did not feel like a daughter who had lost her mother. I felt like a complex algorithm. Mother-crazy= Daughter-fractured. Mother-absent=Daughter-fractured. Mother-unorthodox=Daughter-Interesting. Yes, everything I have become in my life was
a reaction to her. I struggled against
her judgements and became a more open person.
I fought with her religious pronouncements and became an agnostic. I struggled with her craziness and became a
social worker. I struggled with her
motherhood and had no children. I
struggled with her three marriages and had one marriage that has lasted 32
years. So far.
Now she visits me in my dreams. She still wears those flowered skirts with
slits up her calves. She is voluptuous,
with long dark brown hair. She still
smokes those thin cigars. And she is
always happy, laughing and ready for an adventure. I don’t even remember how imperfect she is in
my dreams. That is her gift to me. Her frequent visits. Her humor and joy. Not the tantrums or depression. Not the narcissistic jabs. Death has made her whole. Maybe mine will do the same for me.