a short excerpt from an in-progress essay collection about growing up Jewish in the Southern USA. A longer version of this essay is being shopped around, so LMK if you can think of any outlets that would publish this.
xoxo, Hannah
When I was still renting a room in the sociology professor’s house, a friend of a friend of hers stayed with us for a few days. She was tall, striking, and dark haired. She could rock a red lip. She was from California. She bragged about knowing Rita Mae Brown, bragged about Rita Mae Brown's horse farm, and went on and on about queer feminist theory. The friend of a friend was gathering notes on the local evangelical Christian university for a supposed screenplay, as if my city was some sort of weird, sad zoo for her to visit. Nonetheless, I liked her aura and style, even if her personality was radically different from mine.
One night, I was eating dinner with the sociology professor and the friend of a friend at a hotel rooftop bar. I ate Brussels sprouts with bacon, then a fancy flatbread pizza with indiscriminate toppings. It was fine. We inevitably got on the subject of religion. The friend of a friend had stated before that she was Jewish and a lesbian. I mentioned I was also Jewish, added that my father is Jewish and my mother a Catholic.
“Oh, so you’re not really Jewish then," she said between bites of an overpriced leafy salad.
As if that sound loop hadn’t been playing in my ears since I was a kid. I felt the bitterness color my sharp face. A Jewish lesbian from Los Angeles telling me I wasn’t Jewish enough because of my Catholic mother. As if either of us would have survived the pogroms in 19th century Russia or Shoah or the entire history of the fucking world.
The strobe lights of negative thoughts flashing in my brain. This California Jew could fuck off, fuck right off the rooftop bar, and get the fuck out of my stupid Christian city. I hated her. I hated myself for hating another Jew. Mostly, I hated myself for feeling that self-violent urge that I had thought buried after long introspection.
So much for solidarity, I thought. The overpriced cocktail I ordered now sweating in my grasp. I continued to sit there with the professor and the friend of a friend until we split the dinner bill three-ways.
I tried, you know. I tried to be a good Jew. I attended services for years after my bat mitzvah unlike my fellow Jewish teenagers who began dropping off after fourteen, fifteen years of age. I wanted to be better than them. I wanted something that was mine that nobody else could claim to be. A good Jewish girl. And it worked, for a while.
The last time I walked the halls of the local synagogue was for my grandpa’s funeral service. I went back in time, looking at the mounted shadowboxes of old photos of the local Jewish community. Storefronts now parking lots or new businesses. At the end of the synagogue hallway, I find my grandfather caught in a black and white photograph. I can immediately tell it’s him by his large nose and ears. He looks like my father who looks like me. His dark eyes beaming underneath his yarmulke. He’s mid-talk, maybe reciting from his Torah portion. I can almost hear him seventy years on. I do not know what he is saying.
Does he know I no longer go to services? Is he ashamed of me, his eldest grandchild of his eldest child? Does he know that I visited him a few summers ago, when he was newly returned to the dirt. Can he hear me when I mutter “goyim” under my breath, living in the city that never truly accepted us?
What am I, still? The pang and the pull of my religious identity binds me to the binary: am I the good or bad Jewish girl? Does my personal definition matter to my enemies, hidden and in sight?
Every now and then, I think about that professor’s friend of a friend and her flat nonchalant statement. I wasn’t Jewish enough for her. But I’m Jewish enough for those who hate me. I’m Jewish enough for the people who love me.