Butchblog

We were not an observant Jewish family. Rarely went to synagogue, although we did observe most of the High Holidays, and Hanukah (which was our substitute for Christmas). My father had been raised Orthodox, but had given it up before I was alive. Maybe it happened in college, or in his South Philadelphia neighborhood, where, he told me, he often had to run home from school to avoid getting beaten up by the Italian and Irish kids.

            If I thought about religion at all as a kid, it was mostly in terms of not acting “too Jewish.” Like our parents, we children were supposed to fit in. Be Americans. Hide. Kids in school would sometimes ask me what my “nationality” was. I never knew quite how to answer. Was it Russian? Hungarian? American? When I asked my mother about it, she said. “Ignore them! Don’t you know what they’re really asking?” I shook my head. “They want to know if you’re a Jew.”

            I think that was the beginning of my realizing I was not a “real” American. And never would be. To this day, I still feel that way. Maybe now more so than ever, what with Trump’s storm troopers ripping people off the streets.  I’ve made an uneasy peace with this feeling of foreignness, and feel relatively safe. Still I always carry around that sense of differentness, of being the other. The sense of someday being told that I was no longer welcome here.