How does one write a family story, a memoir?
My grandparents left Turkey for America in 1924. The story is
that they got to America, raised their family, including my
mother, and she married and had me.
Is that the story? Or is the story that the ship that pulled
them to America, pulled me in its wake as well? If I want to
know myself, I must go back and trace their journey.
I know that my grandparents left Turkey for Hashem's sake,
and went to America for Hashem's sake. They left Turkey to
prevent their sons' conscription into the army. Conditions
were brutal and depraved. Hardened criminals were released
from jail directly into the army. It was a good place to get
killed and an impossible place in which to survive as a Jew.
My grandfather's younger brother David came home from the
army half-dead. My grandmother nursed him back to health.
Some families from their small town, Tikir Dag, had
immigrated to Seattle, taken up fishing businessess in the
salmon-rich Puget Sound. They needed a Rav. My grandfather
got wind that some of these people who had observed Shabbos
in Turkey transgressed it in America. He already understood
the potential for getting rich and the lure of money in
America. He understood that the New World constituted a kind
of newspeak that implied the obsolescence of the Old World,
the obsolescence of Hashem [ch'v].
My grandfather prepared himself. How? I imagine him on
deck of the ship that will carry them to America.
He brings the sefer entitled Going Out of
Egypt, written by the Abarbanel during the Jews'
expulsion from Spain. He brings the experience of earlier
exiles, other voices. This is not an entirely new experience.
The mythology surrounding America is not quite as magical.
Brought down to natural proportions, we can resist it. There
are prior exiles, there are paths worn by the feet of our
fathers and mothers; there is a map.
He studies the map to divine its key. He is a mariner putting
new maps over old ones. The originals bleed through. He
prepares himself with a worldview of America before he ever
arrives. In his hands, America shrinks to a small island,
as small as Turkey or Jerusalem. The only important
boundaries on the map are a Jew's moral alternatives.
He does not fling himself off the boat in wide-eyed
innocence, forgetting everything he knows. He does not cast
himself as an eager exile but as a faithful mariner entrusted
with the safety of the ship and its passengers. He is a
figure of heroic proportions.
I write almost endlessly of their journey. I reach back
into that journey for the code of my identity.
He tells his children they will be laughed at, mangling the
new language as immigrants do, the old accent an undertow
pulling at the syntax of the new one. He immunizes them
against caring too much what others think of them. I imagine
him telling them to pledge to Shabbat observance, that one
seventh of their lives will be free of materialism. From one
seventh, a man can divine the rest. He inoculates them
against the inevitable rush to blend in.
I imagine that among my grandmother's prized possessions are
some seeds in a velvet pouch. These are the seeds to her
identity that I will someday plant in words. I will take
everything I remember and all that I imagine to know her. Her
psalms, her recipes for Shabbat food, her recipes for
healing, her humor, her gentle distancing from the culture
around her.
She immunizes her children: it's not easy to be a Jew. She
does not mean the lack of funds they accept as part of the
rabbi's underpaid plight. She means the constant grooming of
one's identity. She means it is easy to slip out of one's
sense of self and into the prevailing sense of who you should
be. She means a Jew is a map- maker. The map is herself, a
constant redrawing of borders. There is always a danger that
the map-maker become obsessed with Terra Incognita.
Everywhere my grandparents put their feet is Terra Firma. My
mother and her family become reeds in a wave that cradles me.
The lullaby is Spanish Judeo [Ed. the Sefardic version of
Mama Loshon, not Yiddish, but Ladino.]
I am born into a distinct context but I still have to build
the walls of my structure, to insulate between the inside and
the outside, as I grow up in a Christian America in the
1950's. I have to find my voice. I have to find a way to
resist the rush to blend in. I am not an immigrant but I have
to make my own relationship to Shabbat. I have to keep myself
free.
It is a series of challenges to write past the complexities
that tend to silence us. Once I told a writing workshop
leader why I had not gotten further in my writing. I am too
religious for the secular Jewish writers, too Sefardic for
the mainstream, too female for the predominant male voice.
She said: Write against the friction. It will be difficult
but worthwhile.
Most of us know the framework of our family stories. The real
story may be imagined between the rungs of facts that gird
history.
Writing our ancestors heals an old wound that was created
with stereotypes of observant immigrant Jews, deprecated and
antiquated. To this day, there is no healthy positive Torah
observant character in the so- called canon of secular Jewish
literature. Every immigrant character succumbs. He dies at
the hands of his own wide-eyed innocence upon entering the
portals of America, or by his/her sad resignation to the
children's and grandchildren's indoctrination into the New
World. By design, Old World characters are a dying breed.
What are the children of the dying breed? Doomed to self
denigration.
It is ironic that this literature refuses to die. It is now
itself a tired song, an anachronism. In it, all the Orthodox
characters succumb to temptation as they did when they first
landed in America. Now the lure of secular knowledge, the
lure of sin brings them down.
But if there are no heroes in the secular literature
depicting those immigrants, exposing those observant
characters in order to expose their flaws, then how is it
that we are alive? How is it we are vibrant Jews alive in the
pulsating river of history, alive in the unfolding beauty of
tradition? How is it we are beautiful, our skin glowing with
life, our Shabbat strong?
Where are the heroes who breathed life into us? If there were
breaks in the generations, how did we find our way back?
We have to go back and retrieve our heroes, not just to
replace `theirs,' but to discover where we came from and to
enlarge and Enlarge and ENLARGE our own sense of who we may
be. When we hold up a mirror to our rich and sacred life, we
need to see figures of heroic proportions. We need them to
help us stretch and grow.
To help us understand who we are.
To reveal these heroes, we need powerful, compelling, fresh
language. An old story won't do.
"Sing unto Hashem a new Song."
