A Nice Jewish Home

Sue Eisenfeld pieces together the threads of her early years and discovers a richer Jewish foundation than she once believed.

Left: Sue Eisenfeld’s book Wandering Dixie. Right: The author at age five in the summer of 1976, getting ready for day camp at Camp Kadima outside Philadelphia, where she returned each year until she was twelve.

Editor’s Note: I first met Sue Eisenfeld more than five years ago, when I interviewed her for Publishers Weekly as she was promoting her book Wandering Dixie. I had no idea that one simple, routine question I asked during that interview would stay with her and get her thinking about how she was raised, and whether it was, in fact, Jewish at all. Over time, that question led her to a realization. Read this essay to see where it took her. — Howard Lovy

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Feh might have been the most frequently used word in my dad’s house. Oy vey iz mir was said often, mazel tov and keinehora, of course. We noshed, we kvetched, we schlepped, we nudged, we kvelled. We were zaftig, we were klutzy. We wiped shmutz, we rearranged our tchotchkes. We were told to watch our keppie, move our tuchus. Grandparents referred to each other as alter cockers. And, with a certain tone of voice that I understood even at a young age, my great aunts—the ladies with girdles and bosoms out to here, preparing chicken soup with the skins and the stomachs and kasha varnishkes with the schmaltz in their linoleum kitchen—might mention that so-and-so married a shiksa. All of these were the most common words ever to be spoken in a household, as far as I knew. In my later teens, my grandmother taught me some of her colorful curses: Gay kaken ofn yahm (go shit in the ocean) and ga zagen zuch (go saw yourself in half).

I didn’t know Yiddish was Yiddish. My relatives spoke, and I understood them in context. Only when my great aunts would engage in full-on foreign conversation did I know to ask them to “stop talking Jewish.”

I didn’t know Jewish was Jewish, either. My family did things that I don’t know why we did them that way, but we did. My stepmother taught me you always break one egg at a time into a separate bowl, to make sure it doesn’t have any blood in it, before adding it to the rest of whatever you are baking—what I’d learn later is because of kosher laws against mixing meat and dairy. So many of my relatives would “poo poo poo” or “God forbid” while clasping their hands and kissing them up to God, after you said something potentially horrible, a way to ask the Almighty to prevent the curse from happening. Likewise, they’d conjure, “From your lips to God’s ears,” if you mentioned something good that could happen, like meeting a nice Jewish boy. Or “Man plans, and God laughs,” when things went wrong. We attended brises, without explanation and where nobody flinched; every-other-weekend b’mitzvahs for a time, feeding-frenzy Jewish weddings, and the funerals.

Seared into my mind above all were the funerals: the family would either drive to Brooklyn and Long Island from my dad’s house in the suburbs or be taken from my mom’s apartment in town in black limousines up Broad Street in Philadelphia to a predominantly Black neighborhood, where all the old Jewish funeral homes still stood from the days of yore. I would notice that the men had stopped shaving and wore torn black ribbons on their suit coats. Then we’d head out to the faraway cemeteries where the rabbi would say more prayers and we’d each shovel dirt into the grave, and afterwards, if we weren’t showing our grief by eating casseroles in mourners’ upholstered living rooms, then we were sitting on hard, straight, wooden chairs with black, covered mirrors in cold shiva silence.

Beyond the funerals, there was a dark cloud that hung over the family at all times, too—a Holocaust cloud, an undeniable but often unspoken knowing that seemed to inform nearly all decisions of importance in life, a feeling that we needed to live for those that didn’t, that we needed to live wisely and do well in the world for those that couldn’t. We didn’t even have any Holocaust dead in the family, but the 6 million were ours by general ancestral connection, and I had been raised in my first few years by a Survivor—a nanny with dyed black hair and a harsh and pillowy face and with such a thick Polish accent that my parents worried I’d learn to speak like her. One of the first books my mother suggested reading during my elementary years in her quest to encourage me to read classics was Night by Elie Wiesel, a book that seared me.

As an adult, I couldn’t tell you I recognized this common trauma among Jews, but when my goyishe husband uttered offhandedly one night, as he walked up the stairs, that he was “hitting the showers,” I felt a jolt to my system, a painful inner shock. The showers! I repeated to myself in disbelief, The showers!? before coming to understand, once I asked him, that he was referring to the locker-room phrase used among athletes, not the gas chambers.

Did I come from a very Jewish home? No one had ever posed this question, so I had never gone through the exercise of recounting my early life with that lens.

Then I wrote a Jewish-ish book, and a journalist and book reviewer called me for an interview. On the phone, among the many other questions he asked was this: Were you raised in a very Jewish home?

I didn’t think before answering; it was so obvious: I hadn’t been bat mitzvahed. I didn’t speak Hebrew. I didn’t cultivate a Jewish life or family. I didn’t have a relationship with Israel. This distance from my religion was one of the fundamental facts that underscored my book, a journey through history wherein I traveled to small Jewish towns throughout the Deep South that once had large Jewish populations and then had seven Jews left, or one, or none. I attended Friday night services more times during my three years of travel-research than I had in my entire life. I attended conferences and took bus tours alongside more Jewish adults than I’d ever been around before. For the first time in my life, no stranger had trouble spelling or pronouncing my last name. “A non-observant Jewish woman comes closer to her religion” was part of the book’s promotional language.

The answer that rolled off my lips: No.

I was fifty years old. I hadn’t lived in my parents’ homes for more than thirty years, and I’d been living my independent life with my atheist WASP husband in a town much less Jewish than where I’d been raised. I didn’t have a strong Jewish community around me, where friends lived near and far throughout our metropolitan area. Most of my Jewish friends were married to non-Jews, and they did not raise the kids particularly Jewish. We didn’t have a Jewish newspaper in my community. We didn’t have a decent Jewish deli. There was only one synagogue in the county, and I didn’t know anyone who was part of the congregation. I didn’t regularly have anyone to celebrate the holidays with, and each year I debated whether I should go to work on Yom Kippur.

My Jewishness was like a diffuse gas, a particle here and a particle there, nearly unnoticed in the otherwise mostly Christian and secular world.

I hung up from the interview, but that question had pierced me. It attached itself to me, gnawed on me, followed me around for a few minutes and then a few weeks and then a few months, and now I’ve been looking back on that moment for years. Once the glimmers of my early life began resurfacing in my mind, I realized I had my origin story all wrong. I realized how deeply I had buried or denied or ignored my Jewish identity, one most definitely cultivated at home.

As my great-uncle Freddie from Brooklyn once said about the religious observance of his own Old Country family, “We were Jewish; we weren’t Jewish.” Sure, my immediate family was not very religious. In my primary home with my mother in the city, we didn’t do candles on Friday night, and we didn’t do synagogue. But when staying at my dad’s house out in the suburbs, I would sometimes go with him, my stepmother, and younger sister to the family services at the Reform temple for the High Holy Days—just one service, not too early, not too long, and then we’d have a big meal at their house that my stepmother had prepared for days. My dad and stepmother—good eaters—observed all Jewish holidays that involved making food at home: a big Seder with a nursery-school Haggadah and matzo ball soup with kneidlach that I loved; a big Rosh Hashanah meal with kugels, et cetera, and Yom Kippur break-fasts with bagels and cream cheese and all the white fishes and chopped animal parts I could never stomach that the old people ate. At Purim, my stepmom took me to the kids’ synagogue party and taught me how to make hamantaschen with apricot preserves and prunes. At my mom’s apartment, she turned on the electric Hanukkah lights in the window facing the street, gave me small gifts every night for eight nights, and fulfilled the Jewish motherly duty of deep worrying all year round. She instilled in me the Jewish values of education and charity, and she offered me options for a more Jewish life if I wanted it.

But I had no desire to be more Jewish. I wanted to be like everyone else at my public school, or no one in particular—but not something observable. I had many Jewish friends, but I didn’t see them as outwardly different from anyone else. I certainly did not want to extra-hang out with the Jewish kids I didn’t know by joining BBYO, as my mother suggested, nor going to Hebrew school, nor studying to become bat mitzvah, as she had offered and as most of my Jewish friends did. Aside from the benefits of the food, Judaism was a set of rules set down by patriarchy (although I didn’t know that word yet), and thus I inherently didn’t want to follow them; this I knew in my core, even from a young age, and it’s probably why my independently minded, mold-breaking, divorced, working, feminist mother didn’t take to the religion too strongly either. I didn’t like being told what to do—not by my mother, not by my father, and certainly not by a bunch of sages and rabbis from thousands of years ago.

The religion didn’t rub off.

And yet, as my middle age came on, I noticed a clear feeling of affinity when meeting new people who were Jewish. We were already familiar in so many ways. I bristled when non-Jewish friends remarked that the ever-present Christmas trappings and celebrations were non-Christian and unrelated to religion, and I felt slighted when no one understood my different perspective. I felt bewildered after the Hamas attacks when none of my non-Jewish friends engaged me in thoughtful conversations about the nuances of feelings that could exist together in a single moment. Above all, I felt a deep connection with the ancestors, a thread running through me all the way back to Abraham: a timeline embedded within me of all the thousands of years of wandering and expulsion, an unyielding commitment to a practice and a culture that others have tried to stamp out, that the diverse people of the world have fiercely held on to, modified, hid, buried, waited for, pretended for, and gave their lives for. I remember their strength, their insistence on survival.

But these heftier beliefs came later. The most Jewish experience of my young life occurred before I even had an awareness of whether anyone else around me was Jewish: I attended Jewish day camp for eight weeks every summer, for at least six years, starting in first grade. Led by honey-skinned people with names like Shoshana, we sang Israeli folk songs in Hebrew while sitting cross-legged in the grass in our terry-cloth gym shorts. We clapped our hands and danced with arms hooked together under the mid-summer sun. We all came from homes and families where great-grandparents had, unbeknownst to us, escaped pogroms, where great aunts spoke Yiddish and made overcooked meat with mushy vegetables, where grandmas with soft skin spoiled us with favorite foods like bialys or rugelach and coffee candies, and where parents sent their kids off to camp every day (or to overnight camp) for two months. We were the kids who never even knew that we grew up never eating a ham sandwich. We did oneg shabbat every Friday afternoon, with grape juice and bread and blessings, and we passed around the challah, each of us breaking off a piece for ourselves and then sharing with our neighbor while wishing them, “Shabbat shalom.”

And then the school buses would come and take us campers back to the city, and I’d be imbued with the words and music of the prayers that I would remember for the rest of my life, and all the Jewishness that formed the bedrock of my life that I never even knew has been holding me up.

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Sue Eisenfeld’s essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, National Parks Traveler, The Forward, Washingtonian, Blue Lyra Review, and many other magazines and literary journals, and her essays have been listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays. She is the author of Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal, and Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South. You can find her at www.sueeisenfeld.com

Five tiny delights

1. Drinking coffee while reading the newspaper (hard copy!) in the morning

2. Doing outdoor yoga

3. When my cat jumps in my lap

4. Eating a great sandwich from a place that really knows how to do sandwiches (e.g., Philadelphia or New York)

5. Taking a hot shower after a long, hard hike

Five tiny Jewish delights

1. Eating a challah that my sister makes - onion and poppyseed, above all

2. Visiting old Jewish cemeteries that are off the beaten path

3. Learning Yiddish curses

4. Gathering with my friend group of self-proclaimed “Bad Jews” for holiday meals; among us all, someone knows the right prayers, songs, and rituals

5. Reading Jewish novels and cookbooks to learn stories about the Old Country