Meeting Janet: My Jewish Love Story

Howard Wach recalls the summer of 1989, when an academic trip to Oxford led to an unexpected romance that would change his life.

Editor’s Note: With all the negative news out there, I thought I’d take Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to share something different—a love story. In this piece, Howard Wach recounts how an academic trip to Oxford unexpectedly led him to his beshert. — Howard Lovy

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Howard Wach with Janet Rogow in 1989.

I didn’t go off to England in the summer of 1989 to meet a Jewish woman and fall in love. I traveled to read manuscripts in the archives of an Oxford college. I was a historian, and I went for work, not for love.

Happy ending alert: Two years later, I married the woman. Within another four years, we produced a son and a daughter, both now self-possessed, independent, resourceful adults. We’ve weathered some storms, but we’re still together, still in love, still ticking after thirty-six years. I found my bashert, and she found me, in a most unlikely place. I am grateful beyond measure to this day.

This is how it started.

***

I was thirty-four that summer. I lived in Potsdam, a small college town in the “North Country,” the remote slice of New York state that cuts across the Saint Lawrence River valley from Lake Champlain to Lake Ontario. I had just finished my first year teaching history and “Great Books” classes to Clarkson University’s engineering and business students. Few of them had any interest in what I was hired to teach, but then, few academic historians can choose where they land. I was a suburban Long Island boy with a strong preference for city life. I arrived in Potsdam with a Brandeis University PhD after a decade in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a long stretch of graduate school and itinerant part-time teaching.

My scuffling, semi-bohemian existence in Cambridge flipped between academic apprenticeship and late-night partying. When I wasn’t writing, in a seminar, or teaching a World History class somewhere in the greater Boston academic universe, I hung out at “The 1369,” a jazz club where my pal Michael tended bar. For a few years, wonderful music spilled out of that grimy, dilapidated Inman Square bar.

“Jazz is the music we’ll hear in heaven,” another pal once said. I’ve got my doubts about heaven, but not the soundtrack. Potsdam didn’t have a jazz club or much else I had taken for granted. I had never lived anywhere so rural, so isolated, or so staggeringly cold. Winter mornings at 10 below zero and the engine block heaters you plugged in overnight were features, not bugs.

In the weeks before my summer trip, I dated a local girl named Lynnette, who I met in a shoe store where she helped me buy the hiking boots I needed to survive the long winter months. I liked Lynnette. She was smart, pretty, vivacious, and sheltered by a small-town Catholic upbringing. I was the first Jew she ever knew personally. I felt her warming to me and managed to stifle the question lurking behind our pleasant outings: What would we talk about for very long? I didn’t want to educate her, so to speak, and I couldn’t imagine what she could teach me. Myopic, I know. Condescending, definitely. I plead guilty.

That was my new life in a strange place when I flew off to London. I made my way from Heathrow to Paddington Station, caught a train to Oxford, and arrived at Manchester College. I settled into a rented room that faced a lovely quadrangle bordered by ornate Neo-Gothic buildings and climbed stairs to dusty archives each day.

***

Ok, maybe I lied. Or stretched the truth. Yes, of course I was looking for love. Not in the dreamy yearning sense. More like a submerged undercurrent of feeling. The undercurrent—a fantasy, really—reliably surfaced whenever I traveled—a smart, attractive, available woman appearing next to me at the airport, or in a cozy pub, or on a train. A mixture of sexual desire, emotional need, and my good-Jewish-boy Long Island conditioning, the fantasy instructed me to get on with it, to pair up for a long haul.

I’d been through three serious but shorter hauls in my twenties and early thirties, two-to-three-year trips through the cycle of every love affair: ecstasy, agony, and all the intermediate stops. One woman was Jewish, and two were not. Sometimes, that mattered—a voice asking me to gauge something I couldn’t easily define. Sometimes, the voice faded to a whisper I could ignore. After all, I started two steps up the mobility and assimilation ladder. I was a grandchild of immigrants who fled Eastern Europe, a child of striving, Americanizing Sinatra and Yankees fans. Baby-boomer Jews like me had all kinds of options. Endogamy was a choice, not a commandment. But love was pushed to the periphery when I flew off to England that summer. I was full of early-career ambitions and still adjusting to the alien frequencies of that northern latitude when I arrived in Oxford.

***

Each day I climbed the stairs and carefully combed through fragile manuscripts. In the evenings, I retreated to my room to write. Toward the end of my stay, I was eating dinner in the college refectory when I noticed a group of Americans chatting over their meal. A woman sitting among them caught my eye. She had a head full of dark brown curls, flashing brown eyes, and a quick, bright smile. I watched her stand and walk across the room to refill a water glass. Everything else checked out, too. She stood tall and erect, her hips swaying in tight jeans below full breasts and a narrow waist, somehow both slender and ample. A hormonal charge blasted through me, the blood rush of immediate attraction.

I didn’t know it then, but the day before, she had clocked me while I walked down Holywell Street. Later I learned she carried a premonition to Oxford, a certainty that someone was hurtling toward her. She saw me before I ever laid eyes on her, gasped and said to herself, “Oh my God, there he is. That’s the man I’m gonna marry.” Who can explain these things?

I have a distinctive way of folding t-shirts. I’m careful about it; I don’t want wrinkles. One of the Americans chatted with me in the College laundry as I folded away. She explained that she and her colleagues were attending a seminar and invited me to join them at dinner. Later that day she told the brown-haired woman she should meet me and that my laundry technique signaled strong potential. I suppose any man careful enough to fold wrinkle-free t-shirts is good raw material.

So, the stars had aligned. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the brown-haired woman across the table that evening. I maneuvered toward her after dinner. Not a difficult move, since she was maneuvering toward me. Her name was Janet. She came from the Bronx and taught high-school English in a Westchester County school district. She and her seminar colleagues were studying Eliot and Hardy. We strolled from the refectory to the grassy quadrangle, holding our coffee cups. Busts of Victorian clergymen lined the corridor that surrounded the quad, a solemn marble procession of stern-faced, shaggy-haired heads and shoulders. “Where do you suppose I can buy one of these,” she asked as we admired them. I let a beat pass. “Busts Are Us,” I said. Her smile bloomed into laughter. Timing is everything in love.

***

She invited me to join a few of her seminar colleagues in her room for after-dinner socializing and offered to play music through her small Walkman speakers. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I only have jazz.” Well, as Levon Helm sang in The Band’s classic tune “Up on Cripple Creek,” “that just gave my heart a throb, to the bottom of my feet.” Jazz lovers understand that you can’t speak unless you listen. They know how hard work, cultivated skill, improvisation, and collaboration create freedom. These are precious human qualities. I already knew I wanted to bed this woman. Now I wanted more.

We had one hours-long date, a leisurely stroll through Oxford to the Ashmolean Museum. The terraced houses reminded her of her Bronx neighborhood. Later, we lingered outside in a beer garden on a perfect summer evening, the long English dusk softly surrounding us. We talked and talked and began sharing our pasts in a tumble of conversation over pints of malty brown ale—Hobgoblin, it was called. We learned that we both knew and loved that great American music and the pleasures of smoking weed.

She told me about her childhood, her father’s death two years before, that after two serious affairs dissolved, she embraced her single status, bought an eighteenth-floor studio apartment in a Riverdale high-rise overlooking the Hudson River Palisades, and dedicated herself to her work and finishing a master’s degree. I told her things I seldom talked about with anyone: youthful adventures in spiritual searching, my miserable time in high school, a humiliating teenage stolen-car escapade. Halfway through our meal, I crossed the patio to retrieve napkins and turned to look at her. A half-smile creased her cheeks. Her brown eyes bored through me, measuring, estimating, appraising. I felt another flush, an erotic depth charge, when I registered her gaze and that inviting half-smile.

That we were both Jewish was immediately clear. We could see it in each other’s faces and hear it in our voices. We began learning how closely related were the worlds that nurtured us. Our parents grew and matured in Bronx neighborhoods through a depression and the “big war.” Mine decamped for a new Nassau County suburb in 1959; hers remained in a 1960s Bronx coop apartment. As children, we both heard Yiddish as our grandparents’ everyday language and parents’ secret code. Our fathers were veterans and City College graduates who climbed into the middle class. Mine sold “linens and domestics” to Macy’s and neighborhood shops; hers taught chemistry at the High School of Music and Art in Harlem. We were cut from the same Jewish cloth.

Neither of us had grown up especially observant. I survived a suburban orthodox Hebrew schooling and a classic ‘60s bar mitzvah in the temple catering hall; she had no formal religious instruction (though her brothers did) and sometimes attended a Reform synagogue (a problem when catty neighborhood girls derided her as “not really Jewish,” a sixth-grade humiliation she never forgot). We inherited the Jewish-American world of High Holidays, Passover, Hanukkah, and the occasional Shabbat. Everything else was more or less negotiable.

Years later, raising our children compelled us to make those decisions. But that night in an Oxford pub, we were busy discovering each other, two New York Jews drawn together. Improbably. Miraculously.

Would it have mattered if one of us hadn’t been Jewish? Perhaps. Would instant attraction have clobbered us so powerfully? Who can say? We weren’t new to the game. Neither of us had restricted ourselves to the tribe in the past. Did it matter that we both had a taste for herring smothered in onions and cream sauce?

That we understood the same fifty Yiddish words? That we felt the importance of holding a Seder each spring? That we knew, instinctively, certain things would never need explaining? Was all that more important than the thrill I felt when her eyes dissected me across a crowded pub? More important than the intimacies we shared over our first meal together? Or were those Jewish signs the seal, the affirmation, the promise that opened us to each other and made my heart beat faster?

After dinner that night, we walked back to the college and arrived at the stairs that led to her second-floor room overlooking the quadrangle. It was that awkward first-date moment when you lean in to mark and gauge the occasion. As I started my approach, she stuck her hand out for a firm shake, then bolted up the stairs. It was laughably incongruous, that handshake. It couldn’t short-circuit the current passing between us. I smiled to myself as I walked back to my room.

The next evening, we met again and walked slowly around the perimeter of the quadrangle. We got to the stairs, and this time she invited me in.

***

“When will I see you again?”

“I’m coming home in a few weeks. But first I’m taking a road trip with my brother.” The brother lived and worked in London. They planned to drive north through the Lake District and into Scotland.

We sat quietly on a bench in the quadrangle. We had made love the night before. I was leaving later that day. I had just enough time with her to feel a vital power, a magnetic field of emotional and erotic energy. We had found something essential to ourselves in each other. Boarding the train to London and Heathrow, I realized that my travel fantasy had come to life.

I called Lynnette when I returned to the North Country. Before I could say what had to be said, she launched into an account of her time since I left. I could hear a new familiarity, an enthusiasm, happiness that I was back. I cringed. I didn’t want to hurt her more than necessary, so I ripped off the band aid.

“I met someone in England, Lynnette, and I think it’s serious.” Silence on the other end for a minute.

“Really? What does that mean? You don’t want to see me?”

“I don’t think so. I think that would be a mistake.”

“A mistake? I’m a mistake?” Indignant, her voice breaking.

“No, no, I don’t mean that at all. I’m really sorry, Lynnette. I just know this is the right thing to do.”

I could hear her sniffling. “The right thing for you,” she said. I had no answer for that because it was true.

***

I thought about Janet constantly. I could feel her gaze in the beer garden. I replayed the research trip that blossomed into romance, conjured the smell of her neck, the tingling chemical affinity. She told me later that she felt bereft—she used that word—when I left her in Oxford.

I knew her brother’s name, put my research skills to work, and found his London phone number. Now, this was 1989. No internet, no cell phones, no email, no texting, no WhatsApp. It was landline or forget it. I called the number and asked the man who answered for Janet. “Oh Janet, it’s your boyyyfriend,” I heard him sing out.

“Hi there. How did you find this number,” she asked me.

“Oh, it wasn’t hard. I’m a PhD, after all.” I got right to the point. “When will you be back?” She gave me the date and the flight information.

“You can meet me at the airport if you want.” An invitation, a challenge.

“I’m kind of far from the airport.” She was silent. I quickly recovered. “Okay, I think I can do that.” A profound understatement of fact—I was 350 miles away—and intent, since I had never felt so instantly and completely connected to anyone. I marked her return on my calendar and made plans to visit my parents on Long Island to be within easy distance of JFK.

The day finally arrived. August in New York. Hot, steamy, the sun burning through a heavy white sky, the airport traffic slow and sticky, like the weather. I found the right arrival gate—you could walk right up in those pre-9/11 days—and waited. Passengers began streaming into the terminal. When she walked through the gate I caught my breath. She wore a calf-length fitted dress, the material clinging to the curves of her body. She saw me waiting, waiting, waiting, and smiled.

We made love in her bed that night. “I’m home,” I thought. I’m home.

Howard Wach with Janet Rogow.

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Howard Wach is a semi-retired academic who spent twenty-five good years in several roles at the City University of New York. He wrote and published articles on history and educational technology in various journals and now writes creative nonfiction and short stories. His recent work has appeared in the Palisades Review and the Jewish Writing Project.

Five tiny delights

• The first morning cup of strong French Roast coffee

• Reading a novel in the sunroom of our country house.

• A good jazz piano solo

• Swimming laps in my own lane

• Thinking of my children living their adult lives

Five tiny Jewish delights

• Remembering the taste of my grandmother’s rugelach

• Walking down Second Avenue and imagining my grandfather’s life

• A good Catskills joke

• The feeling of a tallit around my shoulders

• Chanukah candles lighting a wintertime window