I grew up in a Jewish home in a predominately Jewish town in a predominately Jewish suburb. I spent two hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday at Hebrew School, and attended High Holiday services with my family at our local Conservative synagogue. I was Jewish, of course, just as everyone around me seemed to be, but I could sense early on that the world of Judaism in which I existed was just a bit different from everyone else’s.
None of my friends, after all, had great aunts and uncles and grandparents with inky numbers scrawled on their forearms. I understood it from a young age as something that set my family apart—set me apart—and somehow marked us, too. We were a family of Holocaust survivors, and that was the lens through which, unbeknownst to me at first, every Biblical account I read and every prayer I learned was filtered. From a young age, my faith was bound to my family’s legacy; their stories my ritual text, their sorrows my liturgy.
[,,,]
I realized then that I had missed out on years of questions, stories, and, more acutely, years of a real relationship with my grandparents. All I had were my pieced-together memories, grainy home movie footage, and second-hand accounts of their experiences during the Holocaust. The lore I had been consumed by when I was younger had been largely cobbled together from what I knew about them at the time, snippets of stories of my grandmother surviving because of her skill as a seamstress, of cousins and uncles looking out for each other during the war and after. It wasn’t fair, my 17-year-old self angrily thought. There were so many more things I needed to know.
A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine
No comments:
Post a Comment