August 23, 2010 · 7:34 am

A Jew by Choice

by Anna Gersman (Schomberg, Ontario, Canada)

Doubts, fears and uncertainty have plagued my life and the choices I have made, including my decision to become a Jew. I was brought up an atheist, knowing nothing of God, prayer or ritual. I feared religion and avoided it. I could not understand its purpose. Growing up, my ears were filled with jeering words of ridicule for those who did have faith. “Religious people were weak;” “Religion has caused all the wars and problems of the world;” “There is no scientific proof or rational thought to verify religion;” “Look at the millions murdered in the name of religion,” I was told. As a child, places of worship filled me with dread. The great emptiness of godlessness clouded my childhood. I was firmly exiled from God.

The conversion of an atheist is not easy. The long process, for me, was a series of small steps, gently guided by the encouragement and patience of those who loved me, my family and friends. I found my way cautiously with great fear and distrust.

The initial strands of my journey began when I met my Jewish sailor husband in the early 1980s. I fell in love with his warmth, humour and kind spirit.  We sought adventure and together one glorious September, we set sail for the Caribbean in our sailboat. Looking back, I wonder what guided me, where my inner faith and strength come from that helped me push off from the shore. We were not of the sea. He was a Jewish boy from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I was from Newmarket, a small town in Ontario.  Together we sailed out onto that massive expanse of water, enveloped by its surging power and energy. As we crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Bermuda, our world was endless sky and sea. We felt God’s breath blow across the surface of the ocean, softly, gently at times and then fiercely.

Caught in our first storm at sea, I was terrified of capsizing and being pulled down into the cold dark depths of the Atlantic. I did not know how to pray, and yet I prayed with a desperate conviction for survival. I felt God’s presence many times out on the ocean, in the power of the universe, in the vast array of stars, in the schools of dolphins leaping in the moonlight. I realized I could not feel exiled from God at sea, and after several ocean voyages, I was no longer an atheist. I knew there was a God and yet I was a long way from formal religious practice.

My husband was a secular Jew, and we enjoyed the social part of being with family and friends during the Jewish holidays. My mother-in-law accepted me as a non-Jew, regularly encouraging me to “just have a baby dear.” Her words were wise because in fact the miracle of childbirth brought me significantly closer in my journey towards Judaism.

When my oldest daughter was five-years-old, prompted by discussions at school, she asked me “Mommy, what are we?” Those words sent a hollow echo reverberating though my godless soul. I sensed my duty as a mother was to understand my own spiritual identity and pass this on to my children. I had learned over the years to prepare the traditional menu for the Jewish High Holidays. I could make chicken soup and knaidlach (matzoh balls), but I did not understand the rituals or historical significant of the holidays. I spoke to my husband about our children’s sense of uncertainty about their religious identity, but he could not fully comprehend the void I experienced. He had an unshakable confidence in his own heritage, a strong sense of belonging and identity. He had difficulty seeing the yearning and bewilderment in our child, but he took her hand and went to find a synagogue to attend High Holy Day services.

For me, the goal of parenting is to create an independent, capable person. My understanding of the goal of conversion is to create an independent confident Jew, eager to explore further. For my children’s sake, I knew I had to convert. I told my husband and he looked at me tenderly saying, “I have waited a long time to hear you speak those words.” I felt privileged to have married someone, who stood by me while I stumbled on a personal journey towards faith. We joined Temple Kol Ami, a Reform synagogue. Our children were enrolled in Saturday morning Hebrew school, and gradually over time the unfamiliar became familiar.

I cannot describe the joy I felt learning the Torah stories alongside my children. The stories of Noah and the flood, of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and the exodus from Egypt, came alive for me as I slowly painted my interior world with their ancient symbols of hope, redemption and forgiveness. The first few times we attended services my husband wept as emotions long buried in childhood flooded back. The Hebrew prayers and melodies he had long forgotten came back with new significance and meaning as he sat with his family in shul. It was wonderful for me to witness his reconnection to Judaism, and his experience helped me feel secure in my decision to become a Jew.

During my conversion interview the rabbi asked me, “Why do you want to become Jewish?” “For my children,” I replied. “I want them to know God.” He smiled and his eyes twinkled as he said “usually we want people to choose Judaism for themselves, but this is a good place to start.” At first I struggled to be part of the synagogue world; I was uncomfortable with the prayers, fearful I would do or say the wrong thing. The rituals of Shabbat drew me in like a moth to a flickering flame. Gradually, as I stumbled through the Shabbat blessings each week, I came to know the peace that Shabbat brings.

At synagogue services I wrap myself in my tallit (prayer shawl) designed by my husband and painted by my daughters, feeling the shelter of God’s love when I draw it around myself. I have learned the great comfort of communal worship, being led in prayer as though through a beautiful garden. Now, I feel safer to ask questions as I continue to search for my own way of being Jewish. The loving ancient words of the Torah and the siddur (prayer book) bring me solace and comfort in this fast paced high tech world.

At my daughters’ B’nei Mitzvot the rabbi spoke to them, stating “our hope is that you will continue in the path of Jewish learning.” I hear that universal message and know that their journey, like mine is ongoing. I hope one day to visit Israel, and to chant Torah, but for now I listen for the sound of God’s voice as often as I can in all that I do.

It is not easy to convert from nothing, to construct a religious life without a solid foundation set in childhood. Each person undertakes their own unique and personal journey towards faith. I have been fortunate.  I chose a loving Jewish partner who waited patiently for me to make my choice; lucky, to have chosen a shul and congregation accepting and tolerant of differences; lucky, to have found a rabbi able to encourage and welcome the unaffiliated, the disenfranchised, and do the holy work of outreach. As we read in synagogue, “Prayer may not bring water to parched fields, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city, but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.” (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mishkan T’Filah – Reform prayer book.)
___
Anna Gersman grew up in a large family in King City Ontario. She has traveled and sailed extensively in South Africa and the Caribbean with her husband and children. She has been a nurse for over 20 years. She is currently working with seniors as a case manager in home care and as a camp nurse at URJ Camp George during the summers. Anna has been a member of Temple Kol Ami, a Reform congregation in Thornhill, Ontario since 1997. There she found a spiritual home, encouraged to develop every aspect of Jewish life. Anna is currently working on a memoir of her journey to find her Jewish voice. She lives in Schomberg, Ontario near Toronto with her husband Sydney, and their teenage daughters Ariel and Liora.

This piece is reprinted with permission of the author from Living Legacies –  A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women, Volume II, edited by Liz Pearl,  PK Press: Toronto, Canada, 2010.  For more information about this publication or to order copies please visit http://at.yorku.ca/pk/ll.htm

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August 16, 2010 · 11:21 am

On Expectations and Commitment

By Esther D. Kustanowitz ( Los Angeles , CA )

I believe that commitment is commitment. Even more so, I view matrimony as a commitment that is inviolable. But recently I was reminded that not everyone has the same barometer for what is considered commitment. I had dinner with a potential business associate, a married man with children. Suddenly, over the course of dinner, our business seemed to veer into funny business. First came a few compliments, most of them professionally related. Then he asked to hold my hand. I told him no, and that he had made me uncomfortable, but that didn’t stop him. He told me it was simple affection and I was over-interpreting it, but I think my yeshiva day school background spoke up at that moment. Years of learning about drawing fences around areas of temptation, creating moats and walls that kept sin in the barely visible distance, suddenly made sense. But in that more compromising position, in that moment of a potential breach in a protective fence, I was uncomfortable.

Since that hot summer night, I have wondered what I’d done to convey that there was possibility there, or whether I overreacted at a display of affection that perhaps, as he kept claiming, wasn’t what I perceived it to be. I pondered how similar the actions of hand-shaking and handholding were, and tried to revisit the events from alternate perspectives. I put myself in his shoes, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he was expressing an intended affection-minus-sexual-desire only to be rejected. I stepped into his wife’s loving and trusting shoes, and wondered how I would feel if my husband, the father of my children, was in a foreign city and held the hand of his younger, female, single potential business partner over dinner and wine.

Maybe this kind of thing happened all the time for him and his wife. If so, perhaps it wasn’t a violation of their commitment, and therefore, strictly speaking, within their understanding of morality. Or maybe they had an open relationship that permitted liaisons on foreign soil. I put on my yeshiva girl glasses and thought to myself, this is why people are shomer negiah, and don’t touch members of the opposite sex until they are married to one; because “good touch” can turn to “uncomfortable touch” while a wineglass empties. But regardless of any subjective moral codes or extenuating circumstances between him and his wife, for me this action on his part represented a crack in their commitment. And that made me uncomfortable.

I believe in honest communication, and have high standards once commitment is proclaimed. And because I know not everyone mirrors my constant commitment to commitment and communication, I try to keep my expectations (and sexpectations) in check, while keeping my standards high. It’s a hard line to walk, and this line is probably part of what has kept me single. This is something that I, and probably other single Jews, struggle with, and is sometimes categorized among the frustrated as “unrealistic expectations.”

Where are our models for contemporary Jewish dating? Maybe we need a liturgy that gives us the words to praise the divine elements of dating, or a Shulchan Arukh (code of Jewish law) that instructs us how to behave. Every Passover we read about being commanded to “see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt ,” about identifying personally with an ancient story and people. By seeing ourselves there, we can begin to understand what their lives were like and the choices they made.

I believe that by keeping in our hearts the injunction—whether divine, rabbinic, or personal—to treat others as we would like to be treated, and by clearly communicating our intentions, we elevate our dating behavior to a higher ethical level. We—or at least I—can only hope that at the end of the dating process, this approach will yield a more concerned, communicative, and ethical partner to stand at our side as we conquer the world. To put it another way, by elevating the way we see each other while we’re seeing each other, we will more fully be able to see ourselves.

Esther D. Kustanowitz writes, edits and consults on matters relating to Jewish life, pop culture, dating and relationships, and online social media. Esther wrote “First Person Singular,” a singles column in New York ’s The Jewish Week for more than four years. She currently blogs at My Urban Kvetch (http://estherkustanowitz.typepad.com/)and at Jdaters Anonymous (http://jdatersanonymous.com/). She also consults for the ROI Community, an international network of young Jewish innovators in their 20s and 30s, and has been known to teach improv. She lives in Los Angeles , CA .

Reprinted from Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices, Vol. 4: Sex and Intimacy, © 2010, edited by Elliot N. Dorff and Danya Ruttenberg, published by The Jewish Publication Society with the permission of the publisher. Available from the publisher at http://www.jewishpub.org/product.php?id=351.

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August 9, 2010 · 7:40 am

Memories of East New York

by Joyce Halpern (Cherry Hill, NJ)

Having been raised as a Jew in a gentile neighborhood, I was delighted with the vibrant Jewish community where my husband grew up.  We visited his parents in this neighborhood frequently during the late 1950’s and 1960’s when I was in my twenties. Family members and neighbors told stories about their immigrant experiences as children.  Some talked about “the old country” and their good fortune to become Americans. My mother-in-law took me shopping and demonstrated some of the accepted folkways in the neighborhood.  Others traditions I learned from family gatherings and from my own observations as I walked the streets and mingled with the people.  I knew this unique, cohesive society would some day disappear, so I made some notes so I would not forget it.  From these notes, I present a loving memory of a vanished neighborhood.

Some of the Jews who had come to America as children in the 1920’s later established a community in a section of East New York.  They were garment and factory workers or small shop owners.  Having left the tenements years ago, they now lived in long, two-family duplexes.  Modest synagogues were nestled in all neighborhoods so children could walk to Hebrew school. Streets were lively with walkers because walking was the primary mode of transport.  Small shops, owned by men who formerly made their living from pushcarts, nudged each other on streets, their signs with bold Hebrew letters competing for attention. Clothes, bolts of fabric, and pots were displayed outside under the careful eyes of the shlepper. “Come inside, Mrs.,” he would call.  “I have bargains.”  Customers entered the store and the drama of negotiation began. Buyer and seller played their expected role until a price was struck.  Bargaining was conducted in Yiddish.  English was too passive a language for such an important struggle.

Many of the homes in East New York had porches where children gathered.  Some adolescents sought a more sophisticated venue.  The corner candy store was their salon.  Quiet chess players or combatants arguing about politics could also adorn porches. Extended family members lived within walking distance.  Children could show up at any relative’s house for an after school snack.  Relatives gathered frequently. They might play cards, debate union activities or just visit, but they always ate a six course meal.  So much togetherness was a mixed bag.  Everyone had an Aunt Sadie who found dirt in corners of houses and children who were too thin.  “He is tsu din,” she scolded a mother.  “Why don’t you make him eat?”

Cooking and baking were serious, time-consuming jobs for housewives.  When they met each other, they often greeted one another, not with “Hello,” but rather “So, what are you cooking for supper tonight?” Preparing for any holiday was always a frenetic activity. Women jostled for attention at the kosher butcher shop vying for the plumpest chicken.  Then it was off to the fish monger to select a swimming carp.  Grinding the flesh to make gefilte fish was an onerous task which the women did willingly every holiday. The traditional dishes they cooked were an essential part of every holiday experience.  On Rosh Hashanah the air in the neighborhood  was layered with the delicious smell of chicken soup coming from so many homes, yet another link in communal joy.

The High Holidays were an opportunity for neighbors to display their growing prosperity in America.  How proudly they walked to the synagogue wearing clothing they could never have afforded in Europe.  This was a once-a-year show, however, because garment workers had lay off times over which they had no control.  Solid financial stability would only come in the next generation of their college-educated children.

Joyce Halpern enjoyed a long career as a teacher but has always been a writer.  She  was contributing editor to an art magazine and an art newspaper, and, as a free lance writer, her articles have appeared in various Philadelphia and New Jersey publications.  Recording her observations and feelings in both prose and poetry has been a life long necessity.

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August 2, 2010 · 8:35 am

Shiva

by Leslie LaskinReese (San Rafael, CA)

Lori asked if we would sit shiva and  I said no, who would come that knows Mom?  That was my knee jerk reaction.  Raised a Jew but not trained a Jew.  We never sat shiva growing up. I didn’t even know what it looked like when I was young.  But the day after Mom died I realized I needed to sit shiva.  When I told Dad he sounded almost relieved.  Or maybe I was imagining things.

We are Reform Jews.  Orthodox Jews sit shiva for seven days.  That’s what shiva means: seven.  Reform Jews sit shiva for three days.  I don’t know who picked three.  Officially shiva begins as soon as the funeral finishes.  I checked in with my friend who is studying to be a rabbi and she said shiva can begin when I need it to begin.  So my shiva began on Sunday.  My dear dear friends brought lunch and dinner and spent time with me.  They let me talk and they listened.  They made me sit down and they fed me.  They gave me room to breathe.

Last night and tonight we had a service at home.  Our wonderful cantor and my friend who is almost a rabbi officially, and is clearly a rabbi in every other way, led beautiful services and gave me room to pray and remember and cry surrounded by friends who will wrap themselves around me and my family.  It gave me a place to begin.  I stopped holding my breath.  And I told them about Mom.

So yes, I did sit shiva Lori, and it was amazing.  Thanks for asking.

Leslie LaskinReese is a writer and restaurant designer living in Northern California.  Leslie’s writing can be found at something’s burning (http://leslieedie.wordpress.com/) where this piece first appeared.  When she is not writing, Leslie is either designing restaurants  or tending her family.  Someday, Leslie will have the courage to seek print publication for one of her many writing projects.

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July 26, 2010 · 7:34 am

Digging to China

by Roslyn Bernstein (New York, NY)

Summer 1951

We wore aluminum dog tags with our religion stamped on them, so that a stranger would know where to bury us after an atom bomb attack. It was the fifties, a time when television was just beginning to appear in the East End. We lived in the West End, near our Lady of the Benevolent Sacred Heart Church, a wooden building with beige stucco walls and a stained glass window of Christ on the cross facing the Atlantic Ocean.

We were the outsiders, longing to belong, the only kids on the block who had never been inside the church, although we often stood by the heavy oak door peering in. Jewish girls didn’t attend Sacred Heart Church and they most definitely did not go to the Sisters of Charity School.

Joanne and I lived on the same block and we ate lunch together every day at school, unwrapping the silver foil on our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a table far from the other girls. Her father, Arthur, was a lawyer who was proud to be an atheist. Her mother lit Friday night candles, but never went to synagogue.

My parents ate clam fritters on Friday night. They sent me to the neighborhood elementary school, where green paper Christmas trees adorned the classroom doors and where a torn blue and gold Chanukah menorah was taped carelessly in one corner. Joanne and I knew the words to “Silent Night” although our mothers forbad us from singing Jesus’ name. Just mouth the lyrics, our mothers said. Never, never say them.

But I never listened. I sang “Silent Night” at the top of my voice, raising my volume when I came to the words, “Holy Infant So Tender and Mild.” After all, it was forbidden. I envied Patricia Everson, the blonde girl who sat in front of me. She was always crossing herself. “Mary, Mother of God, have mercy on me,” she said before she did every long division problem. “Lord Jesus help me,” she whispered as she stood before the class and tried in vain to spell the names of the Indian tribes in New York State.

Joanne and I often talked about the bomb. She was sure that it would strike New England, where the Boston Tea Party had taken place.

“Boston is a more revolutionary place than New York,” she told me, as we sat in the wet sand, looking for jingle shells. We had studied the American Revolution two years earlier. Now, we were deep into the Cold War and Communism. I was sure that Russia was going to drop a big bomb somewhere and that we would all disappear into a mushroom cloud of smoke.

She argued with me incessantly but there was no dissuading me from this grim vision. I read the newspapers that my father brought home every evening—The World Telegram, The Evening Sun, The Journal American. I’d sit on my front porch, swatting flies, and turning the pages.

My favorite was The Journal American, a paper that included a daily editorial on the woes of communism. “Listen to this, Joanne,” I said one day as I pulled a scrap of newspaper from my beach bag and began reading the bold headline: “The Bomb is Ticking. Do You Hear It?”

Joanne shook her head. “Don’t believe everything you read,” she said. Her voice was loud and dramatic. I continued reading: “If we don’t take any action, it will explode on our hallowed soil.” “That means on our beach,” I said. “Soil means sand.”

“I’m not scared,” she said. “It’s all propaganda. They want us to be frightened.”

I twisted my dog tag as she spoke, feeling the raised letter J for Jewish that was stamped above my name. Then, I crumpled the clipping into a ball and threw it into the water.  It landed on the crest of a wave, and disappeared into the dark surf.

Born in Brooklyn, Roslyn Bernstein moved to Long Beach, New York in 1948.  A poet and journalist, she has been a professor of Journalism and Creative Writing at Baruch College, CUNY, since 1974. She earned a BA at Brandeis University and a MA and Ph.D. at New York University, and has served as the director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program at Baruch College since it was established in 1998.

This excerpt from “Digging to China” in Boardwalk Stories by Roslyn Bernstein is reprinted with permission of the author and her publisher, Blue Eft Press (www.blueeftpress.com).

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July 19, 2010 · 7:20 am

Difficult

by David J. Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

“It’s difficult being a Jew.”

Children of the many Jewish immigrants who came to America at the turn of the 20th century continually heard that lament from their parents.

The complaint certainly was not baseless. “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t come in on Monday” was the usual reply from their bosses if they requested to be off on Shabbos. And the constant struggle to put food – kosher or otherwise – on the table did not make Jewish practice or learning very easy, either.

Now, after the turn of the 21st century, it’s still difficult being a Jew – but for an entirely different reason.

We no longer are confronted with a Saturday/Monday ultimatum, but we do have to face something that’s more insidious simply because it’s ever-present – the constant beckoning to “stop being primitive,” to “be enlightened.”

This is all the more challenging for a ba’al teshuva – a returning Jew – like myself.

Let me give you an example. I recently went to a friend’s house in my Brooklyn neighborhood. He has remained a staunchly secular Jew, once even remarking to my wife in a conversation about the Torah that probably would have been best not to have: “You swallow all that stuff?” All his grown children are on track to having non-Jewish spouses, and my friend, rather than lamenting the consequent severing of  Jewish heritage, is very happy about it and looking forward to having many grandchildren.

Just walking into his house was an instant flashback to the world I’m still struggling to tear away from. His shelves were filled with an extensive array of books – but not a single one even remotely connected to Jewish thought. He had a large, flat-screen TV with a full range of cable programming. And he offered to lend me a book which he just knew I would enjoy because of my keen interest in science: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

The book – which, sure enough, seemed very interesting and well-written – began with a synopsis of the “Big Bang” of creation arising from the infinitesimally small “singularity” leading to protons and electrons leading to atoms and molecules leading to different substances leading to different life forms leading to us – all, of course, totally by accident.

This, I’m beginning to realize more each day, is the basic premise of modern secular society – we’re all simply walking piles of atoms whose only goal is to do essentially whatever we want to do as long as it doesn’t physically hurt anyone else (and that single restriction is only due to an evolutionary mandate to preserve the species, the secularists will say).

It’s a mindset so pervasive in everything from textbooks to bestsellers to TV, iPods and the Internet, it has to be fought daily – hourly.

Compounding the difficulty – at least for me – is the literal account of Creation in Genesis. I still find it hard to fully embrace the concept of a universe only 6,000 years old and all of mankind descending from one couple created as adults in an idyllic garden.

But I have more difficulty accepting Darwinian evolution literally, either–despite Carl Sagan’s insistence that it’s “a fact.” The legendary late Rabbi Avigdor Miller, for one, has shot huge holes into evolutionary theory with scientific logic, showing very clear self-contradictions and scientific impossibilities in the theory.

Perhaps if I reach the level of Torah study that my 19-year-old son, Mathew (he prefers “Matisyahu”) has already attained in yeshiva, I wouldn’t have any struggle. He’s shown me examples of rabbis and scholars discerning from the written and oral Torah concepts of pi, a heliocentric universe, and even genetics centuries before the later civilizations proffered these ideas. Modern science seems to be merely catching up to some concepts already in the Torah, and computers are just now beginning to reveal some of the secrets of the gematria, the numerology, of the words and letters of the Torah.

Yes, it is difficult being a Jew.

But it’s also challenging, stimulating, and fulfilling – as anyone can experience after just one visit to the Shabbos table of a frum family.

My friend may have it easier – but he certainly doesn’t have it better

David Glenn is founder and publisher of Bay Currents, a community newspaper in Brooklyn. He also teaches math at Brooklyn’s Yeshiva Ohr Eliezer, which motivated his son, and then the family, to embrace Orthodox Judaism.

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July 12, 2010 · 6:01 am

“Man is a Wolf”

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

My demanding and charismatic mother has been dead for eleven years but I
still often think about her, wishing she were alive.  There’ll be a question I want to ask her about her past, or an event in my current life I’d love to be sharing with her, and sometimes a regret for something I did or said as a child will crop up.  I know she would probably dismiss bringing up the past like that as “Quatsch,” the German word that’s so much more dismissive than “Nonsense.”  She loved to use it as magisterially as if she were in fact a judge pounding her gavel and rendering a verdict. But it doesn’t stop me from imagining the scene anyway.

There are times, though, that I’m glad she’s not alive.  As whenever I read about the conditions at Gitmo, or the Orwellian-named policy of “extraordinary rendition,” or the American use of waterboarding, which has been re-branded in the American media to cover up its illegality.  I feel sure she would be outraged and even sick to her stomach.  I certainly am.

In the late 1940s, not long after she was liberated from her slave labor camp in Germany and met my father, she spent a few weeks in London and among the souvenirs I still have from that trip are tiny photos she took at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.  As a child, she said that the medieval tortures–like a witch in the Chamber of Horrors having water poured through a funnel down her throat–reminded her of things she had seen during the Holocaust.  I didn’t ask what those “things” were, I was stunned enough by descriptions of the waxworks cruelty, and by her oft-repeated “Homo homini lupus est”: Man is a wolf to other men.  This was the voice of dark experience speaking, the voice of history, though I think she took some comfort in summing it all up with the Latin she had learned to read and declaim in school in Poland, situating herself in her own pre-war past and that of Ancient Rome.  My mother liked to take the long view when she could, and I’m sure the museum helped her by siting cruelty many hundreds of years ago.

But I’ve always known that torture for her was no mere exhibit, it was a reality, however hazily defined it might be for me.  It became disturbingly clearer when photos from Abu Ghraib were released on the Internet, and when accounts of torture there and elsewhere in the American gulag were published in magazines like The New Yorker.  Yet it was still always at arm’s length–until I had an hour and a half of it myself, not as a media stunt like some reporter on CNN having himself tasered, but, unexpectedly, while undergoing a medical procedure.

Trying to track down a persistent throat problem I’d been having, an otolaryngologyst had referred me to a neurologist so as to start ruling various possibilities out.  The cheerful neurologist found I had no signs of Parkinson’s whatsoever, but wanted to be sure there wasn’t some neuropathy she was missing in her personal exam.  She described the procedure she wanted me to have as “they’ll stick some needles into you.”  “You mean like acupuncture? Will it hurt?”  Her reply:   “There’ll be some discomfort.”  That didn’t sound so bad to me, and because I was so busy, I didn’t bother to explore on my own exactly what the test, an electromyogram, would entail. I wish I had.

A few weeks later I lay in a hospital gown in a cramped, overly bright, featureless little room waiting for the test after some small talk and a brief physical examination.  The doctor was assisted by an Austrian intern and because I’m studying German, this gave the whole experience a surprisingly relaxed feel.  She and I chatted a bit in German, but pretty soon, after an initial examination, the human side of the interaction was completely over, and I was reduced to an object.

What exactly is an electromyogram?  By inserting electrodes into muscle tissue, doctors can test  the electrical activity of muscles at rest and during contraction to see if there’s nerve or muscle damage. So for about an hour, I had needle electrodes stuck into various places on my legs while a nurse or I moved my limbs as instructed.  Information was gathered and the machine that I never got a good look at crackled like a Geiger counter. At first I felt almost nothing, then it was like a nasty pin prick, then each successive jolt was more and more painful, sometimes so much so that I gasped or groaned “Jesus!” or “Wow!”  At more than one point my leg shot in the air because the current was so strong.

This went on and on in a kind of nightmarish rhythm: first fear, then pain, then relief the pain was over, then fear of more pain coming, then the pain which kept getting worse.  As the cycle continued,  my consciousness shriveled until the world was reduced to a series of sensations and noises, both those that came out of my mouth and those being made by the machine.  When the doctor finally told me that the next part of the test didn’t involve electric current, I thought I was over the agony, but it actually got worse.  He stuck needles of some kind in my hand at the joint of my index finger and thumb, in my arm, in my shoulder, and each time I had to move my hand or arm in certain ways to to provide the information they were looking for.  Not only did this part of the test hurt more, I had soreness in my hand and arm for weeks afterward, and large bruises.

I don’t remember well the short consultation that followed, but I do remember feeling exhausted and humiliated when everyone filed out: neurologist, test administrator, Austrian resident, nurse.  I was so stunned by what had happened to me that I didn’t even check out, just wandered the halls till a nurse pointed me to an exit. I managed to drive myself home, glad that I hadn’t started crying during the test, even though the pain had been so intense I almost did so twice.

What seemed like the greatest violation of my dignity, of my selfhood, was that I had come to this hospital for healing, or at least a diagnostic exam that would lead to healing, but had found something very different instead.  The people administering the test didn’t intend to torture me, they weren’t evil, they weren’t remotely like my mother’s tormentors, but they had left me feeling crushed and shattered just the same.  I’d been mugged once in New York, but that was a pat on the back compared to this assault, to suddenly no longer feeling safe in the world, as if my personal boundaries were meaningless and anything could happen to me.

I told a dancer friend of mine about the test and she said she had walked out of a similar one.  “You can’t do this to me,” she said to the doctor, “I’m not a criminal.”  And when she described the scene, I felt like an idiot.  Why hadn’t I stopped the test?  Why hadn’t I told the doctor to turn the fucking machine off and let me go?

I couldn’t.  I was paralyzed and not thinking straight, barely thinking at all.

The morning after the test, I woke up at 4:30 AM, shaking.  My bed had turned into that hospital table and though the room was dark, I felt bright lights beating down on me.  I knew I had to flee that scene somehow.  I got up quietly so as not to wake my partner or the dogs, grabbed a Valium in the bathroom, and headed to my study to escape into the morning’s news.  Over the following days, whenever I answered somebody’s email about how I was feeling and the test flitted through my mind, or if I even mentioned it, I could feel the terror and pain coming back.  Anyone who’s been in a violent accident, or victim of a gross physical assault, will probably know what I mean.

After talking about the test with my therapist, I knew that writing about what happened was essential to getting over it.  He made the connection for me between my experience and my mother’s in the war, something that amazingly hadn’t crossed my mind until he said it.  Yes, it was only an hour and a half of agony, not years, months, or even days–but it linked us in the most unexpected way.  I had entered a prolonged situation of helplessness — or that’s how it felt to me.

I realized that I had to write to the neurologist who was in charge and share my experience, not to apportion blame, but so he could help future patients.  I had never had a test like this before; it had never occurred to me that I could stop it.  But the administering physician should have offered me the choice before the test even started. What added to the nightmare was the wall that suddenly shot up between me and everyone in the room as soon as the test began.  I was a source of data and they weren’t people, either: just soulless technicians who never responded to my obvious distress.

It’s not melodramatic to realize that if the test had gone on longer without hope of release, and had they been after any secrets I held, I would have told them anything to make it stop.  Now I understand something of what happens in places like Abu Ghraib, and I was only tortured for an hour and a half.  But at least it ended, and I’m free.

I’ve been able to seek relief in writing.  Once, decades ago, I suggested  that my mother write about her past because the world needed to know what happened to her, but that made her furious, “I don’t owe the world anything!”  How could I argue with that?  But writing about her is something I have to do, and each year I discover new ways.

I’m on a Second Generation listserv and recently we’ve all been discussing our middle-aged health issues, and after I described what happened to me, one member told me that this same test was being recommended for her 89-year old father.  Hopefully my story will spare him pain, or at least inform him that he can make the pain stop.  I’m not remotely happy to have had this ordeal, but it gave me a strange gift: brief, visceral understanding of what my mother experienced during the war, being trapped and victimized.  It made me marvel at her courage to go on, to rebuild her life, even while it fills me with sorrow to know that her story can never be fully told.

Lev Raphael, a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature, has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978. The author of nineteen books which have been translated into almost a dozen languages, he has spoken about his work in hundreds of venues on three continents. His fiction and creative non-fiction are widely taught at American colleges and universities. A former public radio book show host, academic, and columnist, he can be found on the web at http://www.levraphael.com.

You can check out his latest book, the memoir, My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped, at http://www.levraphael.com/mygermany.html.

And you can view a YouTube excerpt from one of his talks at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFhrajH-6AE

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June 21, 2010 · 8:00 am

Writing Practice: Faith

How would you describe faith?

Is it something inside you–a deep trust in God, an unwavering belief in God’s presence–that flows like a swiftly running river toward the sea?

Or is it more like a flickering flame, a candle burning brightly one day, waning the next, mysteriously gathering strength and intensity then fading to a shadow without reason or explanation?

Do you think faith is something that you work toward like climbing a tall mountain… something you have to seek out, searching for a clear path to reach the pinnacle, slipping and sliding off the path, only to regain your footing with more certainty further on?

Or is faith like a rock inside you, sturdy, unswerving, always present, never in doubt?

We have different experiences of faith, and each of those experiences can serve as sources of inspiration in our writing.

We can write about standing amidst fellow Jews on Shabbat and offering our prayers to God and feeling a certain faith that God is listening.

We can write about approaching the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem and sensing God’s presence in history, in our lives, at that moment.

We can write about learning that someone we love has cancer and not giving up hope.

We can write about a dear spouse who may have survived a car accident or hip surgery and praying for his or her recovery.

We can write about losing a parent, giving birth to a child, caring for an ill aunt, helping a frail grandfather… and how each individual, each experience, influences our faith, for better or worse.

How does faith play a role in these experiences? How does faith play a role in your life?

Can you define faith without checking a dictionary? What does it mean to you? How would you describe a life with faith versus a life without faith? And how does having faith–or not having faith–influence the way you view your Jewish identity?

Can you think of a time in your life when you felt your faith challenged… and can you describe what happened? Set the background for the event and how you came to find yourself in the situation. What made you feel that your faith was challenged? How did you respond? And did you feel after the experience that your faith was stronger or weaker?

Can you think of a time when you realized that you didn’t possess any faith? What prompted you to realize this? How did it make you feel? And how did you respond to this revelation? (Do you still pray? Can you still believe in God, even if you doubt His or Her existence?)

Look at passages in the Tanakh for examples of individuals who displayed–or failed to display–faith. Abraham when he set out on his journey. Nachshon when he led the people into the sea. The ten spies when they entered the Land.  What can you learn about faith from these passages? Can you compare the faith–or lack of faith–displayed by these individuals to your own?

In writing about faith, you may discover your faith deepening, running swiftly like a river’s steady current, or you may discover an empty well, barely illuminated by a flickering flame. Whatever you find in your search, let us know. Sometimes sharing the search is enough to inspire faith in others, if not in ourselves.

Bruce Black

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June 14, 2010 · 8:00 am

My Father Is Arrested

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

The knock on the door of our Berlin apartment came around five o’clock one dark morning in May of 1938.

It was the favorite time of day for the Gestapo to make house calls. Their victims were usually asleep and not many other people saw them at such an hour.

When my mother opened the door, two men in dark raincoats stood outside. One of them muttered, “Geheime Staatspolizei,” and pushed the door open and let himself and his partner in. Their clothing was as anonymous as their faces. Perhaps secret agents are picked for their faces. Only members of a Secret Service look like this, no matter what their country. No one ever remembers them afterwards.

We lived in a time of constant rumors, all of them threatening. Even I, a child, had recently heard of an impending roundup of Jewish men in our Berlin community. There would be a mass raid, a razzia. Why–and what was to happen later–no one knew. A pre-dawn knock on the door was dreaded, almost expected, that summer. The only speculation was for whom that knock would come and when. Yet when it came for us, it surprised my father and mother.

Inside the apartment, the agents confronted my father in the foyer and announced their orders for his arrest. My father asked permission to take a little of their time: he needed to shave and dress. There was no way of resisting.

Permission granted, one agent remained in the bathroom with him and took up a position by the window facing into the room. The other man stayed in the foyer with his back against the slightly open bathroom door.

I tried to be unobtrusive. From my spot in the small entrance hall, I peeked into the bathroom. Inside, I saw my father’s face in the mirror over the sink. I thought him calm and accepting. But I noticed how his hands shook while he freshened up.

My father had suffered several recent gall bladder attacks. My mother said it was bad nerves. Conditions in Berlin were more than favorable to nervous tensions that spring in 1938, especially if you were Jewish and in a prosperous business.

Now she went into the kitchen and got ready a dose of his medication. She came out holding a small bag in her hand and said he must be sure to take it with him. One of the agents remarked drily there would be little chance for using it.

I saw my mother’s eyes starting to blaze. I cowered as she turned on the two Gestapo agents. Fearlessly, she chastised them for barging in on our peaceful household at such an hour, for taking away an innocent man when everyone knew how wrong that was. How could they face their consciences performing such a mission?

I like to think the Gestapo men remembered that scene. I did, all of my life. It took incredible guts to speak out the way Mimi did. She remained lady-like, even in her scolding. But she certainly exploded that morning. She had good reason. The Gestapo men knew that, too.

In later years, when her health and mental strength failed, she was often afraid of things that seemed childish to outsiders. But I remembered Mimi’s courage and I recalled how she stood in the hallway of our fashionable apartment, wagging her finger under the nose of the Gestapo agent, backing him against our bathroom door. Would I have such guts were I put to the test?

That dark morning the man at the door just shrugged his shoulder while the other one inside the bathroom ignored her. None of that deterred her. “Where are you taking my husband?” she asked repeatedly until the second man finally answered.

“To the police station.”

The landing outside our apartment door was still dark when they took my father out. My father, wedged between both agents, turned to Mimi.

“I have a cousin in America. He lives in Louisville (he pronounced it Lewisville), in the state of Kentucky. Try to contact him and see if he can help.”

Mimi dressed quickly, then she helped me with my clothes. We began the rapid walk to the police station just a few short blocks away. Just as we arrived, breathless, at the precinct, several police vans pulled out. All the vans were fully loaded. The razzia had already produced sufficient results.

Inside the station Mimi asked again and again about the destination of those departing vehicles.

“Alexanderplatz,” was the desk sergeant’s brusque reply.

She decided we would follow them. A long taxi ride brought us to the center of Berlin. The driver stopped at a large, dark gray, forbidding-looking building. Threatening, just like the mood of everything else that morning.

Many years later I saw the dreaded headquarters of the Gestapo in a television newsreel. Even after many decades that view crystallized the special and horrible aura I once felt. I could not know what went on in that building, what unspeakable and excruciatingly painful torment people experienced there. What I sensed at age ten was that it was an evil place.

The day I entered it with Mimi, I saw a warren of dark corridors filled on either side with windowless, small, brown cubicles. In one such sparse hole in the wall I waited quietly at her side while Mimi faced a heavy-set official behind a desk. The chubby man rustled some papers pretending to look up my father’s name.

The prisoner, Leopold Nussbaum, he informed us, was on his way to an interrogation center, but the family would probably have some news from him within a few days.

Not encouraging information, yet the official was a shade kinder than others we had encountered on our way in. Why that was, I couldn’t tell. The way he looked at Mimi was definitely less insolent and arrogant.

We stood waiting for the streetcar at its Alexanderplatz stop. Buildings just as dismal and forbidding as the one we had just left surrounded the traffic-filled square. I glanced across the street at another evil-looking dark, tall structure. I felt Mimi shudder as she looked at it, too.

“The Volksgerichtshof,” she volunteered without my asking.

In later years I learned more about the People’s Court and its use by the Nazi regime.

Mimi might have known even then what kind of place it was. Few prisoners left it without an order for their execution, if they left the building alive at all.

The long ride home on the streetcar was bleak. Mimi looked discouraged and fearful. My feelings of course, were a reflection of hers. She was quiet and sad and barely spoke. It was May, yet everything around us was still gray and cold. It started to drizzle. Times were suddenly desperate. I had a dreadful sense of foreboding.

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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June 7, 2010 · 8:25 am

The Hassid and the Tennis Racket

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Outside looking in, his hands on the wire fence,
he stood sallow and sweaty in the hot sun,
dressed in black coat and hat watching me
practicing my pathetic serve,
stabbing at the ball with fly swatter frenzy,
willing it to land in the box with any kind of consistency.
Between tosses, I watched him watching me
through rimless glasses, his blue eyes searching
for some reason for my solitary ritual.
For ten minutes I struggled with my swing.
For ten minutes he did not move a muscle.
His silence screamed at me until, exasperated
I walked over to him and asked, “Do you play?”
He seemed puzzled by my question,
started to answer, but then stopped in mid-word,
and wistfully, I thought, shook his head no,
as if he had finally decided to fall on the side
of the ethereal, instead of the temporal.
At his hesitation, I wish I had had another racket
to invite him to play, to deconstruct the fence
between his universe and mine.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

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