by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)
I normally would have found him attractive—he was handsome and fit, and middle-aged like me—but I was walking alone down a quiet residential street, and he was following me on his bicycle saying,
“Look at you! Aren’t you sweet? You’re ethnic—look at that hair. Is that natural?”
So, instead, I felt an immediate surge of familiar fear, that same fear most women feel when a man on the street is coming on too strong. I didn’t reply to him and just kept on walking.
The afternoon seemed absurdly beautiful, with a clear cerulean sky and golden sunlight pouring down on the Sycamore trees and the big old houses with their lush spring gardens. Then I noticed another man—he was sitting on a chair on his front porch watching the two of us—and I heard him call out,
“Hey!”
Hearing his voice partly reassured me because I no longer felt alone, but it also confirmed my fear that maybe there really was something unsafe about my situation. The man on the bicycle kept on following me, and now he said,
“You’re either Mediterranean or Hebrew—am I right?”
Then my heart stopped cold because this was the first time in my life a stranger had approached me on the street wondering if I was Jewish. I wasn’t even sure what it meant that he was doing it, especially because the man asking me was Black. And then the other man, who was still sitting on his front porch, called out again,
“Hey!”
while I kept on walking and saying nothing. But even with the man on the porch yelling at him, the man on the bicycle pulled up alongside of me and looked into my face. Then, sounding pleased, he said,
“You’re ethnic, all right. You’re one of Job’s daughters, aren’t you?”
One of Job’s daughters? Was that his Biblical way of saying he was sure I was Jewish? Or did he mean something else by that? In the Old Testament, Job’s daughters were the beautiful ones—the most beautiful in all the land.
Of course, I knew by then that there were some men who particularly favored Jewish women. “They’re sexy,” they would say, “spoiled little Jewish-American Princesses, but sexy and intelligent.” Or, as a Chinese-American man I used to know once said to me, “They’re all the fun of a woman of color but with the skin color of a white woman.”
But whether calling me one of Job’s daughters was meant to be a compliment or not, it was extra scary having a man add this “you’re a Jew” thing to the typical harassment of a woman walking down the street thing.
Since the man on the porch—a white man, who looked on the younger side—had not bothered to get up from his chair despite his yelling, I quickly thought about how I might extricate myself from this situation. I said,
“I’m sorry, but I’m on way to see the doctor.”
The man on the bicycle then changed his tone, saying, with concern,
“Oh, are you sick?”
Even though I was just headed to an annual checkup, I said,
“Yes. Yes, I’m sick.”
After that he turned his bicycle around and cycled away from me, back in the direction we had both come from, leaving me alone.
When I entered the doctor’s office a few minutes later, I asked the receptionist if I could borrow a pen and paper because while I waited for my appointment I wanted to write down everything that had just happened.
I never wanted to forget that if something like that—being harassed on the street because I looked “Hebrew”—could happen to me in my hometown, one of the most progressive communities in the United States, Berkeley, California, it could happen anywhere.
Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, which has both brand new and older works. She has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right.
The Jewish Writing Project 