Home is where the heart is
DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
Associate Editor
I didn't think of myself as half Jewish until I'd been told I wasn't at all.
It was at a Jewish community event in Montreal. I must have been 11 or 12. An older woman sitting on a chair in a corner corralled me and asked me about my parentage. It didn't strike me as odd at the time - grown-ups asked a lot of weird things.
"You're not Jewish," she said, after I told her that my father was Jewish and my mother wasn't.
I don't remember what, if anything, I said back. I think I told that yes, I was, and walked away. But I do remember that feeling, like it's hard to get a breath. I knew I was Jewish enough that the other kids at school made jokes about picking up pennies and told me I was going to hell, Jewish enough that my first "boyfriend" at summer camp had broken up with me when I told him my religion. "I hate Jews," he'd said simply.
My mother, English and raised a devout Anglican, fell in love with and married my father, a German-Jewish concentration camp survivor, and between them they produced me and my two brothers. My mother didn't convert, but she took it upon herself to raise the three of us in a Jewish home once she realized what Judaism meant to my father, an agnostic Jew whose idea of worship seemed to involve the Sunday New York Times, the recordings of Jussi Bjoerling and lackschinken from the local delicatessen.
My mother taught herself rudimentary Hebrew and learned the essential prayers. Unlike most of our friends, even some of the Jewish ones, we never had Easter baskets or egg hunts, although we did have a Christmas tree with a Star of David on top. I think the tree served mostly as the backdrop for the traditional English Christmas meal, which involved roast goose and steamed Christmas pudding, set alight. Over the years, my mother may have moved away from the Church of England as far as her theological beliefs are concerned ("The Trinity doesn't make much sense to me," she confessed to me once, when we were finally both adults. "I feel closer to Judaism."). But it's another thing entirely to give up the foods of your childhood.
So why didn't my mother convert? I think it's because she didn't want to switch religions just because other people felt she should. To this day, she wrestles with her faith, attending church for its familiar rituals but still deeply drawn to Judaism, more than a decade after my father's death.
I admire her integrity. I know it's hard to live in that limbo land. I spent a lot of time there myself. I felt uncomfortable in church, but the sense of belonging I'd felt in synagogue as a child vanished in my adolescence. In college I went to a few Hillel events, but I was always afraid someone would call me on not being a "real" Jew. I didn't know that there were plenty of "real" Jews who couldn't read Hebrew either.
By the time I was in my 20s, attending synagogue meant crying (and trying to pretend I wasn't). How could I feel so much like I belonged and not belong? My heart ached.
When I got engaged to a Jewish man, we set out to have a Jewish wedding. But the Reform rabbi in the small town where we lived told us he considered ours a mixed marriage. My father was incredulous. "I thought that after what I'd been through," he told me over the phone, in what would be one of our last conversations, "no one would question your Jewishness."
Twelve years later, people do still occasionally question my Jewishness. But I don't. Not when I take my daughter to Hebrew school, not when we light the Shabbat candles together, not when I tell her that yes, her grandmother is Christian, but we are Jewish.
Now, when I find myself in a church, as I did last year for the funeral of my mother's mother, I'm not uncomfortable (unless, of course, the sermon is blatantly anti-Semitic). I know my place. I'm a guest, and that feels right. And the simple act of attending services at a synagogue no longer causes my heart to ache. Today, I feel at home.
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