Convergence

By Nicole Waldner

One Jew says, just for argument's sake, because God knows a Jew loves a good argument, "Being a woman and being a Jew are two different things."

"How so?" says the other Jew.

"One is a burden and the other is a curse."

"Oi, so true. But there is a time when the woman and the Jew becomes a Jewish woman."

"Oh," says the other one, "when is that, nu? Is it when she's cooking in the kitchen? Or praying at shul behind the mechitzeh? Or is it when she's at the mikveh?"

Stop! You gotta be kidding! Not in my family, not with my upbringing. My head was jammed full of liberalism and secularism, culture and travel. Still, I do have some sweet memories of women in the kitchen doing Jewish things. My mother with her bustling meticulousness cooking for the high holidays, smells from the old country, potato latkes and layered pancakes. Making haroset and matzo cake at Pesach with my sisters and mother, the four of us together. Usually though, we just noshed and cracked jokes, but always in the kitchen. We never really spoke about being Jewish, but later we'd speak about politics; Israel and the Israel haters. And as for being women, well I suppose we spoke about that sometimes, through our bodies, and what they were doing. But most of the time it was about outwitting each other and because of our happy confidence in each other's presence we could be pretty funny.

Clichés about Jewish women and Yiddische mammes simply did not apply to my mother. She was skinny and hated the idea of us being fat. The words, "That's a waste of calories!", are seared into my mind forever. She never pinched our cheeks and told us we were adorable, she didn't kvetch and cling and she definitely didn't think we were geniuses. She didn't lay on the guilt and tears, she just screamed! She could be pretty terrifying too and had an excellent forehand.

The other Jewish women in my family also defied the stereotype. When I went in search of the past, I went to Transylvania to find my mother's people. It turned out they were Christians, who'd once been Jews, who'd once been Christians. In a word, confused. Over there, the women were not just dominant in number, but in everything else too. They were big, they talked loud and fast and if you didn't like their cooking, watch out and you'd better ask for seconds. They weren't very Jewish, but they were very woman.

"Nu, so tell me, when is a woman who is Jewish a Jewish woman?"

"When she is standing under the chuppeh. For it is in her duty to find a Jewish husband, and continue the ancient line, that the Jew and the woman in her are truly united."

Never mind that this stern and inflexible command clashed horribly with that secular, liberal upbringing, this one was never negotiable. In this, as in so much else, my father set the tone. Gently, firmly, and always with a smile. It made it hard to say no to him. All our Jewishness came from the remains of his Orthodox upbringing.  But it was more than his love and respect for tradition and more than his unshakeable belief that having an identity was paramount. It was about Shoah. It was always there. Oblique, but inescapable. A cold, hard rod of steel rammed through our sunny Sydney lives. Six million didn't die so that we should just disappear. This scarcely articulated but omnipresent thought tested us in strange and disturbing ways, for as we went about our lives, busy, secular big city lives, knowing and loving other people, there was always a point at which these affections were stunted, tainted and limited.

We were taught not to hate, but how can you not hate? My father was usually too polite to swear, but the occasional "fucking Nazis, fucking animals" did slip out. Not so my mother, from whom we all learnt to curse and blaspheme, in stereo, old school and new. Long before I ever came to Hungary I could already swear with the best of the Pesti cabbies. "Everyone is welcome in our home", was the way we were brought up, but how long for and in just what capacity? Now those were some other things we didn't talk about. I don't believe my mother would have had the stamina and belief to insist on a Jewish husband, not because of any liberal impulse, but her atheist, Communist education must have somehow stuck. Having grown up motherless, and for all intents and purposes fatherless, not much in the way of Jewish culture trickled down in the wilderness of her childhood. The first time she saw a chuppah was on her way down the aisle. 

How I loathed the narrowness of this Divine injunction, how I longed to distance myself from it. From the injunction and all the xenophobes who clung to it. I would escape its poisonous tentacles that pursued me in my most intimate moments, that made me fear and mistrust those I loved. I would become one with the great heaving mass of humanity, I would obliterate those suffocating ghetto walls for good. With every boy I brought home, I fought against it.

There was my first love, Pedro. Spanish, Catholic and very macho. He was too young to fret over, still, his parents warned him that Jews liked to marry their own kind. Lucio had the face of a Renaissance prince and the manners of a pimp. He tried to talk me out of my Jewishness by insisting I was a racist. And there was John, the dispassionate wasp, who found my ethnicity quaint, if a little too exotic, but it was all a matter of indifference to him. And then there was Ali, the Semite, who loved me and railed bitterly against all religion and those who would impose their authority. He dreamt of a better world where we would all be one, Semite brothers and sisters, living side-by-side, in peace, love and harmony. And wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it? To never wonder anxiously if he's Jewish, to not care if he's of the faith, a member of the tribe. He was persuasive and passionate, but he was the wrong kind of Semite.

When I went to Hungary to find my past, I also found Zoltán, a country boy from Pecs. His eyes were heavy-lidded, melancholic and alive. He spoke English like my father. We fell in love. He took me by the hand and led me under the chuppah. And in that moment, I became the Jewish woman I was always fated to be. ◊

“Convergence” was first published in the anthology Sós Kávé/Salty Coffee, Novella Könykiadó, Budapest, 2007.

The English edition of this anthology was also published in 2007 by Novella;

and the German edition Salziger Kaffee, was published in 2009 by Novella.