For Rosh Hashanah: The Jewish Earworm

Being Jewish isn’t always a picnic.

I got my first inkling of this when I was about nine. My father and I were walking near his house in Westfield, New Jersey, when he fell into conversation with a neighbor, a man in his 70s, still strapping, with a snowy, Tip O’Neill quiff and a golf-course sunburn. After a few minutes, they introduced themselves. Then, cocking his head ever so slightly, the man asked my father, “What kind of name is Lindenman?”

“Austrian,” my father answered.

Years passed before I learned just how imprecise an answer he’d given. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of, I believe, seven political entities into which the family seat of Lemberg – or Lviv, or Lwow, or L’vov – has been incorporated over the past three centuries. But there on the spot I got the basic message: it is sometimes better for a Jew to go about with an Edelweiss in his buttonhole.

But I only began to appreciate the dilemmas involved in belonging to a people with such a strong sense of historic mission until after I quit trying to belong.

Let me explain that. I’ve never actually been Jewish – my mother, having grown up Catholic, never converted. According to halakha, this fact placed me firmly outside the tent. Beyond that, it seemed, nothing in the regs spelled out how I should relate to my father’s people. I could be friendly or unfriendly or a total stranger.

In cases like these, environmental cues help guide decisions. If I’d grown up in the Soviet Union, I might well have played it like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who used to say, “My mother was a Russian; my father was a lawyer.” If, like the young Geoffrey Wolff, I’d had plans to penetrate the WASP ascendancy, I’d probably just have shut up about the whole thing.

But by the 1980s, the WASP ascendancy had ceased ascending. Through the air of Manhattan, where I was growing up, floated the idea that the Jews were living through the triumphant third act of their historical drama. After being put-upon for thousands of years, they had at last achieved victory in war and peace. Not only was there a Jewish state, New York had a Jewish mayor – one who enjoyed the esteem of the city’s Catholic cardinal-archbishop. The shelves in the bookstores and the newsstands were ready to collapse under the weight of Jewish authors’ work. Being able to claim some connection to this flourishing tribe was “very heaven.”

Here, I am trying to capture an impression, not record facts. The decade contained plenty of hints that the Jewish state was a morally complex enterprise, and that those who acted on its behalf often made terrible decisions with which all Jews had, somehow, to contend. These would have included Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the first Intifadah, Jonathan Pollard’s conviction for espionage. Incurious about most things unrelated to my own puberty, I noted only “Hymietown,” which I wrote off as a blip, like the pointed tone with which the Westfield man had pronounced my name.

The upshot is that, until just a few years ago, I related to the Jewish people in a parasitical way. Without contributing to their well-being, or even declaring myself to be Jewish, I called attention to our fortuitous connection by way of burnishing my own image. I must be smart, look at Einstein! After catching me in the misuse of a Yiddish word, a Jewish reader called me a poseur. You’ve heard of Plastic Paddies? To this man, I was an Ersatz Ike. Then he ordered me, in so many words, to go big or go home.

He didn’t spell out how much catechesis I would need in order to meet his standards for authenticity, or what forms of civic engagement I should commit myself to. I never thought to inquire. Being Catholic was turning out to be hard enough. Grappling with additional sacred texts in additional dead languages – taking into account a second view of history – seemed, flatly, impossible. Since my father and both of his parents were dead, I decided, after several months of reflection, to let the pretense drop and think of myself as a Catholic, period.

Not too long afterward, I moved to Turkey, where, for the first time, I heard people let fly at The Jews with both barrels. Once in the course of a private tutorial, my student, an otherwise lovable 16-year-old twerp named Gökhan, leapt from his chair with fist clenched, and shouted, “The Jews stabbed us in the back in Çanakkale War!”

He meant the First World War – Çanakkale is the Dardanelles port city that Turks consider the focus of the Gallipoli campaign. What astonished me was the ease with which he produced the stock phrase “stabbed in the back.” Here was a real, live Dolchstoßlegende! After I reminded myself that I needn’t, after all, take any of it personally, his outburst came to seem like a scene in a bad movie.

I caught another scene a few nights later, when my students invited me out for a meal in the food court at Zafer Plaza, the local mall. A grown man whose name I forget – I’ll call him Murat – started holding forth on The Jews and their poisonous influence in banking, the media, and everywhere else. Murat was not ranting. Instead, he was droning on in a self-satisfied, professorial tone. Nobody chastisted him, but then nobody paid him much attention at all. In the general opinion, he was a bore, and the substance of his opinions secondary to that fact.

Both Murat and Gökhan, I later learned, supported the right-wing National Movement Party. (This explained Murat’s extravagant mustache, halfway between a Castro Clone’s and Rollie Fingers’.) I discovered a simple way to divert such people from The Jews: get them started on The Kurds. Most of my students were center-left Kemalists who reserved their hatred for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister elected president during my stay. If Erdoğan had gone on record praising chocolate ice cream, my students would have cast it into the Sea of Marmara by the bucket. His public tirades against Jews could only have improved their standing.

This enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic, I think, spared me blistering earfuls during Israel’s attack on Gaza, and enabled me to shrug off the whole disgraceful affair with the reminder “Not my circus, not my monkeys, certainly not my mortars.” This blissful spirit of neutrality held though my star student’s spirited defense of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the French comedian whose animus against Jews observers have called “obsessive.”

It faltered a little when the salary of one of my Syrian friends fell short of the extra expenses he incurred when his son took sick. Mostly, I made my gifts of 10 or 20 lira – which he insisted on treating as loans, good on him – out of simple friendship. But this man had delivered a few monologues on Jewish “stinginess,” among other disobliging qualities, and I had to admit that I was also straining to cast myself against type.

Nobody, it seems, had much of an ear for Ashkenazi names. Or perhaps Turks regard being American as too exotic a state to require any further definition. Only one person – the Dieudonné fan, who’d grown up in Strasbourg – thought to probe deeper:

“Are your ancestors from Germany?” He asked.

“Austria,” I replied.

Aside from Murat, who bore all the stigmata of the incurable crank and blowhard, these Jew-baiters were lovely people – friendly, generous, untainted by fanaticism in any general way. (I toyed with the idea of writing a story with the lede “Some of my best friends are anti-Semites, and most of them are genocide deniers.”) To be barred, a priori, from their good graces by the forces of history seemed like a cruel fate. Being held accountable for the sins of Israel and expected to produce a coherent opinion on that bizarre, precarious experiment of a nation seemed even harsher. Only by experiencing the very bearable lightness of being a gentile did I begin to appreciate the burdens involved in being a Jew.

After leaving Turkey, I was invited to tour Jordan with a group of fellow writers. Late one afternoon, our bus pulled up to Mt. Nebo. The sun was drooping westward, toward the Mediterranean. On the very spot from which Moses is said to have gazed into the Promised Land stood a sign listing the distances to various landmarks. Jerusalem: Mount of Olives, 24 km jumped out at me. I strained my bad eyes hoping to see – What? Actual whited sepulchers? – but beyond the ranks upon ranks of bare hills, I saw nothing.

But I did hear something. The Hebrew folk song “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” – “Golden Jerusalem” started playing in my head. I learned it at a Jewish summer camp I’d attended. (How I got there is a story in its own right.) Of the lyrics, I remembered only the chorus, which translates to:

Oh, Jerusalem of gold,
and of light and of bronze,
I am the lute for all your songs.

And talk about a haunting melody. It haunted me until the moment our bus pulled into Petra.

When Csasnad Szegedi, one of Hungary’s leading anti-Semites, discovered that his maternal grandmother had been born Jewish, he went whole hog (so to speak) in the other direction, reporting to the local Chabad center to be catechized. After Christopher Hitchens, arch-atheist and anti-Zionist, learned he’d had a Jewish mother, he never passed up a chance to bang on about it. In its 2013 Portrait of Jewish Americans, the Pew Research Center included 467 people “of Jewish affinity.” These living anomalies “have a religion other than Judaism (or have no religion),” “were not raised Jewish and did not have a Jewish parent,” but “consider themselves Jewish or partially Jewish in some way.” For all being Jewish is no picnic, the Jewish people can’t help attracting hangers-on.

Whether they’re are trying to claim gilt by association with the Einsteins and the Mahlers, as I was, or are simply historical-drama queens craving the romance of belonging to the Chosen People, is something I can’t answer. As I’ve said, I have tried not to hang on too tightly; indeed, I’ve tried to let go. My own affinity, for lack of a better term, for the Jewish people is something unwilled, vague and mostly incomprehensible, which burrows into me and sticks, like an earworm.