This is the first part of a three-part series. The impetus was something I read in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I will reflect on in the last part. Part One delves into my childhood, growing up Jewish in what I consider a fairly religious household, although it was less religious than my grandparents’ households that my parents grew up in. Looking back, it is certainly more religious than I raised my own kids in, and that will be discussed in Part Two. Part Three, funny enough is the part I wrote first, but then kept expanding and writing and re-writing, and realized there was more backstory than I could fit into that section. I hope you enjoy reading about my past lives, and my reflections and reconciliations with who I am today and how I became that person, at least in this one aspect of my life.

Since October 7, I’ve been struggling. Not with my identity as a Jewish person; I am who I am, and I know who I am more or less, but I’ve been struggling with the natural lessening of religious life that often accompanies a new generation. I’m not sure my kids know who they are, and a part of me worries for them, for their safety in this heightened state of antisemitism. Will they recognize the dog whistles and know if they’re in an unsafe situation? How will they react? How will I be able to keep them safe? We are in a good school district, but there are still some microaggressions that I know my kids see as no big deal, and that I take much more seriously. For example, when my middle child was beginning kindergarten, the first day was on Rosh Hashanah, and one of the Board members was extremely condescending and asked about the educational value of having the day off, not seeing the irony of a school being closed on Good Friday which has no educational value, but I digress. Another example was when my oldest changed schools in fourth grade, his new teacher, upon hearing that he would be absent for Yom Kippur, reassured him that it was all right because Jesus was Jewish.

This was not something that I contended with when I was a young child. We grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. We lived in a court, and everyone watched out for everyone else. My parents knew what I was up to and who I was up to it with. Every holiday was a group affair. I don’t remember who would come to our house for the holidays, but I have distinct memories of many holidays, especially Passover and Chanukah.

At Passover, our living room apartment was filled with people. I don’t even know where we got the long table and chairs. We must have had some brought from other families. We sat around, reading the Haggadah. I still have mine from Hebrew School with the torn yellow cover. I don’t remember if it was stapled or attached with those brass plated fasteners. I almost always read as the youngest who could read. I remember the wine glass set on the radiator by the door with the door left open for Elijah. His chair was over in that space also. We had a separate set of dishes for Passover as you can’t use the same dishes as the rest of the year. My mother always had courses. Matzo ball soup out of a big tureen that we’d only see a couple of times a year. There was also a fruit portion, either fruit cocktail with the cherries or half a grapefruit. I would put sugar on mine and we each had a grapefruit spoon to lift each section out. Salad was a simple plate of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers with a scoop of chopped liver. The only kind I would eat was Mrs. Weinberg’s brand. They don’t make that anymore.

On Chanukah, there were eight presents for each of us in a little pile in front of my baby dresser. That dresser was in the living room. The presents were all wrapped in light blue paper with Jewish stars on it. We got to choose which present we opened that night. They weren’t very big – coloring books & crayons, Barbie dolls, Barbie clothing, Matchbox cars, books. They were wrapped in their own shape, so it was easy to tell what some of them were. I would want to open the Barbie doll before opening the clothes. We also got dreidls and gelt. I especially loved the clear, colored, plastic dreidls that the chocolate coins would go in. They spun better when they were empty. We played the dreidl game with pennies.

I went with my cousins to a Workman Circle School. It taught us traditions, holidays and songs, history and Yiddish. I loved it. I loved my teacher, Mr. Baran. When we moved to Long Island from Queens (and my cousins moved to Florida), I went to another school for two years, a much more religious school, but then I discovered Mr. Baran was teaching in a nearby town, and we switched to that one. I adored him and his daughter Ruth. She taught us music. He was from Poland. I can picture him, from his stories, of running away in the woods as a young person, seventeen when the Nazis came. I always pictured thick woods, sporadically flashing lights, noise in the brush, and yelling. I’m sure he didn’t give us those details, but it’s what I imagined whenever I thought of him then.

Our family didn’t talk about the Holocaust much. I’m sure, like every Jewish person, we lost family members. How could we have not? It just wasn’t something we talked about. I do know that my Grandmother’s brother died in World War II. He was in the (US) military, and I am named after him. His name was Kalman. Anytime I was asked where our family was from, I would say I’m Jewish, which translated to who knew. If pressed, I’d respond with Poland, Germany, Russia. I wasn’t sure who came from where, and in some cases as I’ve read history and geography, I’ve learned that sometimes one place was in all three countries at various times. Read The Lost: A Search of Six in Six Million by Daniel Mendelssohn as he searches for his uncle’s story. He lived in Ukraine, but sometimes it was Russia, and sometimes, it was Poland. The same town.

We celebrated all of the holidays when we lived in Queens. We went to public school, and the Workman Circle School, but our holidays went by the Jewish calendar, beginning in the Fall when most of them happened: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchas Torah. We did a lot of the holidays in the Girl Scout troop I was in.

At Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the kids didn’t go inside the temple. I can remember us playing outside in the parking lot, our asphalt playground. There were no cars, so I imagine we must have walked to shul. We were noisy. How do I know? Every now and again, a parent would come out of the door at the top of the stairs that was adjacent to the lot and tell us to quiet down. I’m not sure what they expected. We jumped rope, played ball, and ran around. Noisily.

Sukkot, there was always a temporary structure built, usually in our case with straw and hay to make a little booth. We visited and we ate there. It was a nice, fun holiday after the seriousness of the High Holidays. It celebrates the Harvest and there were apples.

After that is Simchas Torah. This concludes the reading of the Torah and its beginning again. We didn’t celebrate every day, but this is a multi-day holiday, like most of the others. There’s dancing and sometimes there is dancing in the street, but I don’t remember that in our case. The recent Hamas attack on Jewish civilians in Israel took place on Simchat Torah.

We celebrated all of these in our shul and in our homes. It wasn’t odd or strange. It was just the way it was. We also celebrated Thanksgiving. This was, and still is my favorite holiday. I’ll talk more about this in part two.

Moving to Long Island, almost no one I knew was Jewish. One or two families. The schools were still closed on the Holy Days, but there were more questions about our identity. Who we were, why we didn’t celebrate some holidays that “everyone else” did.

In the “spring” we had Tu B’Shevat which was a Jewish Arbor Day. It celebrated trees and ecological awareness. It’s like Earth Day. We collected money to plant trees in Israel.

Next for us came Purim. There’s a meme online, but it’s older than that. With the Jewish holidays, many of them can be summed up with: they tried to kill us, they failed/we won, let’s eat. Purim is one of those holidays. We read the Book of Esther – the Megillah. We drown out the name of the bad man with our graggers or noisemakers, so no one should hear his name (Haman). I’ve considered doing that with some politicians. We make cookies in the shape of his hat (hamantashen) and eat them, but no, we hold no grudges. We dress in costumes and rejoice in our survival. We share food and drink and donate to charity.

It was a very busy year.

As we grew older, some holidays became less important. The secular world was expanding and sometimes I felt that we were almost secularized even though to an outsider, I was quite religious. I had even gone to Yom Kippur services in my small college town at the very small synagogue that looked more like a neighborhood house than a temple. I felt drawn to go despite not going to temple when I was home. There was no kosher dining hall at college, which was only a problem for me during the Passover holiday or when they served ham which I didn’t eat. I was kosher for the holidays, avoiding pork and bread when necessary. My family wasn’t kosher at home. My grandmother’s house was, and even though we could bring Chinese food to eat in her house, we had to eat on paper plates. We were not allowed to use her dishes. I still try to avoid bacon and pork during the holidays, and I’ve always fasted on Yom Kippur, except for the three times that I was pregnant, and continue to do so even though I’ve received the sacraments of the Catholic church. I am a coin with two sides. Both sides make me a whole.

I’ll talk more about this and my kids in part two, next week.

Stepping briefly into the politics of today, as a child I felt a connection to the land of Israel, I read the history books, but that was primarily biblical history, and not world history. Genesis and Exodus are full of our stories. I was very intrigued by the story of Masada, and still have memorabilia from when the television movie appeared in newspapers. It stuck with me. I didn’t have a deep-seated desire to visit, but I felt the vastness of the Jewish people, the ancient, and the historical of having been a part of the world for so long. (More on that when I talk about my kids.)

I want to be a person who sees both sides. Normally, I do, but with the terror attacks of October 7, and reading the history of terror since the beginning of the country of Israel in 1948, I don’t understand the world’s hatred of my people. Why is our history erased? Why are we, who are constantly attacked and terrorized, the “bad guys”? I don’t think I will ever understand it.