Dear Fellow (((White People))) Part Two

I grew up in West Virginia, but my parents grew up in New York, New York. Brooklyn, to be specific.

It was a summertime tradition when my siblings and I were growing up to take a pilgrimage back to the Motherland for a week or so. We would stay in Grandma's house in Brooklyn, walk the mean streets, and eat the best pizza on planet Earth.

Driving over the Brooklyn Bridge into the Old Country was always something special back then. While I was culturally Southern and West Virginian (I still have a touch of that back-country accent to this day), I also grew up never meeting a person who looked like me who wasn't a blood relative. But that was different in New York. In New York, I could look out the window of our minivan and see people who looked like me walking the streets.

Of course, there were also Blacks and Russians and Chinese walking the streets, but the point was it wasn't 99.8% Scotch-Irish. It was a window into another world much different from the world I spent 99.9% of my life in. In West Virginia, I was a minority beyond reckoning. In New York, I was still out of place, but culturally instead of ethnically.

Now, I want to be very clear about something. My Jewish extended family never made me feel like an outsider or inferior in any way. This is something I can't say about my non-Jewish extended family. So it wasn't until I was relatively older that I started to understand that I wasn't "really" Jewish.

When I was about 10 years old (11? 12?) my Grandmother died. She was one of the sweetest, most loving women that I have ever known. Her family was Jewish, from Poland. Amusingly, they were kicked out of the country a few years before World War II because Great-Grandpa was a horse thief. So the only reason that branch of the family survived the Holocaust was because they were running from the law.

Now, until my Grandmother died, the only Jews I had had contact with were blood relatives. And again, they never showed me or my siblings anything but love, despite the fact that my Father had converted to Christianity and raised us as Christians. So I never had any sense of antipathy towards my Jewish heritage. If anything, in the Fundamentalist Protestant Wonderland of West Virginia, it made me something closer to a local celebrity than an outcast.

And then my Grandmother died.

My Grandfather was not born Jewish, but converted in order to marry my Grandmother. And when my Grandmother died, we piled into the mini-van and drove up to Brooklyn for the funeral.

Now you need to understand, while I grew up knowing that I was Jewish, my exposure to Jewish culture was strictly limited to matzah and Manischewitz. Hell, I have to rely on spellcheck to type those two right. My Grandparents were fond of making Hypocrite Stuffing for Thanksgiving, a turkey stuffing rich with pork products and irony. So ceremonial cleanliness was not something I was used to.

So imagine this. It's my Grandparents' small apartment in the Brooklyn projects. My Grandmother, one of the best people I have ever known, has just died. My Father is comforting my Grandfather as we kids are doing our best to hold it together. The front door opens. Grim-faced men in black hats and side-curls come into the apartment, men who I have never met before in my life, come into my Grandparents' apartment and demand that we leave.

As a preteen, I have no frame of reference for this. Who are these strange men to come into my Grandparents' apartment, where I have spent every summer of my life, and demand that we leave? In my Grandfather's moment of grief? In my Father's moment of grief? In my moment of grief? And yet, my Father ushers us kids out. On the way to my mother's family's house, he explains. These men are here to sit shiva for my Grandmother, and as Christian half-breeds, our presence would defile the apartment.

Now, I had read enough of the Old Testament as a child to kind of get the general idea. But I had also grown up my entire life being looked at as different for being a Jew. In West Virginia, being 1/4 Jewish made me an outsider, marked out as different and strange. And now, for the first time, being 3/4 Gentile made me the same thing.

What was I? Who was I? Who the fuck were these Rabbi-looking mother fuckers to kick me out of my Grandparent's apartment? I was used to getting strange looks for not being White. I was not used to being treated like trash for not being Jewish enough.