Don't tell them...

You don't look Jewish.

I was eight. My Dad Peter was a tall, very handsome and charming guy though his relationship with alcohol was rough on all of us. He considered himself Episcopalian. Somehow I cannot imagine his family, a father who left before he was born and his single mom rallying on Sunday to head off to church. But maybe.

My Mom Charlotte was a 5 foot tall dynamo. Great dancer, beautiful and vivacious. She was Jewish. Not a go to temple Jew, but a first generation Ashkenazi Jew, her parents from Belarus. She had been engaged to a dentist when my Dad stopped her heart, then made it beat wildly, leaning against a car (she thought was his) snug jeans, white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pack of cigarettes in the left one. They went out dancing, then roller skating/dancing. She broke off the engagement with the dentist.

Peter had dropped out of HS, joined the Canadian Mounted Police, lying about his age, place of birth. He was a proficient liar. Now that I think about it, maybe that was a lie too! Charlotte graduated HS early, was in the young people’s orchestra led by Leonard Bernstein. She played clarinet. Wanting to go on to college, her three older sister’s told her she was so smart she didn’t need college. They needed her to take her turn making money to support their Mom, so they didn’t have to.

Married at 21, August 1951, Charlotte gave birth to me in June 1952. Peter was in the Army when she gave him the news she was pregnant. “How did that happen?” was his response. Honorably discharged after only a few months. My Mom found the discharge papers when I was 60. I wept when she read what was on them. Discharged due to high anxiety, the papers contained his entire medical history back into his childhood. Multiple severe concussions, broken arms, legs, ribs. Bedwetting through the age of 16, Psychiatric evaluations. He had been a severely abused child. Tragic.

(For all the horrors of the times we are living in, I’d like to think their story might have been different had they been open to getting the support now available)

One evening, I overheard them talking about a Country Club. I don’t think I really knew what a Country Club was, but my Dad wanted to join the local one. “Peter, we can’t join that Country Club, they don’t allow Jews” “You don’t need to tell the you are Jewish, you don’t look Jewish” I remember feeling so many feelings at once. And questions. Was I Jewish? What was wrong with being Jewish? Was it OK to lie about being Jewish? What was really going on here? Did I look Jewish?

It was the beginning of my feeling ashamed of being a Jew. As I found out, since my mom was a Jew, I was too. Is this why the genocide happening in Gaza has hit my heart and soul so intensely? How could a people who for centuries have been so repressed and abused do this to anyone else? I am relieved to see Jews from all over the world standing up for a ceasefire. Calling what is happening WRONG. And I am equally appalled and confused at how anyone can say “it started October 7th, it’s complicated”, or even worse, “I just don’t want to talk about it”.

I got over being ashamed of my Jewish heritage when I was 33. Now I feel ashamed of the entire world who are, mostly, turning a blind eye to the atrocities that the US, UK and Israel are perpetrating on the Palestinian people.