My Buried Boat

My Buried Boat

From time to time, wrecked ships surface on Cape Cod’s Nauset Beach.  They work their way up, a single plank pickled by the sea or the whole spine and ribcage of a boat that ran aground a hundred years before.  Some are excavated and, when possible, they are identified.  Then they typically remain where they are, too fragile or too incomplete to relocate.  Jewish identity has been my buried boat.  I didn’t know it was there and then I did and then, decades later, I wanted to excavate the vessel. I wanted to know what it was.  And I wanted to understand why that excavation mattered so much to me.

Growing up, I did not think of myself as Jewish. I knew that my parents left the Netherlands soon after the Nazi invasion, but they never talked about their emigration.  We lived in rural New Jersey and were active members of the Unitarian church in Plainfield.  Year by year, I made my way through Sunday School. I learned the hymns by heart.  Inside the Unitarian church, I felt at home. Old folks and young adults and small children knew my name and smiled when they saw me. These were my people.

Then I went to college.  New friends, who shared my politics and my outlook, said, “You’re Jewish, right?”  No, I was Unitarian.  “Yeah, sure,” they said. “But really you’re Jewish.”  Both honored and angered by their challenge, I realized for the first time how little I knew of my family history. What I did know seemed fraught with ambiguities.  Would my parents have been able to escape occupied Holland if they were really Jewish? Then again, why would they need to flee if they were not? 

When I asked my parents, my mother said yes, of course, her family was Jewish.  But she was a late child and her parents no longer went to services. She never learned Hebrew.  My father’s family had no apparent faith.  As a boy, he was curious about religion and started going on his own to a liberal Protestant church.    

My parents had deliberately not taken my sisters and me to Europe, not taught us the Dutch language they spoke with each other, and not discussed our connection to Judaism.  I felt I had missed out on information essential to my identity.  My heritage seemed to be a treasure hidden in plain sight, an open secret, never denied but never claimed.

When my parents retired to Cape Cod, they told us much more. In two-or three-page messages sent to my sisters and me, my father pieced together an anecdotal history, beginning with my mother’s family, and coming around finally to the escape from occupied Holland. He explained that they were married by a young German refugee rabbi. The ceremony was in City Hall because my father felt that since he knew so little about Judaism, marriage in a synagogue would be a travesty.  Over a period of years, bit by bit, he wrote us a book. My mother wrote down stories about her father’s Danish family and translated into English the journals written by her mother and her oldest sister.

With so much to tell, why had they not shared the information sooner?  My father believed that what he called the “Nazi insanity” was literally unspeakable.  In a letter to a Dutch school friend who had emigrated to Israel, he wrote: “We never gave our children a coherent story of that scandal because it is not a story for children.  One feels embarrassed, not for oneself as a person, but as a human being.”

My cousin Carla stayed in the Netherlands.  Before her parents were sent to the camps, they put Carla and her younger brother in hiding with the families of school friends.  By the time the two children were betrayed and sent to the camps themselves, the war was nearly over, and they survived.  Their parents did not. When I saw Carla a few years ago, she said, “Your father was a very smart man.  He made only one mistake: he thought he could leave the past behind.”  And that may be the best explanation of why I grew up without understanding that I was Jewish.

Inevitably, my parents embodied their past. Despite his best efforts, my father kept his Dutch accent.  My mother’s cooking remained distinctly European, so that I grew up without soda or tuna fish salad, or soft, white bread. My parents did not really fit in Plainfield, New Jersey, or in the rural township where we lived.  Had either of them been raised as an observant Jew, they might have known exactly where to find a strong, sheltering community. But neither of them felt Jewish when they arrived in New York. They were beginning a new life, starting a new family. So, they made a choice.  They chose a religion that felt right for who they were and who they hoped to become. 

They never regretted that choice. After his retirement from business, my father was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister and that commitment structured and enriched the last decades of my parents’ lives.  They understood this country to be their salvation, and they believed in the melting pot myth, then in its heyday.   Becoming naturalized –even the word is revealing-- meant blending into the great American stew.  By the time my sisters and I came along, the cultural mood had shifted. We came of age when people valued what made them distinctive. The Black Power movement, and Gay Pride, and the Second Wave of Feminism distinguished personal identities and celebrated differences. 

I respect my parents’ choices, but I claim my Jewish identity. It is precious to me and, at a time when antisemitism is widespread and virulent, denial would be both cowardly and futile.  By a sweet coincidence, both our sons married Jewish women and so our grandchildren are all Jewish.  One ship runs aground and another one sets sail. My grandchildren read Hebrew.  They have had their B’nai Mitzvahs.  They know the prayers for Shabbat. They can claim, without confusion or ambivalence, the great reserves of Jewish wisdom and tradition. 

I can’t exactly.  I’m obviously Jewish.  And I’m Unitarian Universalist.  Obviously.