Our Reference Group

When does identity get wobbly?

by Wendy Saul

“It’s all about reference groups” my sociologist friend informs me as I rant on about wealth disparities. There has been a lot written about tribes and affiliation, but somehow her comment about reference groups struck me as different. Reference is about who you compare yourself to, what you aspire to for yourself and your children, what you see as too sexy or not sexy enough, too religious or not religious enough, too pretentious or not appropriately satisfied.

For some, their reference group feels immutable. I remember picnicking with a teacher in rural Azerbaijan. We sat on a hillside as he pointed to the school he attended and where his children went to school. He now taught there. He pointed to the grape vines and told me that he helped plant them. And then he turned in the other direction, to the cemetary, where his parents and grandparents and great-grands were buried and smiled as he showed me his own final “resting place.” His references were so clear, so stable. And there I was, thousands of miles from home, a Jew sitting with a Muslim, an educated westerner asking questions of a very smart man who asked me none. My reference group wobbled as I thought about what my life might have been like had I been dropped here as an infant.

Admittedly, this wobble was familiar. I wonder how common this reference-group wobble is among Jews. Was it more pronounced in my own family than in others? The wobble returned recently when I read an article about a soon-to-open Borscht Belt Museum. Various sorts of Jews had gathered in the Catskills for generations: B’nai Brith leaders and Communist sympathizers, religious zealots or families like Mrs. Maisels of TV fame, located their own, separate communities “in the country.” Certainly, they were all Jews, but different kinds of Jews with different reference groups.

My own family was destined never to be wholly comfortable there. My father grew up in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, a coal mining town where his parents, the only Jews, owned the only dry goods store. He and his siblings were outsiders who went to school, worked and played with friends, but were marked, often invisibly or inarticulately, as different. His Jewish identity ran deep, but he was what I might call bicultural.

Handsome and winsome, my father “married up” — maybe. She was the daughter of an Orthodox silk mill owner whose wife joined a Reform temple and travelled from Battle Creek, Michigan to Lausanne, Switzerland, to Coney Island, in search of health spas. They sent my mother to Abbott Academy where her piano teacher called her Natalie Davenport rather than by her name, Rosalie Rappoport.

When thinking about what should go into exhibits at the Borscht Belt Museum, I smile at stories of the Catskills shared by my parents’ dear friends. They met at one of the huge resorts - she played the accordian and sang, and he was a waiter. This is a museum, were they alive, that they could visit with easy recognition and enthusiasm. My own hope is that this museum also makes space for those who had a less easy or distant relationship with the Borscht Belt, those who were the sometimes, but not the regulars, people who saw the brash humor, the mounds of chopped liver as theirs but also not theirs. I hope this is also a place to talk about race and class and the conversations Borscht Belt regulars had with and about their children.

And then I think about us — my reference group (maybe) — the getting-old folks, basically confirmed in our political beliefs, people who have traveled the world. Our kitchen cabinets are full, and entertainment is not an issue. I am proposing that we think about those spaces where we wobble. Whom do we view as our own reference groups? Are we anxious to become less wobbly? Admittedly, I now find myself happy in this borderland, with an identity that invites discomfort.