Throughout high school and college, there was this boy who had a crush on me. And he wasn't just any boy -- he was my rabbi's son. That in itself wasn't actually so alarming or awkward. I quite liked my rabbi and loved his family overall. But it just so happened that this particular son was on a path toward a more religious way of life. His family, like my own, was somewhere in the middle of the road of religious Judaism. "Conservadox," I liked to call it. For example, we kept the dietary laws in our homes but ate vegetarian food at non-Kosher restaurants, and we observed Shabbat and all the holidays but drove our cars instead of walking. But he was "becoming more frum," as we say when someone discards the leniencies of their childhood in pursuit of something more, whether it be more strict, more austere, more connected, more traditional, whatever that might be. This can be a noble pursuit, and in truth I was going through my own similar transformation, albeit in much smaller increments and with an end goal not so far from where I started. In his case, it meant ultimately wanting all the trappings of an ultra-orthodox lifestyle with its uniform of beard and black hat for himself, along with a wife who lived according to the same religious standards. This was where the trouble began, because no matter how kind he was, no matter how much I thought maybe I liked him back, no matter how sincere he seemed, I could never be that wife. You can imagine his surprise, then, when a few years after a disastrous attempt at dating he found out where I was living. "Borough Park," I said with a smile. It was a bastion of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn. For him it would have been a magnificent place to live! For me, it was anything but. Borough Park is among the larger neighborhoods in Brooklyn with over 106,000 people in its 2 square miles - a far cry from the town of 35,000 in which I grew up. In the 1980s, the already predominantly-Jewish neighborhood turned mostly Chassidic, a category which includes most ultra-Orthodox sects of Judaism. It is one of the largest concentrations of Jews outside of Israel, but instead of Hebrew, most of its residents conduct their lives in Yiddish.
It is also home to the hospital where J would do his residency, and for better or worse the hospital offered resident housing a few blocks away for a price that couldn't be beat. Since the prospect of apartment hunting from 800 miles away was a little more than either of us could bear amid the tumultuous transition we were already barely dealing with, we signed up for an apartment in one of the hospital-owned buildings in the neighborhood. To the small-town Jewish girl who was always more religious than her Jewish peers in college and was often the only Jew among her friends this should have been a dream come true! To think - I would be in a place where there was kosher food on every corner, a synagogue on every street. But I knew these Borough Park Jews were not my kind. They were the extended family that you never talk to or invite to your weddings, and whose connections in the family tree were tenuous and hard to identify. What I didn't expect was to suddenly become a shiksa. "Shiksa" is an otherwise benign Yiddish word for "non-Jewish woman," but in non-Yiddish-speaking circles it was a decidedly derogatory term. Said a certain way, it has the power to recall an entire collective history of discrimination and persecution at the hands of non-Jewish neighbors and leaders. As for its colloquial use, "She's a shiksa" is something a grandmother might snarl under her breath when her grandson brings a girl named Mary to prom. It was one of those Yiddish words I learned growing up but knew well enough never to use, held in the same regard as curse words and racial slurs. "Shiksa" can also be felt even when it's not pronounced, as I quickly learned in Borough Park. It's worth noting two things here: First, that when Yiddish is the lingua franca, shiksa is just a word. It can still be ill-intentioned in its use, but it may hold less weight than when it's used by predominantly English-speaking American Jews. Second, the ultra-Orthodox Jews in that neighborhood are so insular that even less observant forms of Jewish living might not really be Jewish in their book. Any deviations from a "Torah observant lifestyle" as indicated by dress, eating habits, and occasionally even speech might make a Satmar or Bobov Jew question their kinship to the broader Jewish community. While I was raised believing "A Jew is a Jew is a Jew," many Chassidic Jews are raised with less pluralistic outlooks. I only wish I'd known this going in. One Friday afternoon I was doing some last-minute grocery shopping, looking for the few missing ingredients for my Shabbat dinner. Per the Jewish dietary restrictions against mixing meat and dairy I specifically needed coconut milk for the soup that would accompany my chicken, since coconut milk is considered pareve, neither meat nor dairy. I was at our favorite Kosher grocery store, a place that had most of what we needed just down the block, so long as everything we needed was a Jewish brand that only Jews would ever buy. (Instead of Kellogg's, Frito-Lay, and Heinz, I got Paskez, Osem, and Manischewitz.) But I could not seem to find the coconut milk that I knew was hidden somewhere on the shelves, so I eventually asked one of the store's supervisors to help. The stout man with the long graying beard, white buttoned shirt, and tell-tale black vest eventually found a carton and held it up for me. "Is this what you're looking for?" he asked. I looked it over, finding whether or not the "D" for dairy accompanied the kosher symbol on its packaging. "This should be good, as long as it's pareve" I said. "Well, why don't you call the person you're buying it for just to be sure?" "Oh no," I responded, "It's for my shabbat dinner." It wasn't until I left the grocery store that the meaning behind that man's suggestion hit me: He thinks I'm someone's non-Jewish help. . . He thinks I'm a shiksa! Truth be told, I was too stunned to be insulted. And to be fair to the Jewish grocer, I wasn't exactly portraying myself as Jewish, what with my jeans and t-shirt (never mind my Yiddish references to Kashrut and the earnestness with which I sought the non-dairy alternative for my soup). And there probably weren't that many Jews who looked like me shopping in this place while at the same time caring about such detailed dietary restrictions. In all likelihood, I did not fit any category he had been taught to recognize. Scenes like this played out in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons throughout the year we lived there. For example, my first Shabbat in the neighborhood, I put on a long skirt and modest long-sleeved shirt and set out to look for a synagogue where I might feel comfortable. I passed a young couple sitting on their stoop, the man with his scraggly auburn beard and black hat, the woman wearing a lovely outfit that covered her elbows, her collarbones, her ankles despite the August heat. I looked at them and beamed, wishing them my warmest "Gut Shabbos!" and feeling gleeful that these strangers would understand and immediately know I was one of them! I was Jewish, and it felt good to be somewhere where that was the norm! But to my horror they looked at me with pursed lips as if I were a stranger's toddler at a funeral who had just announced a successful poo on the potty. Clearly, I had a lot to learn about navigating the neighborhood. It was a challenge of a different sort to allow myself to be labeled as a non-Jewish woman, or at the very least for my religious affiliation to be questioned. In Wisconsin it was rarely obvious to a passerby that I was Jewish, but I took every opportunity I could to make my religion and lifestyle known to classmates and friends in order to teach them and share in a cultural exchange. I took great pride in my Judaism which was, more often than not, a distinguishing feature. I had always bristled at the feeling of not being recognized or accepted as a Jew by other Jews, and never was this more constant than that first year of Residency. And yet, it had its benefits. So long as they didn't believe I was one of them, I didn't have any standards but my own to meet. I didn't have to prove anything to anyone, and deviations in my practice were noticed only by J. Still, the joy I felt upon leaving the neighborhood after that first year has been one of the highlights of our residency. But that's a story for another time.
2 Comments
Shlomo
2/11/2018 02:05:51 pm
N. never disappoints!!!
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Amy
2/11/2018 02:16:02 pm
I love your ability to take the reader into the scene with you! Keep up the excellent work
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AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
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