Swimming Across the Hudson (7 page)

Halfheartedly I considered searching for my birth mother back then. I asked my parents who she was. They said they'd tell me when I turned eighteen.

On my eighteenth birthday, my parents threw me a surprise party. They invited my friends from school and summer camp, everyone I knew in a huge bowling alley. Rock music played on the speakers. The drinking age was still eighteen. Standing by the flickering pinball machines, my father bought me a can of Schaefer beer. Schaefer. The beer that sponsored the New York Mets. As I popped open the tab I looked at my father, who was also drinking a Schaefer, my father who didn't like beer, who never before and never since drank a beer with his son.

I understood even then what my parents were doing. They were hoping to drown me in the party, to make the day pass without my noticing that I could find out who my birth mother was.

I said nothing about this. Not that day or the next. As the days passed and then the weeks, I wondered why knowing was important to me. I had parents who loved me. Couldn't I control my curiosity when I realized how much this upset them?

 

I
'm not Jewish,” I told Jenny when I returned to San Francisco.

“What are you talking about?”

I described what had happened in New York.

“But your parents converted you, so what difference does it make?”

Yes, my parents had converted me, so technically I may have been Jewish. Even that I wasn't sure of. But I couldn't look at myself the same way.

“Why not?”

“Because if your mother's Jewish, then you are too. And if she's not, you're not.”

“But your mother
is
Jewish.”

“Not my birth mother. She's the one who counts.”

It was no longer clear what made me Jewish. Had I been Jewish only because I thought I'd been born Jewish, and now that I was wrong, I wasn't a Jew? If my parents hadn't converted me and everything else had stayed the same—the sabbath, the kosher home, the Jewish day school—I wouldn't be a Jew no matter what I thought. I couldn't be counted for a minyan at synagogue. Now that I'd stopped being religious, my parents' revelation worried me even more. I was living with someone who wasn't Jewish. I had nothing to fall back on.

“Let's say someone's mother is Jewish,” Jenny said, “which makes that person's mother's mother also Jewish. How far does it go back, anyway?”

“To Abraham.”

“You think every Jew is descended from Abraham?”

I was inclined to say yes. But that sounded about as reliable as claiming that the world was five thousand years old.

“Fine,” she said, “then you're not Jewish. It makes things easier for both of us.”

“If only it were so simple.”

It bothered Jenny the way my parents behaved, always kind and polite when they saw her, but also always distant. Even my mother, who, under other circumstances, would have loved Jenny (they had a lot in common, I thought), could be curiously remote around her. My mother herself wasn't religious; she'd simply compromised for my father's sake. I was surprised that it was important to her that I marry a Jew. But it
was
important to her. She quietly allied herself with my father, who thought my relationship with Jenny would someday end, who still phoned me with the names of single Jewish girls, with the silent breathless weight of his hoping.

I thought of turning to a rabbi. But I didn't know any rabbis. Before I'd gotten my birth mother's letter, the only times I went to synagogue were when I returned to New York. The day her letter came, however, I chatted with the rabbi after services in Berkeley. He struck me as a decent man. When I called him now, he agreed to meet with me.

Rabbi Stone's office was in the back of the synagogue. The air smelled familiar, the sweet fermented scent of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where my father grew up and where our teachers took us to see matzo made by hand and the sabbath wine bottled.

Rabbi Stone told me a little about himself. He had grown up in New York City, in an assimilated Jewish home on Central Park West. He'd gone to the Trinity School, where the students attended chapel every morning despite the fact that many of them were Jewish.
His parents had had a Christmas tree, although they'd called it a bush and decorated its branches with Stars of David. Jesus was Jewish, his parents had said. They liked to remind him of that.

When he got to Princeton, Rabbi Stone found God. He studied at a yeshiva in Israel and came back to the United States to prepare for the rabbinate.

He was more or less my age. Several times since I'd met him, I'd seen him on the streets of Berkeley carrying a knapsack on his shoulder, not looking like my idea of an Orthodox rabbi. He had no beard. His head was always covered, but sometimes he didn't wear a yarmulke—instead sporting a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap with the peak turned slightly to the side. I'd watched him from afar at Berkeley Bowl, strolling through the produce aisles with his infant son in a front pack.

He asked me now about my religious education. I'd told him that I'd gone to Jewish day school. He wanted to know if I'd studied Talmud and if my Hebrew was fluent.

I'd learned Talmud, I said. I could still speak Hebrew and make my way through the prayer service. The day I'd met him, I'd been surprised by how familiar the liturgy sounded. My grade-school teacher, Rabbi Appelfeld, had described Jewish learning as a car without brakes: either you were going forward or you were going backward. But there I'd been in synagogue that morning, and all the tunes came back to me.

“You wanted to talk about adoption,” Rabbi Stone said.

I nodded. “But first I need you to promise not to judge me.”

“Why would I judge you?”

“Because you're an Orthodox rabbi. You think a Jew's supposed to live a particular way, and by those standards I don't do very well.”

He looked kindly at me. His eyes were gray, the color of quartz; they sparkled briefly in the synagogue light. “I have my beliefs. But I only preach to those who want to be preached to. Besides, that's not what you've come to talk about.”

He opened a volume of the Talmud and read to me. “
Kol ha'migadel yatom b'toch bayto, ma'aleh alav ha'katuv ki'eelu yilado. Kol ha'milamed ben chavayro Torah, ma'aleh alav ha'katuv ki'eelu yilado
.” He translated: “Whosoever rears an orphan in his own house is considered by Scripture as if he fathered the child. Whosoever teaches Torah to the son of his companion, Scripture considers him as if he begat him.” King Saul's daughter Michal reared the children of her sister Merav and therefore was considered their mother. Even Batia, the daughter of Pharaoh, was deemed Moses' mother for having saved and reared him.

For most purposes, Rabbi Stone said, my adoptive parents were my parents from the perspective of Jewish law. When they died, I should say kaddish for them. I was obligated to obey them, as the Torah commanded.

Still, he said, adopted children were like orphans. They should be treated sensitively.

“I'm not an orphan,” I said.

“Not literally.”

“Not figuratively either.” Behind him, on a bookshelf, the volumes of the Talmud were lined up. Next to them were the Five Books of Moses. Squeezed on other shelves were scores of commentaries in Hebrew and Aramaic. Some I'd heard of, some I hadn't; some were almost a thousand years old. It was depressing how much there was and how little I knew. I, who in many ways was an educated Jew, had turned my back on this tradition without fully learning it.

“I have two parents who love me,” I said.

“Of course you do.”

“But you consider me an orphan.”

“Not exactly.” He opened his desk drawer and removed a sheet of paper. It was a bibliography he'd prepared for me. I felt bad for having been rude to him. He didn't even know me. It wasn't clear what I'd done to deserve his kindness.

“I didn't mean to be impatient.”

“Jews are an impatient people.”

“But I wasn't born Jewish.” I felt as though I were sitting before a great arbiter of law, before God himself. I hoped that Rabbi Stone would release me, that he'd recast my life with his long rabbinic fingers and tell me I wasn't Jewish.

“You're a Jew,” he said. “If your conversion was valid, as I gather it was, if you were raised a Jew, as you say you were, if you continued to practice even after your bar mitzvah, then you're a Jew according to the law.”

I felt great disappointment and great relief.

He spoke to me in Hebrew: “
Yehoodee hoo yehoodee af al pee she'yechetah
. Do you know what that means?”

I did, I told him. I'd heard those words from Rabbi Appelfeld.
A Jew is a Jew even if he sins
. It was impossible, Rabbi Appelfeld had said, to convert from Judaism.

My father's words came back to me. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. I was a Jew, but I wasn't. I didn't care what Rabbi Stone said. I didn't, and I did.

I got up from my chair and shook his hand. I thanked him for meeting with me.

As I reached the synagogue doors, he called out. “Come back anytime.”

“To synagogue?”

He was standing in the shadows at the front. The light from the ark shone on his head, casting him in swaths of orange. “Why not?”

“I don't believe in God. It would be hypocritical for me to go to services.”

“You came once.”

“That's true.”

“And you've been before. The door's always open.”

“Thank you. I don't expect to come back, but I appreciate your offer.”

 

T
hree weeks to the day after her letter arrived, my birth mother called. She was flying to San Francisco the following afternoon and wanted to meet me the day after that for lunch.

Perhaps she, like my parents, would spring news upon me. You've inherited a terrible disease. You've been bequeathed ten million dollars. I saw myself at lunch with her, still numb, thinking:
You're thirty years old, and you're meeting your birth mother for the first time. What are you feeling right now?

I didn't feel anything.

Two days later, I waited for her at an Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I loved Ethiopian food, this restaurant especially. I wanted to show her my good taste. This is my town, this is my restaurant, as if I myself had cooked the food.

But now I wasn't sure I'd made the right choice. She lived in Indiana. Perhaps a hamburger would have been better. Briefly, on the phone, I'd asked her what she looked like so that I wouldn't embarrass myself in the restaurant, moving from patron to patron, asking every woman whether she was related to me. But my birth mother hadn't been specific. She looked average, she said. I'd seen a magazine cover with a picture of the “Average American” on it. It was a computer composite of various races, weights, and body types. Maybe that was my birth mother, a goulash of strange people come to find me.

She'd asked on the phone if I would pick her up at the airport,
but I'd refused. I would see her, I said, though not at an airport, a place constructed for reunions. Maybe she would try to hug me. I didn't want her to, and I didn't want her not to.

At work the day before, I'd kept glancing at my watch, waiting for the time her plane would arrive. While lecturing on Jim Crow, I tossed my chalk from hand to hand; I found myself looking out the window. She seemed to be everywhere now that she'd arrived. I almost expected her to land outside school and get off the plane and greet me.

I thought of her as a homeless woman, pushing a shopping cart off the airplane, showing up at the apartment with her bric-a-brac. In the morning I'd wake up and find her stuff on our floor—magazines, chewing gum, old packets of tissues. She'd comb through our fridge for leftover food, leaving cellophane wrappers crumpled on the counter.

A woman walked toward me in the restaurant. The black leather pocketbook slung over her shoulder thumped against her side. “Ben,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “Susan Green.” She was smaller than I'd imagined, almost a foot shorter than I was. She had a wide symmetrical face, while mine was longer and narrower, and pale green eyes, while mine were blue. Her skin was darker than mine, but we both had sandy hair. Her nose was straight like my nose; her nostrils were evenly parted. But what I noticed most was how young she seemed. She looked like a Catholic schoolgirl.

“Hello, Mrs. Green.” She wore a navy blazer and a gray wool skirt; around her neck was a string of pearls. In each earlobe was a tiny gold stud in the shape of a star; I smelled perfume on her. Her hands were small but muscular. I was struck by the strength of her grip, and by the ease with which she held herself. I'd been expecting someone more retiring.

“You recognized me,” I said.

And she said, not unkindly, “Mother's intuition.”

She looked around the restaurant. I'd been right to second-guess
myself. She seemed unsure about the place, glancing up and down the aisles. Then I saw what was bothering her. The patrons were eating on the floor.