LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 2

      “Different” from the Beginning

      It seems that from my first cognizant moment, I had questions -- and they weren’t easy questions! I wanted to know, “Why is Mommy crying?” - “Why are we in the car and leaving our home?” - “Why are my sisters bigger than me?” - “Why doesn’t Mommy like our new home and our new neighbors?” - “Why does she say, ‘we are different’?” - “What is Jewish?” “Why are we Jewish?” - “Why don’t we like Jesus the way my friend Susie does?” - “Why is her big family so happy?” - “Why do they have a tree at Christmas and why don’t we?”

      All of those questions arose before the age of five. We had traveled cross-country from Mother’s family in California to Ohio so that Daddy could take over a diaper service business. His older brothers set him up in Akron after he had lost his money in a failed business venture in California.

      I was the youngest of three girls. Shortly after I was born, Daddy moved the family from Pittsburgh, where they had lived in a tight-knit Jewish community, to California. Mommy was longing to be near her mother, brothers, and sister who had all left Pittsburgh for California a few years earlier. Unfortunately for our young family, the move to California didn’t work out, and now the family was “exiled” to Akron, Ohio. There, we had to live among Christian neighbors, without the tight-knit Jewish community of Pittsburgh, or the family ties in California.

      My parents had, in a way, been casualties of World War II, even though Daddy was lucky enough to never fight a day on account of hemorrhoids. (The humor wasn’t lost on him. He was saved by his ass!) But every Jew in America had been horrified by the war, and terrified thinking of what might have happened if the Nazis had won. Feeling like a fish out of water in Akron, my mother became agoraphobic -- a captive of her fears which were totally unfounded. In fact, her neighbors adored her and appreciated this quiet, soft-spoken, shy woman that she had become over the years. What they didn’t know was that this woman had changed quite a bit from the gregarious, bright, witty girl who had once stolen my father’s heart.

      I, however, only knew the frightened woman who was secluding herself in the home we moved into when I was three years old. That was when the questions started forming in my mind.

      By the time I was five, and once my Catholic friend, Susie had explained Jesus to me, I asked the question that horrified my mother the most: “Why don’t we like Jesus?” I told her I did like Jesus from everything I’d heard about him and wanted to keep on liking him. “Was that okay?” She immediately called for my father, and asked him to help me understand that we couldn’t be like those people. We were different!

      Now I was to accept that I could play with all my little friends in the neighborhood, but I could never, ever really be friends with them. That would be impossible. We were all different.

      My parents enrolled me in Sunday school with my sisters to begin my Jewish education and to make Jewish friends. In the fall of my first year, around Halloween, all the children were taken to the small sanctuary to see a movie about Youth Aliyah. It was 1950, and we were to take little blue tins to our neighbors’ homes on Halloween and ask for money to bring the children who had survived the Holocaust in Europe to Israel.

      Since we were too young to know what the Holocaust was, they showed us a movie about it with footage of little children just like us, dressed in striped pajamas in freezing weather, standing behind barbed wire fence. The children were hollow-eyed and skeletal. The Christians had done this to the Jews, they said.

      I was stunned. Horrified. I came home and asked my parents what this all meant. I have no memory of what they said -- but I hid my blue tin. I couldn’t ask all the nice people in my neighborhood for money for these children. I was too embarrassed and afraid they would think I was blaming them for what had happened to these other children. I was also afraid the blue tin might give them ideas.

      I pushed the horror from my mind. But it wouldn’t leave. How could the Jesus my friends were telling me about want this to happen to children just like me? This made no sense, and no one was answering my questions. All I heard was that this was true, it did happen, and we must always know it could happen again. We must never forget.

      I formed a protective wall around me. I now adopted the “wall that made me different” from my friends. But even as I hid behind it, I stubbornly kept my friends and kept pushing my mind to find what was similar. Weren’t we all just children? Didn’t we all like to ride our bikes, roller skate, play tag, put on talent shows, play cowboys and Indians, and ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’?

      So, I had an idyllic childhood in Akron, Ohio with all my Christian friends, but I never forgot.