On becoming a Jew
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lee Kofman
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Lee Kofman's biography and other articles by this writer
If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.
– Bernard Malamud
Brooklyn laundry, 2002: Sometimes I am asked how it feels to be a Jew in Australia. For years I had not considered myself a Jew. I was a woman, writer, lover, feminist, social worker and serial immigrant with a hyphenated national identity – Russian-Israeli-Australian – but I hardly identified as a Jew. I ate pork, lived outside Caulfield, had a multicultural circle of friends, and when I first arrived in Australia on the eve of the millennium, I was charmed by the gentle Australian men. I ended up marrying a Jew, but only by default. His upbringing and education were more those of an Aussie.
Recently I participated in an academic literary colloquium, reading my piece about a true story that happened to my mother in a Brooklyn laundry shortly after she immigrated to America.
My orthodox mother, unmistakably Jewish in a wig and opaque stockings despite New York's sticky summer, was waiting for her laundry to dry. The smells of fresh soap and stale clothes mixed in the airless room. A girl – maybe twelve, maybe a bit older, her raven-coloured hair braided into two neat plaits and her denim mini-skirt revealing the strong legs of an adolescent – stuck her tongue out at my mother while her own mother wasn't watching. It might have been a mistake, but she did it again. Then she gave my mother the finger. My mother tucked her head into her book.
The girl's mother walked out to smoke. Only my mother and the girl remained now in the stuffy laundry. The girl came closer in feline movements too adult for her age and whispered: "Bloody Jew, piss off. Bloody Jew ..." She nudged my mother, just a little bit, with her arm.
After I finished my reading, people approached me, saying how shocked they were upon hearing my story: Surely nowadays things like this hardly ever happen ...
As I drove home alongside the azure beach of the most liveable city in the world, where kangaroos, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Aussies all reside together, I doubted that my writing had done justice to my mother's feelings. I wondered what this particular incident had meant to her. Had it registered also in her mind as an accident in the modern, liberal world?
Strangely, it wasn't this incident itself, but the reaction of my peers, that made me do some soul searching. It occurred to me that, as my mother stretched her words along the New York-Melbourne line, putting on a cheerful bravado – "I whispered to her, but very firmly: ‘You little bitch, if you don't stop now, I'll call the police'." – I had responded to her story with the same shock and disbelief as the university audience. On that drive, I also recalled her brief silence which followed my reaction – unusual for my chatty mother.
From my car window, I watched palms and beach-going people. How lucky I was to live here, in serene Melbourne. In the mid-1980s, when I was a child and my family emigrated from Russia to Israel, my mother had felt similarly privileged. After her years in the Soviet Union (where everyone was equal but some were less equal, especially if they happened to be Jews, and where as a Masters graduate she had to work cleaning parks because of KGB persecution), she had arrived in the Jewish land foolishly expecting to find utopia.
We lived then in an immigrants' hostel: five people in two tiny rooms with iron beds. My mother insisted on keeping the door unlocked until one day my father, whose Hebrew was the best of all of us, read us a newspaper article about Israeli jails. My mother and I both gasped in disbelief: Jews as thieves? Murderers? Rapists? There is no such a thing ... but the doors were locked from then on.
I thought of my mother who, heavy-bodied but agile, climbed the Golan Mountain in her long dress and sneakers, and who in Jerusalem's eastern part of mosques and Allah Akhbar talked to a local Arab about the meaning of life. My mother who, even while locking the doors, still passionately loved every centimetre of that land for so long. Yet, seventeen years after our arrival, disillusioned with Israel's institutional corruption and politics, again she fulfilled her Jewish role of wanderer.
She came to America still believing in utopia. Despite the obvious hardships of being an immigrant in her early fifties, she embraced the American system with enthusiasm. Another phone conversation comes to mind.
"I took a taxi and the driver was Russian. Of course he turned out to be an ex-engineer ... Anyway, I asked what he thought of America. "It's not America," he replied. "It's Americhka!"
"I'm not sure I understand."
"I'll give you an example: here if your income is under a certain amount you get a tax refund at the end of the year. Can you imagine a law like that in Israel? This is exactly what he meant. Darling Americhka."
I was still driving. And thinking. And watching the pale-blue sky embroidered with sunshine. I never tire of Melbourne's beauty, just as my mother is utterly taken with New York's dense foliage and art galleries. While struggling to find employment and an affordable apartment, she still cultivates, with her tireless energy, love for this tough city. She passionately appreciates whatever it bestows upon her: markets, convenient public transport, good education for my brothers. The city is like her new beloved. That day in the laundry, I now believe, was his first betrayal.
CAUFIELD 2000: I TOLD THE STORY TO MY Israeli friend, who has been living in Melbourne longer than I. Both of us have witnessed several anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli verbal attacks since migrating, but agreed that in contemporary Australia it has never been the norm. We have never felt particularly singled out.
My friend thought I was over-reacting.
"What are you saying? That the West is incurably anti-Semitic? That Jews will never find a refuge? What do you expect? You said yourself, there is no such thing as utopia. It's not always about Jews: it's human nature to dislike outsiders. Luckily we live in a place where most people are tolerant."
I walked away even more disturbed, thinking I was turning into a true diaspora Jew, infested with paranoia a la Woody Allen.
Having spent most of my life in Israel, accustomed to being a majority in that country, I was naturally less preoccupied with my ethnicity than the Jewish community in Australia. Isaiah Berlin, an English-Jewish philosopher, once said: "In Israel I don't particularly feel a Jew, but in England I do."
Diasporas tend to perceive their countries of origin as symbols for their particular yearnings, rather than as complex realities. The Jewish diaspora is no different. As the Israeli-Australian anthropologist Dr Cohen puts it: "Many Israelis living in Australia feel that the local Jewish community likes Israel (as central to their Jewish identity), but dislikes Israelis. The community doesn't like seeing them leaving the country, even though they themselves live here. This is the paradox."
Consequently, Israeli migrants often develop dubious relationships with the Jewish diaspora. It is the same with families: technically, you are of the same blood – but not necessarily organically compatible. I owed the Jewish community, though. As a new immigrant, I struggled to find decent employment with my Israeli qualifications and work history. A major charitable Jewish organisation gave me my first chance, employing me to run a fundraising campaign based, of course, in Caulfield, where everybody knew everybody and Yiddish was spoken as much as English.
Raising money that went into water recycling and tree planting in both Israel and Australia was an exercise of real value. I plunged myself into the work, admiring the generosity of the community members who donated their time and money. Yet I wasn't organically compatible. As an ex-Soviet child brought up on everyday portions of uncontested patriotism, I grew up suspicious of any rhetoric, and everything to do with Israel was uncontested in Caulfield.
I knew from first-hand experience how Israel was imperfect, based in an impossible location and dealing with impossible problems. Its people – both Arabs and Jews – were busy surviving rather than simply living. Every day you hadn't exploded, or been shot, or robbed of your money by the taxation office or an unfair employer was a good day. In such extreme circumstances, the reality was shifting constantly from beautiful to horrific and vice versa. People were corrupt and courageous, selfish and kind. Living in Israel was like riding a roller coaster day after day. But I couldn't really talk about this at work.
I felt so ambivalent in Caulfield, where people took on astronomic mortgages just to live amongst other Jews creating a quasi-shtetl, and sometimes remained single in the absence of a suitable Jewish spouse, spending weekends at Jewish functions amongst the same people they had known since school. If that was what it meant to be a Jew, then I definitely wasn't one.
"There is something you don't get," a thirty-something Australian-Jewish woman told me. After spending her youth in Jewish schooling, at Jewish functions and in Jewish neighbourhoods, she had broken free and moved to Byron Bay.
"We huddle together, because we're a traumatised community. Our parents and grandparents are mostly war refugees, some raised us in houses stuffed with canned foods, just in case another war broke out."
Indeed, the Holocaust has been deeply internalised as a lingering residue within the subsequent generations of Jews. Though memories of it are often loudly invoked, writes the academic and writer Eva Hoffman, it is rarely discussed, unpacked or processed. Unable to come to terms with its impacts and legacy, we replay in our minds a tragic narrative which neither empowers nor enlightens us.
It is not only the tragic past that never really loosens its grip on our present; we are also trapped by the looming, hypothetical future. Memories of the Holocaust become a constant reminder to stay on guard. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote of the Holocaust as "a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe."
This unexpectedness has understandably caused a lot of fear in generations to follow, but has also engendered a rhetoric. For the post-Holocaust Jewish community, Israel is the embodiment of the hope "Never again!" so questioning the country's ways can be seen to undermine Jews' own security.
Gradually I started realising how much pain there was in Caulfield, disguised with merry klezmer tunes.
I was forming a counter-argument to my Israeli friend. Jews are not merely other outsiders. Since the Romans threw us out of Israel, for centuries we have missed out on the normalising experience of possessing a home that most other diasporas had at some stage. This perpetual homelessness, the lack of origins, also made the Jews more suspicious in their "host countries" – it turned them into extra-outsiders. Stalin is known to have said that the Jewish lack of a homeland made them "mystical, intangible, other-worldly".
Our national psyche has developed differently based on this constant oscillation between prospering in the host countries, then being persecuted for this same prospering and other prejudices, and moving on again and again. This odd condition finally culminated in the Holocaust.