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            Fragen

Questions

Bubby, am I one hundred percent Jewish?

I am eight years old when I first dare to formulate the question I had been turning over in my mind for such a long time. I have been worrying that there might be a sinister reason for the way my thoughts tend toward doubt instead of faith. This way of life we lead, it does not come naturally to me, although I know it should. Because no one else suffers from this affliction, I wonder if genealogical contamination can explain the anomaly. I suspect I am regarded as tainted by my mother's actions, so it follows that she too could have been tainted by someone else, by some mysterious, forgotten ancestor in her past. This would explain why I am the way I am, and not like the others.

Bubby, am I one hundred percent Jewish? I ask. Because I think that whether I am or am not is a matter that defines my destiny. Because I need to know if I have a hope of fitting in.

What a silly question! she exclaims in response. Of course you are Jewish, she assures me. Everybody in our community is. She dismisses my earnest fear with a laugh. But how can she be so certain?

Look at our world, she says. Look at how separate we live. How we have always lived. Jews don't mix with others, and others don't mix with us, so how do you think you could be anything less than one hundred percent?

I didn't think to inquire then why so many people in our community have light eyes, pale skin, and fair hair. My grandmother herself had always spoken proudly of her blond children. Pale, non-stereotypically Jewish features were valuable commodities among us. They meant one would be able to pass. It was the gift of disguise that God granted, seemingly at random, although we were led to believe that he had a precise system in terms of granting privileges, so perhaps lack of blondness denoted a spiritual inferiority, or perhaps it was actually the other way around, depending on how you looked at things. When I met my husband for the first time at the age of seventeen, I focused mostly on his golden hair and what that would mean for my genetic legacy. I wondered if the gene was strong enough to guarantee me golden-haired children, children who would be safe when the world, trapped in its unalterable pattern of orbit, turned against them.

Now I understand that those Eastern European features and fair coloring align perfectly with the genetic studies that have long since confirmed that none of us are one hundred percent of anything. But these findings never made it into our midst, and if they did, they probably wouldn't have mattered. In our community, we believed that as long as we were separate, we were pure by default.

This word, though, "pure"-it doesn't come from our language, from our vocabulary. Our word for "pure" is tuhor, and its original meaning applies only to spiritual purity. It means to be pure of intention, to be clean of sin. In the Hasidic tradition, this kind of purity ostensibly outweighs the importance of strong ancestry. The obsession with pure bloodlines would come later, perhaps as a by-product of the ideology and laws that defined us by exclusion. One drop of Jewish blood was all it took, not for the first time in Hitler's Germany, so those who could, fought to hide that drop and deny its existence, but out of instinctive...