Secrecy Won't Keep You Safe In The Long Run
Eve Marx
Eve doing her best Shiksa imitation.
Word Count 1269
I was born into a world of secrets. Everything that happened in my family was on the hush-hush. My father worked for mobsters; my mother didn’t have friends. Instead, she had confidantes. I found their world of whispers and innuendo endlessly intriguing and even as a young child, managed to be around but not underfoot, perfecting my eavesdropping skills and reading body language.
My father’s family were all dead before I was born, but my mother’s father and her two siblings were around enough for me to pick up on their secrets. The principal family secret was that we were Jewish. My grandfather, a chemist employed by a company that famously did not employ Jews, lied to get a job he proudly held for thirty years. The family told anyone who asked that they were Unitarians, a convenient lie as there was no Unitarian church in that town and therefore no one to squeal on them. On Friday nights, they closed the curtains and pulled down the shades to hide their Shabbat candles. When my grandfather retired, he returned to being Jewish. My mother, who early on decided she didn’t believe in God or organized religion, frequently reminded me that should another Hitler-type turn up, we would most certainly be outed as Jews and likely rounded up.
At the start of seventh grade, my mother moved us back to the semi-rural and largely anti-Semitic town where she grew up. During my first week in the new school, the homeroom teacher asked if he could rub his hands all over my scalp, clearly looking for something. What are you looking for, I asked. “Horns,” he said. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you? Maybe because you’re young, they’re still just tiny nubs.” When I mentioned this to my mother, she warned me not to complain and keep my mouth shut.
After being called a few painfully derogatory ethnic names while in line at the school lunchroom, I began to see it was safer to keep my Jewishness on the down low. I didn’t know much about Judaism anyway, having had no education. I thought being Jewish meant you ate bagels instead of English muffins and Chinese food on Sunday. So, my secrecy took a passive stance. It felt more like lying by omission. I was encouraged when my mother told me my paternal grandmother, long dead, had abandoned her religion to convert to Catholicism. I had some Catholic friends, so I started attending their church. This led to a mother’s helper job I held the summer between seventh and eighth grades, employed by a family who belonged to the Catholic church. After school resumed in the fall, they hired me to babysit their two young sons most Saturday nights. It was around Christmas, and I was hanging out with the kids while they ate their Chef Boyardee when the older one, Russell, who was seven or eight, asked about my Christmas tree. It’s not nearly as nice as yours, I assured him. And my mother doesn’t call it a Christmas tree. She calls it a Hanukkah bush.
“You’re Jewish?” the child asked. He stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs, “You killed Christ!”
“Not me,” I said. “I wasn’t there.” He wasn’t having it and dragged his little brother from the table, up the stairs, where they barricaded themselves in the bathroom, screaming in what seemed like real terror.
When their father drove me home and handed me twenty bucks, the going rate for babysitters at the time being .50 cents an hour, I stupidly imagined he was giving me a holiday tip. Instead, he informed me I wouldn’t be babysitting for them anymore. Because I’d met them at church, they never realized I was Jewish. He acted like I’d lied to them, which perhaps I had.
During my sophomore year of high school, I dated a guy who was a freshman at a Jesuit college. To save money, he didn’t live on campus but at home with his mother. Our relationship was furtive because his mother would go crazy if she knew he was seeing a Jewess. That’s what he called me. A Jewess. One afternoon when we were driving around, he remembered something he’d left at his house. He told me to wait outside, not even on the porch, because she would know I’d been there. How would she know, I asked. She’d be able to smell you, he responded. Soon after, we stopped going out.
When I left home for college, I began wearing a cross. I didn’t identify as Jewish, and after attending Catholic church for so long, I was starting to feel an affinity for the holy spirit. So when my advisor learned I might not be able to continue my studies due to a lack of funds, he asked if, by chance, I might be Presbyterian? I said I could be if necessary. He hooked me up with some clergy in search of a scholarship prospect, and I memorized enough of their scripture to get me through the door at an awkward “getting to know you” luncheon. I lied with a straight face when they point blank asked me about my religious goals and beliefs. In return, they partially funded my stay in school until graduation.
After I was married and had a baby, we moved to a suburb of New York City. My husband, who is Jewish, says we were steered. The community we bought into had a modest Jewish presence, and the first week we were in the house, a neighbor came to the door with a basket of hamantaschen, a Jewish pastry associated with the holiday called Purim. She was overjoyed, she said, that another Jewish family had moved to town. She asked if we were joining a temple, and when I said no, she became upset and asked how would our son know he was Jewish? When someone calls him a kike, I said callously, remembering the names I’d been called in middle school. Appalled, she backed away and never spoke to me again. I can hardly say I blame her.
The war in Gaza terrifies me. What frightens me is the swiftly rising tide of anti-semitism. We live near Portland, Oregon, a city founded in part by American Nazis. In 1936 the German cruiser, “Emden,” chugged down the Willamette River to moor in Portland, flying a Nazi flag. Newspapers at the time reported Nazis marching — but not goose-stepping— through the city, which “threw them a party.” Oregon’s history is rife with accounts of exclusion laws founded on the large presence of the Ku Klux Klan. The Anti-Defamation League recently reported a violent Neo-Nazi activist traveling across the state promoting an anti-semitic, white supremacist agenda. It would be a mistake to think these white nationalist sentiments are buried in the past.
Not long ago, I removed the mezuzah by our front door after two different delivery people asked me what it was. No need to mark our house as a Jewish house, I told my husband. Last week I learned a local Jewish man was called an ethnic slur and doxxed after he posted support for Israel on his social media page. For the first time in years, I feel afraid again. The one thing I’m sure of is that my mother was right. Even if you wear a cross around your neck or try to keep your Jewishness a secret, they will come for you. They will come for you.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
