Not for Naught

by Nadia Tarlow

It occurred to me recently that I had inherited my Mother’s defense mechanism to forget those things that are painful. And then a child, my own child, showed me that I had not.

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It was Christmas Eve. My son, Luca, and I were at a packed-to-the-gills St. Hilary’s Catholic Church in Tiburon, California, watching my daughter, his sister, perform as one of the three kings in the church’s rendition of the birth of Jesus.

Once Siena had done her part and the mass began, I led Luca out of the church, feeling suffocated and exhausted, finding relief in the beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge outside the church doors as we walked back to the car.

This experience—watching my Catholic daughter perform while standing beside my atheist son, triggered a memory from childhood I may have suppressed until that moment.

When I was 10, my parents moved us to a small rural town in Connecticut called Redding. I was in fifth grade, and it was in the last month of the school year that we moved. Every morning I would walk our mile-long driveway to the bus stop where the bus would pick me up and drop me off again at the end of the school day. My parents had good intentions when we moved to this small town just before the end of my fifth grade year -- they hoped I would meet friends before the summer. But this small town and its small school already had its cliques, and I began sixth grade on the outside.

One day in my sixth grade year, or was it my seventh, on the bus on the way home from school, Sean, I think that was his name, threw a wadded up piece of paper at me, and he and his friends made some strange hand motion I didn’t recognize. I didn’t recognize the symbol on the small ball of paper either, but I knew I had been singled out. I knew I was being recognized, and I later realized, judged, as different. The friends I had known as Tom Smith and Cate Hamilton, who lived at the other end of our long driveway, had laughed with Sean on the bus when he threw the paper at me, and

their hands had joined the others in making the same strange

motion Sean had made. As we got off the bus, they did it again, lifting their arms in a salute that felt more like an accusation. I walked the mile home to our house at the end of the driveway and looked for my Dad to find some answers. I showed him the wadded up piece of paper I had tucked in my pocket, and I imitated the motion Sean, Tom, Cate and the others had made. My Dad stared at me in disbelief.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s the Heil to Hitler,” he responded.

“The what?” I asked again. And then my Dad reminded me who Hitler was and explained that this motion was a Nazi salute, a motion to support the Nazi movement and the hatred of Jews.

“But I am not Jewish,” I responded.

“Once you have been treated like a Jew you are a Jew,” my Dad responded.

We learned that Cate’s parents shared the same beliefs that she did, because they refused to admit their daughter had done anything wrong, and she never called to apologize. Tom did call to say he was sorry for “teasing” me. I wonder now as this memory resurfaces, whatever happened to Tom and Cate.

And so it was that I spent the rest of my life feeling like a Jew. It wasn’t long after the event on the bus that my parents and I awoke to the word DIE on our Redding, Connecticut, lawn, written with the logs we had stacked for the winter. And not long after that, I found myself in a boarding school in Palo Alto, California, too terrified to go to the public school Redding kids went to.

My roommate during my Freshman year at this illustrious private school I had escaped to, was the great granddaughter of Henry Kaiser of Kaiser Steel and Kaiser Permanente-the latter a great medical resource. And yet, his great granddaughter snubbed me in a more devastating way than even the children of Redding, Connecticut, had on the bus. Ashley Kaiser and her family, in their own way, taught me again what it meant to be a Jew when she took me to her home for Thanksgiving that year. When we returned to school after the long Thanksgiving weekend, Ashley never spoke to me again. Her parents had learned that my last name wasn’t Smith or Hamilton.

My son, Luca, the atheist, maybe wanna-be Buddhist, will enter 6th grade in the fall of 2009. He won’t know the prejudice I experienced. He has two atheist grandparents, one brought up as a Protestant, the other as a Jew, an Arab grandfather who doesn’t believe in Allah, an atheist mother who has more religions in her blood and being than most (by the way, I will always be a Jew) a Catholic father and sister, a black stepfather raised Baptist, and a bi-racial, bi-cultural stepsister. Our children’s beliefs are still being shaped, and I don’t know where their spiritual journeys will take them. I am certain, however, that whatever Luca ends up believing or not believing, he will respect and not judge the beliefs of others. He has learned at a very young age that where or whether people choose to worship has nothing whatever to do with the kind of people they are.

I left the church in Tiburon on Christmas Eve feeling more prejudice against the pomp and circumstance of the Christmas pageant than I would have liked. There are some places I just can’t seem to get beyond. But I hope Luca left feeling no judgment. I hope Luca leads his generation to a place that doesn’t judge people because of their religion or the color of their skin or for the way they dress or wear their hair or for any reason other than the way they act as a human being. If Luca can lead his generation in this way, my childhood won’t be for naught and nor will his.