These two snippets are from a powerful book written in the 1980's called, "A Certain People."
ITEM: A
few weeks after a neighbor’s father moved in with her, members of the block
association came to call – not to welcome the elderly gentleman but to protest
his habit of sitting on the front lawn quietly reading his Yiddish newspaper
while he caught the afternoon sun. “It’s
not nice,” they complained, by which they meant that they were embarrassed by
his public display of Jewishness. Had
the eighty-two-year-old man read a French newspaper, the block association
members would have been delighted with the touch of class he added to the
neighborhood. –Charles Silberman
ITEM: The
funeral had been uplifting as well as moving.
The dead woman, who had died in her eightieth year, had been filled with
vitality until the end, and in his eulogy the rabbi evoked her presence with
warmth and humor. Reluctant to break the
spell, the mourners stood outside for a while reminiscing. Finally I started to leave, but a cousin came
running after me. “Mother has something
she wants to tell you,” she said with a glint in her eye. “Take your yarmulke off, darling,” my pious
eighty-two-year-old aunt said as I returned.
“You’re outside: it’s not nice.” -Charles Silberman
In the twentieth century American Jewry was embarrassed by its roots. As comedian Jackie Mason put it, "Too Jewish!" It is no wonder that the twenty-first century has given rise to a generation uninterested in a faith of which they know little but understand well enough to know that their parents were ashamed of it.
Comments