Musings of a Jewish Mom

Tag: history

  • Do I Look Fat in These Genes?

    I really loved my paternal grandmother. She was an amazing woman, brilliant, multilingual, and tough as nails. Because of her determination and quick thinking, she was able to get my father’s family out of Austria just in the nick of time. She was a Polish Jew who emigrated to Austria when she married my grandfather who was an Austro-Hungarian Jew. She was probably the only literate person (except perhaps for the Catholic priest) in the small country bumpkin town that they lived in. Other villagers used to come to her to read the letters they had received or to write ones when anything official came up. She spoke Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian and German fluently when the family still lived in Kittsee. When, not by choice, the family moved to Shanghai in 1938, she adapted and learned Cantonese, Japanese, Russian, English and many of the other myriad languages that were spoken in the Hongkew Ghetto in which they lived. She was so smart that she not only learned these languages but learned them fluently. I can still remember when I was about 6 or 7 she told me I was an instigator. A what? I had never heard that word before and when I looked it up in the dictionary I was very upset. Was I a bad girl? But the point is that even though English was far from her first language she knew it well enough to admonish me with a less common word. That’s smart.

    But…she was a short, fat woman with very flabby underarms. I loved my grandma but boy those batwings were really not pretty. Fast forward to me now, also a Jewish grandma. Besides inheriting her affinity for language, I inherited her figure and her batwings. Boy do I dislike those batwings. I google: how do I get rid of batwings but the solutions always involve exercise so that’s not going to happen. So I’ve got my affinity for language and I’m a short, fat, and now old Jewish woman.

    Do I look fat in these genes?

  • FYI

    Someone who knows me very well asked me today why am I calling my blog Musings of a Jewish Mom, especially when my first two posts had nothing to do with Judaism and more to do with turtles.

    My answer was: because that is who I am. I didn’t think it needed explanation but since the question came up I will answer more deeply.

    I do wonder, if I had been a Black woman, and I called my blog Musings of a Black Mom, I wonder if the same question would have been asked. Never mind, I’m not going to play the antisemitism card for now. And I certainly have no intention of this blog being political in any way because that is not my focus or mindset.

    I have always considered myself a spiritual-minded person. I went to Hebrew School until third grade and then decided it wasn’t for me. Interestingly my parents never pushed me about that. From third grade until I was 28 years old I was always looking for mystical paths, mystical connections. It was not until I met my husband, who is Jewish and Israeli to boot, that I realized that what I was looking for was right under my feet. By under my feet I mean, my roots. 

    One of the reasons why I turned away from Judaism in my younger days was because I thought it was just too sad. My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on a steady diet of stories of very close calls with certain death by the hands of the Nazis. This imagery tormented my young mind. So much so that by the time I got to college one of my majors was German Literature. In my naive mind I thought that if I study German Literature I will understand the German mind and I will understand why the Germans wanted to kill the Jews. I was going to figure this whole antisemitism thing out! I was even awarded the Outstanding Student of German Literature Award at my college (not that there were too many of us), and I’m sure that part of the reason that I was awarded that was due to my German professors’ collective guilt. Needless to say, I learned a lot about German literature but got no closer to understanding why the Nazis wanted to kill us.

    When I met my husband, who is also a Moroccan Jew, I got exposed to a very different type of Judaism than I had been aware of. When I went to Israel to get married I entered this big, joyful, noisy Jewish family! They were not crying and kvetching all the time! Even their prayers had uplifting melodies that were quite different than the tunes I had grown up with, which always sounded to me like crying.

    After being together for 38 years, my husband’s life-affirming expression of Judaism has rubbed off on me. I am very proud to be a Jew. I recall a time when I went to study at the University of Vienna that my father warned me not to let anyone know that I was Jewish. I kept my mouth shut while there until one day one of my professors point blank asked me what church I went to and I told them none because I’m Jewish. Luckily this was 1977 and not 1937 so all I met with was a shrug. Well, I don’t want to hide being a Jew anymore. I don’t want to hide any aspect of myself (as previously blogged I have come out of my turtle shell). So if there is anyone that is uncomfortable that my blog is called Musings of a Jewish Mom, please, don’t come in. There are so many other houses to visit, you don’t have to come to mine. But if you want a nice chicken soup and some homemade challah, come on in. The door is always open.