"Are You Jewish?"
An innocent question; an existential crisis
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Jewish?”
The question stopped me in my tracks. I was making my way home from the grocery store, navigating the busy intersection on 14th street. No one ever recognizes me as Jewish. But this Chabadnik, giving away Shabbat candles on a Friday afternoon, did. How could you tell? I wanted to ask. What gave me away?
“You could easily fool the Nazis,” my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, used to say, bursting with pride. I was born with bright blonde hair, green-blue eyes and a small nose—and I was raised to view my non-Jewish appearance as an asset. It made me immune. At first glance, I’m not a Jew—I’m a human being. The two can be mutually exclusive, my grandmother tried to explain.
One of her best friends was a Jewish girl whose goyische appearance saved her life. When the Nazis came, she looked them in the eye and asked, in her most derisive tone: “Do I look Jewish to you?”
She didn’t. They left, and she fled.
“When did you learn that you were Jewish?” I once asked my grandmother.
“I never learned it. No one told me,” she said. “I just knew that I was a Jew, and that other people didn’t like Jews, and that that’s how the world works.”
My grandmother doesn’t talk much about her childhood in Vienna. But when she does, it sounds like she grew up on a waterbed: something was always bubbling beneath the surface, shaky, threatening. Eventually, she stabilized the waterbed by contorting herself.
She didn’t speak Yiddish in mixed company. She spoke German with a perfect Hochdeutsch accent. She didn’t dress like that Chabadnik, but like a fine European. She read the same books as Gentiles did, listened to the same music, ate the same food—including pork and seafood galore. She never went to temple. She didn’t observe Shabbat. Nobody around her kept kosher. She was an Austrian patriot. She did everything she could in the hopes that no one could point and say: You are not like us.
“When did your parents decide to flee?” I asked.
“Right after the Anschluss,” she said. “We saw the Nazis parading into the city and all those Austrians welcoming the procession with hysterics of joy. They were so wild with elation, it felt like the ground was moving. It’s the closest I’ve come to watching people who think they saw God.”
Her parents fled to Prague. They stayed for a few months, but the Nazis kept encroaching. In 1939, when my grandmother was 14, her parents put her on a boat, alone, headed to Israel. It wasn’t their destination of choice; they had no choice. Nowhere in Europe was safe. The U.S. had closed its borders.
My grandmother had a single suitcase of clothes. No money or jewelry—Jews weren’t allowed to take property out of Europe. Her parents told her they’d join her in a few weeks.
She never saw them again.
My grandmother stayed in Israel. First, desperately awaiting the arrival of her parents; later, a disillusioned orphan. She built a life for herself there, in Tel Aviv, where—all these years later—she remains.
I was born assimilated. My grandmother didn’t teach us any Yiddish. I didn’t go to temple or light Shabbat candles or keep kosher. When the Chabadnik stopped me on 14th street, he was wearing a disheveled black suit and a wide-brimmed hat over a yarmulka. I was wearing a Lululemon bodysuit and carrying three pounds of mussels in my Whole Foods bag.
Assimilation felt like a thing of the past for me, because I was never different.
When I moved to New York City, a Muslim friend, who had grown up in New Jersey, told me: “We don’t call it New York; we call it Jew York.”
I laughed. I liked that. It was comforting; familial. Like saying, You belong.
“There’s no antisemitism in New York,” I told my grandma.
“Azoy,” she said.
A few nights ago, my husband was walking our dog when a man came up to him.
“Hey! You Jewish?” he demanded. The man wasn’t a Chabadnik and wasn’t offering Shabbat candles. My husband turned around and walked away.
* * *
My grandmother lives “between the river and the sea.” Protesters in New York – in the same country that closed its borders to refugees like her – chant for her to go back to where she came from.
Go back to Poland! they say, giddy.
My grandmother, born and raised in Austria, doesn’t come from Poland. Her mother died in Poland, though. She was captured in Prague and transported in a cargo train, like cattle, to die in a country she didn’t come from.
Is that what they mean when they say, Go back to Poland? Do they think we originate in the gas chambers?
I’ve come to agree with my grandmother: Being human and being Jewish can be mutually exclusive.
Do they really want us dead, I wonder— or do they secretly want us alive? If we were all gone, who would they hate? It is a powerful emotion to give up. I see the sense of purpose and belonging it provides. On college campuses. In Union Square. In Washington Square Park.
It’s the closest I’ve come to watching people who think they saw God.
* * *
“That is quite the question to ask a lady nowadays,” I eventually responded to the Chabadnik. We both smiled.
“Yes,” I said. “I am Jewish.”
I looked around. No one stopped. Everyone just kept walking. He reached out and gave me a clear bag of two tea candles. I took them and left. I didn’t ask how he knew.
When I got home, I called my grandma.
“Hi, Safta,” I said. “What were you up to today?”
My grandmother is 99 and a half. She emphasizes the half.
“I was just calculating how many months I have left to a hundred,” she said. “And I’ve decided – I’m going to make it!”
I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was waving her finger in the air.
“So you will, Safta,” I said, laughing. “So you will.”
Sharon Klapka is a novelist based in New York City. She was VP Business & Brand Development of a $400 million fashion startup acquired by Victoria’s Secret, and sold her startup shares to finance the transformation into her Jewish grandmother’s worst nightmare – a full-time writer. She lives with her husband in Manhattan and dotes over a yellow Labrador Retriever who embodies everything she ever wanted to be: athletic, thin, and a natural blonde.
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
Thanks for this article - it just feels so familiar.
But I do want to say that "Jew York" is a slur and not something a friend should say to a Jewish person.
This was a tough read but I love the ending.