How to Hang a Mezuzah
I PAY FOR my kids’ religious upbringing in monthly installments. Every summer, I fill out a little green card that establishes the figure that will be autodrafted out of our checking account for the next twelve months. There are the synagogue’s dues, which are steep, and then the tuition for my three kids to attend religious school on Sunday mornings. A building fee—payable over five years—is leveraged on all members. It gets expensive, so there are price cuts for people under thirty-five and deeper price cuts for people under thirty. I ask the woman who works in the business office if there’s any way my husband and I might pretend we’re thirty-four for the third year in a row.
Kevin looks at our budget and reminds me that we spend more on religion than we do on our daughters’ ballet lessons, our cell phone bills, or our homeowner’s insurance. Which would be fine, he says, if either of us believed in God.
Kevin was raised Catholic. The church got whatever his parents felt comfortable putting in the collection plate on Sunday. There were no contracts, no invoices, no autodrafts. Sunday Mass was something to be endured, and Kevin will tell you the priests should have been paying him to be there.
WHEN MY PARENTS get engaged—several years before I am born—they take a class, specifically for interfaith couples, at their local synagogue. My father, who was raised Methodist, does all the reading assignments. My mother, who is Jewish, reads the books’ jacket copy and skims the introductions. They are married by a rabbi in my grandparents’ living room, and my mother becomes the first person in her family to marry outside the faith.
WHEN I AM five years old, we move to a little island off the coast of Sardinia, Italy.
There’s an American elementary school on the island, but my mother is committed to the idea that I should become fluent in Italian. She marches me up the steep steps of the Istituto San Vincenzo, a local primary school run by nuns. She brings a pocket-size Italian dictionary, points at me with exaggerated gestures, and tries to tell the head nun, “She’s Jewish. Can she attend?” The nun nods her head emphatically and says, “Sì, sì.” Neither woman is sure she has been properly understood.
Every afternoon when my mother picks me up from school, she peppers me with questions. She is eager to see evidence of language acquisition, and I am eager to please. She asks what I have learned, and I tell her, “the parts of my body.”
Weeks pass, and she continues to ask the same questions. “Still learning the parts of my body,” I say, as we make our way across the Piazza Umberto.
It goes on. Always, I am learning the parts of my body. Finally, my mother asks me to show her, and I point to my forehead, my chest, my two shoulders. “Nel nome del Padre e del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo, amen,” I say, as I make the sign of the cross.
WHEN I AM young, it is my father who leads the Passover seder, who hides the afikomen, who tells us the story of how the Jews escaped from Egypt. My mother’s job is to check the matzo balls on the stove, make sure they’re not falling apart.
GROWING UP, I envy the people on my mother’s side of the family who look outwardly Jewish with their dark eyes and brown, wavy hair. I resemble the women on my father’s side of the family with my hazel eyes and thin blonde hair that eventually darkens to a medium brown.
On a bus trip in ninth grade, a friend compliments me on my appearance. “You’re so pretty. Your nose doesn’t even look Jewish.”
I say nothing and stare out the bus’s tinted window, worried my friend will see that I have begun to cry. My indignation isn’t for the Jewish people, who have lived with
