Getting out of Hebrew school

The central theme of Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmoszgis (2005) is life as a Latvian/Eastern European Jewish immigrant in suburban Toronto. The stories are chronologically arranged: you follow the narrator from his first years in Canada, where he doesn't understand much of what's said at school and his parents are poor, struggling and confused by the language, to his adulthood where he seems to be a kind of suave, quirky writer guy.

I always like the theme of complicated relationships to cultural heritage. For the first half of the stories, I sort of assumed that he was describing a person who didn't have much genuine allegiance to any big idea of Jewishness. I was probably projecting; it's easy to see lots of futures in stories about a kid. But when he's an adult there's more suggestions of embracing the cultural identity, being into all the trappings, if not the God part. None of this comes out directly, but it's cleverly in the style of the stories being told about the older I. Little things like how he's doing research for an article on a boxer being inducted into the old-timers' category of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who, among other attributes, happens to be "America's first great fighting Jew." In an earlier story, "An Animal to the Memory" he gets severely reprimanded for knocking another boy to the ground and choking him with his hands while a rabbi makes a speech for Holocaust Rememberance Day. And he desperately wants out of Hebrew school.

A few weeks ago, arriving at my parents' house for dinner, I was immediately briefed on the discussion topic of the evening, an article published that day in a British newspaper, with the headline "Who is Jewish?" It described a recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which yesterday was upheld by the Supreme Court (what happened to the House of Lords? Apparently its judicial branch is no longer, as of October 2009, which I guess is good from a division-of-powers standpoint). The appellate courts found that a London Jewish school's admission policy discriminated on ethnic grounds. There's legislation that allows faith schools that receive government funding to give preference to students who are members of the group the school is set up to cater to if they have more applicants than spaces.  The school that was taken to court is a good school and gets twice as many applicants as it has new spots each year. The kid who took them to court is an observant Jew whose dad is ethnically Jewish and whose mother converted, in the Reconstructionist synagogue or something, which means that Orthodox Jews don't consider her Jewish. So the school treated him like any other goy and he didn't get into the school. Meanwhile any random born Jew whose never been to synagogue a day in her life would be put near the top of their admissions list.

The trial court found in favour of the school, reasoning that it was part of their faith practice to decide who was a member of their group. Court of Appeal said no, too bad - giving preference to kids of a certain faith can't equate promoting kids with certain birth-related characteristics. I was amazed that there would be a decision from the appeal so fast. Maybe the Supreme Court, having only been created two months ago, has so little backlog that it can be ready to hear new appeals almost immediately.

I always feel double about it: on the one hand, I'm totally and immutably Jewish. On the other hand, I don't relate at all to the idea of Jewish identity. I have no interest in joining groups that identify with Jewishness, even to protest Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There are not two but three strands to the thing: the ethnic, the cultural, the religious. Accent, or things like "shut the light" fall more into ethnic than cultural, I think. I say "shut the light" because that's how I learned to speak, and not because of some practice I engage in willfully (though I like it that I say "shut the light" and have ever since sometime around the age of 20 I was made aware that other English speakers don't say that). The cultural is the stuff that most of my relatives are into, the special charities, the chosen-people history books, lighting candles, reading at Passover, and on and on. They're not religious, they're just really into some thing that is being Jewish. And it's because of the ethnic, not the cultural, that I always tell my father that he can't simply decide he's not Jewish anymore. That kind of Jewish is defined by who would want to kill you, and not by what you yourself aspire to be. And that part of the group identity I have no problem with, the kind that says, this is what I was born into. And I prefer it if the British government thinks that entitles me to no special consideration when it comes to attending a particular school.

Anyhow it occurred to me, thinking about Nathasha and Other Stories, that it might be a lot easier for a third-generation immigrant to separate ethnic and cultural identity than it is for a first-generation immigrant, whose sense of difference must pervade every social encounter in his new home.