We're Not White Trash. We're Jews.

March 3, 2010

Not long after Mrs. Schuster suggested that synagogue wasn’t for me, Mom started wearing a small, silver chai. The first time I saw it, I was surprised. I touched it, pressing it like a button on her chest.

She glanced down. “I ran out and bought it on lunch break,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that woman co-opt Judaism.” Both the chai and the sandalwood prayer beads—wrapped around Mom’s slender wrist and blending into her dark skin—seemed like small acts of defiance.

But the rebellion against Mrs. Schuster ended there. Instead of taking me to synagogue on Saturday mornings, like I hoped, Mom sequestered herself in her room and meditated. I found her closed door—and the stillness that took over our home—frightening.

Too old for cartoons and too uncomfortable in the quiet to read, I cooked breakfast.

When Mom emerged from her room, she sniffed the air. As she walked down the hall, she guessed what I was making. “Eggs with onions and cheese,” she said.

She came into the kitchen and peered over my shoulder.

Then she shared her latest meditation-induced epiphany with me. “I think you inherited your fear of dogs from your grandmother.”

“Nana’s not scared of dogs,” I said, giving the eggs a stir.

“Not my mother. Your savta.” She meant the one in Israel that I’d never met. “She’s terrified of dogs because of the Holocaust.”

And then she went to the living room and lit some incense.

“Were your grandparents in the Holocaust?” I asked Ruti on the phone that afternoon.

“No. And we call it the shoah,” she said.

We did our impromptu Hebrew lessons at lunch and on the phone. After the synagogue incident, Mom didn’t want me going home with Ruti. She said it wasn’t healthy for me to be around Mrs. Schuster.

Mrs. Schuster brought Ruti to my house once. I ran outside to meet her. Ruti stuck her hand out the window, waved, and grabbed her overnight bag from the backseat. But then I heard the synchronized thunk of automatic locks.

“Don’t get out, Ruti,” Mrs. Schuster said, her hand poised over the console. “I just remembered we’ve got that luncheon thing to go.”

“But Mom, we just ate.”

“Well, we’re going to eat again.”

I knew Mrs. Schuster was lying. I could tell by the way she glanced at our house and looked away, like it was too pitiful a sight to bear, that she didn’t want Ruti to spend the night with us because we were poor. I turned around and headed towards the door. Irritated with Mrs. Schuster and angry at Mom for making us live here—in a small, sagging duplex—I walked slowly, in no rush to get back inside.

“I’ll call you when we get home,” Ruti shouted as Mrs. Schuster drove away.

“I liked your house just fine,” Ruti whispered on the phone later. “My mom’s a bitch, a kalba.”

After we hung up, I told Mom what Ruti said. She laughed but then straightened her face. “Don’t say that word again, Alma.”

“What? Bitch?”

Mom looked at me from the corners of her eyes. “Say it again, and I’ll give you a Dove bar,” she said. “And I don’t mean chocolate.”

She meant soap.

When I told Ruti that my grandmother had been in the Shoah, she said, “Wow, that’s so cool. That makes you a soredet, a survivor.”

“I’m not a survivor,” I said. “Savta is.”

“OK, so you’re third generation,” Ruti said. “But I have no idea how to say that. Hey, do you know what camp your grandmother was in?”

I said no, but that didn’t stop Ruti from speculating that maybe my savta had met Anne Frank, one of her heroes.

“Maybe they were friends,” she said. “Only it was the guards that kept them from visiting each other and not my Nazi of a mom.”

After we got off the phone, I thought about my father and wondered what it was like to be raised by someone who’d been through the Shoah.

I went out to the living room. Mom was watching TV. I sat down on the couch next to her and she tucked me under the quilt, which she’d pieced together from old clothes. Under the blanket, I could feel her body, warm and solid, next to me.

“Is my father scared of dogs, too?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. She stared at the TV, her face distracted. The lines on the edges of her mouth tugged down, just a little bit. Someone who didn’t know Mom wouldn’t have noticed, but I saw every change in her mood, no matter how small.

“Mom?”

“Not that I remember,” she said, with forced cheer.

“What about guns? Barbed wire?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about uniforms?”

Cold air rushed in as she flipped the blanket up and got off the couch. “I’m going to make some tea,” she said. “Do you want some?”

On Monday, instead of meeting Ruti for lunch, I went to the library to look at books about the Shoah. We’d studied it in World History and I knew about the Nuremberg Laws, the ghettos, the camps. But, as I’d spent the weekend turning it all over in my head, I’d realized I didn’t know enough about people, like my grandmother.

I pulled a book off the shelf. I stood, flipping through the pages, stopping only for photographs of survivors. I scanned the women’s faces for something familiar, someone who resembled me. I wondered if the men looked like my father.

I studied the poses. Some had their arms folded across their chests, like shields. Some pushed their chins down, turning their eyes up, like they were reluctant to show their face to the camera. Others looked away, their eyes focused on some far off place.

Who was Savta? Did she guard herself like this? Was she ashamed like that? Did she seal herself in the bathroom, weeping, leaving my father to listen to her on the other side of the door?

“I thought I might find you here,” Ruti said.

I jumped and dropped the book.

Ruti picked it up, leafed through the pages. “There’s nothing here that you don’t know already. If you really want to learn about the Shoah,” she said, “we have to go to the public library.”

She closed the book and put it on the shelf.

We went and stood in line for the payphone, behind kids that were calling to ask their parents if they could stay late, or have a friend come home with them after school.

Ruti called her mom first. “I need to stay after for a group project,” she said.

“For Spanish class.”

“With Tommy, Sarah and Bo.”

“We have to work on a dialogue.”

“It’s due tomorrow.”

“Mrs. Rodriguez told us about it today and we were going to do it at lunch, but Tommy had lunch detention.”

“Mom, I didn’t pick Tommy,” Ruti said, rolling her eyes. “Mrs. Rodriguez put us in groups.”

They set a time and hung up.

“Your turn,” Ruti said to me.

I called the pre-school Mom worked at. The secretary asked me, “Is it an emergency? We can get her out of class if you need her.”

I wanted to talk to my mom. It felt urgent. But would Mom think it was an emergency? “No, it’s OK,” I said. “Just tell her that I’m going to the library with Ruti and that she can pick me up at five.”

“We’re looking for books about the Holocaust,” Ruti said to the woman at the information desk.

“We’ve got a section in the children’s room called ‘Discover the World,’” she replied. “Why don’t you girls start there?”

“We are not girls,” Ruti said. “We are young women. And we are looking for books about the Shoah. That means Holocaust in Hebrew.”

The librarian sighed and tapped on her keyboard. She scribbled some numbers down on a piece of paper and handed it to Ruti. “You do know how the Dewey decimal system works, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Ruti said.

She marched off, putting a little sway into her hips, her backpack jostling with the movement. I followed, walking like I always did.

Ruti couldn’t navigate the library as well as she’d said, so it took us a while to find the right shelf. When we found it, my chest tightened. I ran my finger over the spines, trying to decide which to choose. I was sure that one of the books had something—some clue—that would help me figure everything out. I just had to find it.

But five was coming up quick and I wanted to take my time.

“Why don’t you check a few out?” Ruti suggested.

“Because what if something happens and I lose them? Then the library will send a late slip and Mom will find out.”

“So?”

I didn’t tell Ruti what I was thinking. That Mom would be hurt by my interest in anything related to my father. That Mom might feel how I did when she meditated—shut out, alone.

I held two books, felt their weight. “I’m going to take them,” I said.

“What?”

“In my backpack.”

“There’s an alarm.”

“So I’ll take the bar code off.”

“Quick, quick,” Ruti whispered. She grabbed a book from my hand. She peeled the sticker off with her fingernails.

When we finished, Ruti opened my backpack, tucked both volumes in, and zipped it shut.

“Walk slowly,” she said.

I did. We inched through the aisle. We passed the information desk, went down a short flight of stairs, and walked by the check-out desk.

“We did it,” I whispered to Ruti.

But as we pushed the doors open, a shrill sound shot through the air.

Mom walked in to the library office with such a fierce step her car keys rattled in her purse. The lines on her face were fixed hard. She ignored Ruti and me, sitting by the manager’s desk in metal folding chairs.

“Hello, I’m Alma’s mother,” she said, shaking hands with the manager. “I’m very sorry about what my daughter has done. And I’m sure she is, too.” She glanced at me then, her black eyebrows meeting in an arrow.

I nodded.

The manager—pudgy, with thin blonde hair—leaned back in his chair and looked from my mother to me and back again.

“I appreciate your apology, Ma’am. But we do have a policy here of pursuing criminal acts in accordance with the letter of the law.”

Mom sucked in her breath. “I understand,” she said.

“However,” he said. “Alma is a young girl and the items she chose were a bit unusual for a thief.”

The manager pushed the books across the desk. Mom looked at them, picked one up, opened it and snapped it shut. She shook her head.

“Now, Alma’s friend here tells me that you all are Jewish? And that your mother was in the Holocaust?”

“Her father’s mother,” Mom said.

He nodded. “Either way, it seems that this is less a matter for the law and more something to be discussed at home,” he said.

Mrs. Schuster came in. “Ruti,” she said. “What is going on here?”

Ruti shrugged.

“You don’t know? I do. It’s this white trash friend of yours.”

“We are not white trash,” Mom said.

“Really? Then why does your daughter have Ruti running around town lying to me?”

“First of all,” Ruti said, rising to her feet. “I would hardly call going to the library ‘running around town,’ Mother. Second, Alma doesn’t make me lie to you. You do. Because you’re a kalba.” She walked out.

Mrs. Schuster pointed at my mom and shook her finger. “I don’t want your daughter coming anywhere near Ruti.” She turned and left.

Mom looked at the manager.

He nodded. “You two can go. I think we’ve all had enough for one day,” he said.

Mom didn’t say anything to me until a couple of hours after we got home. I was sitting on my bed, trying to read. But, sure that Mom was going to call me into the bathroom for a Dove bar, I couldn’t. I stared at the page, a blur of black and white, as my eyes filled with tears.

She stuck her head into my room, leaving the rest of her in the hallway. Her eyebrows were still turned down, but not like at the library. “Your father’s name, Yuval, means stream,” she said.

As she stomped away, she added, “And we’re not white trash, goddamn it. We’re Jews.”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or herself.

We're Not White Trash. We're Jews.

Mya Guarnieri

Arts and Culture