Anne-Marie Savage Ross

I didn’t grow up a Jew. Neither did my mother, or her father, or his father before that, or anyone’s father as long as anyone can remember. But we all grew up with the whispers, with the dinner conversation of our elders about journeys made by people whose names had been long obscured, but whose efforts meant we had a table at which to sit, the “we don’t do that, make your own religion” when something doesn’t fit with our religious education at school. I was the only kid in my rural California town, I am sure, whose mother interrupted the Smurfs with an offering of waffles AND a regaling of how certain branches of our family “cleaned” their blood by leaving Spain and jumping from island chain to island chain, until Portugal gave them a safe haven off the coast of Africa. Nobody I knew had more than a vague notion of what their grandparents did; we were casually jumping back to the Inquisition of 400 years ago in between commercials.

Nothing is left of our Jewishness but the memory of the fact that this is so; we follow no holidays, we are aware of no secret customs, we do nothing that would get us featured in National Geographic. Yet we, too, are different from our neighbors. What’s been retained is hardly definable by anything but pride. Pride in survival, pride in our history, pride in our difference.