identity

I’ve never been one who’s been all that sure of where he fits in. Going to a Conservative Jewish Day School the son of a Reform (liberal) Rabbi, my more traditionally observant friends used to tease me because my synagogue used an organ on the Sabbath, when the playing of music is forbidden according to Jewish law. To them I was always somewhat of an infidel, a yarmulke wearing impostor refusing to accept the validity of the laws as passed down from Sinai.

And yet, for the entirety of my adult life, I have been labeled quite the opposite, the token Jew, the Rabbi. My friends in University turned to me for their weekly (or monthly, or yearly, or sole) dose of Yiddishkeit. My friends in Poland turned to me to help confront the realities of that country’s anti-Semitic history. Here in the Peace Corps, in Ukraine, I am again in the shoes of this familiar role, the Rabbi and the token Jew. I am the example and the gatherer, the instiller of rites and the fighter of stereotypes. Yet still, I am unsure where I stand.

I am an American. I was born on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and could scarcely be more proud of it. I am the six year old who went on a trip to Washington, D.C. and decided to memorize all the Presidents by heart. I am the teenager who got emotional at witnessing the Capitol emerge from out over the hill and the 19 year old who got the jitters every time his intern ID badge let him straight into the 200 year old marble dome. I am the lost college senior who drove 12 hours through the night with his friends from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Washington D.C. to watch our nation’s first African American President get sworn into office. I am the Public Policy grad who was inspired by the new President’s call to service, who went online and started an application to the Peace Corps, unsure of where it might lead.

I am a Jew. I was circumcised on the morning of my eighth day and much of my fate has been sealed ever since. I am the 7 year old who visited Israel for the first time, who thought that everyone around was his brother. I am the 13 year old who was more nervous for my Bar Mitzvah than any other event in his life thus far. I am the 17 year old crying at the walls of the Kotel, newly emerged from ten days of Polish-Czech-Hungarian Holocaust immersion. I am the college student who every friday night showed up late to the party because he had to go to Shabbat dinner at Hillel. I am the college senior who cooked Shabbat dinners for 25 of his friends because he knew they wouldn’t attend one otherwise. I am the nervous young man setting foot in the Shtetl of Bransk, where his great-grandfather left 100 years before, saying the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, in the actual graveyard of his actual ancestors.

And yet here I am in Ukraine, and every day more I spend here in my small village, every week that goes by where I don’t speak any english and don’t go to synagogue a part of me becomes a little more ingrained in this village life. I forget English words and use Ukrainian ones that just seem to fit the situation better. I recently had the pleasure of seeing my family in Jerusalem over the new year, and my sister was constantly chastising me for what she referred to as my “Ukrainian accent” while speaking English.

America is my birthplace, and there are certificates to document this fact. Israel is my homeland, as 14 years of Jewish education and almost a dozen trips to Israel have instilled. But Ukraine and Poland is where my great grandparents came from, where our traditions were borne and reared, where their identity was formed. Isn’t this place a part of me, as well?

Alot of people around here, when I meet them for the first time, ask me if my ancestors are Ukrainian. I’ve got a “Ukrainian” look, they tell me. I tell them, yes, my ancestors came from this part of the world. But more often than not I leave out the fact that these ancestors were my people, not theirs. These ancestors were Jews.

But then sometimes it becomes apparent that many of their ancestors where a lot like many of my ancestors, that maybe this sordid past isn’t so black and white. My director has often told me that many members of the community have some Jewish ancestry. As he put it, when you have people of different ethnicities living and mingling together, no amount of cultural differences or parental displeasure can overcome the solution to the equation of Boy meets Girl.

About a week ago I was sitting around the dinner table of the Technology and Physics teacher at my school. It was his birthday. Vassil Ivanovich has become, over time, one of my closer friends in the village. He is, as my Director so aptly put it, a “brilliant 43 year old with the smile of a 12 year old.” He cant take apart a computer with his eyes closed, and can fix almost anything. Yet he is constantly laughing at his own simple jokes, constantly viewing the world with a positive outlook. I once told him that he could charge 50 dollars and hour fixing computers in America. He told me it would be silly to charge when he could do the same work for free.

His wife, Olha Alexandrivna, is the Ukrainian language teacher at school, and also my language tutor. A small woman in size but large of heart, she is incredibly religious, and celebrates every holiday. I should note that there is a different Ukrainian holiday about every week, so finding anyone other than the local priest who goes through all the motions is quite the accomplishment.

Vassil and Olha have two children, Vannya and Marika. Vannya is my start guitar student, who has begun giving lessons himself. He dreams of being a programmer, and this week has gone to the oblast-wide competition to see how he fares against competition from larger cities and towns. Marika is in the fifth form and very bright, but sometimes has trouble pushing herself to study as much as she could. But she has a smile that could set sail a thousand ships, so for now we’ll let that suffice.

Rounding out the clan is Olha’s mother, which makes me even more in awe of Vassil. Any man who could live with his mother-in-law and stay married, let alone with a smile on his face, deserves a salute from us all.

Ukrainian birthdays are joyous events. They involve copious amounts of food and copious amounts of Vodka. At first it was difficult, because much of the food is meat, but by this point my vegetarian ways are well known in the village. (Author’s note: by this point, as the only American in a 600 person community, pretty much everything about me is well known in the village. Since my outhouse is in view of the street, it is both literally and figuratively news when I wipe my ass.)

On this particular birthday, Vassil Ivanovich pointed to the chicken on the table. “You can eat this. It is Kosher.” Vassil Ivanovich loves the fact that I am Jewish, and regularly plays “Hava Nagillah” and other Klezmer hits on his computer. His neighbor growing up was an old Jewish man, and his knowledge of Judaism, while not of an academic nature, is certainly more than any others in the community. So when he told me it was Kosher, I assumed it was just another of his jokes, his way of showing me that he understands where I am coming from. But then he told me he was serious. And then he told me why.

“Ask her what her grandmother’s last name was,” he said, pointing to his mother-in-law. “”Katz,” she replied, “She was a Jew.” And it was her grandmother who taught her the ritual way of slaughtering a chicken, and it was the way she taught her own daughter, and granddaughter as well. Here I am, in the middle of a Ukrainian village, and a Kosher Chicken is sitting on the table.

Which grandmother, I asked. My mother’s mother, she replied. It hit me like a truck. These children sitting before me, this guitar hero and princess with a knockout smile, were considered Jewish under Jewish law. Like their mother’s mother’s mother’s mother before them, they, too, were a part of the covenant.

I tried to explain this to them. The kids could go to Israel for free, for ten days. The son could go their to study. They could move to Israel and then go to America. They didn’t understand. This could change their lives.

But they didn’t honestly seem to care. Even Vannya, after talking to him privately, thought that the trip sounded cool, but “Ukraine is my home.” And the church is their church and their beliefs are their beliefs and no amount of fineigling by Talmudic scholars around the globe would likely convince these people otherwise.

And yet all they would have to do is prove that this maternal great-grandmother was a Katz, a member of the tribe, and the Orthodox Jews of Israel would open their arms wide and embrace these long lost witnesses of the revelation at Sinai. Meanwhile, my friends who have attended Jewish summer camp and youth grips and been active on their college campuses, well get those dirty mudbloods out of their house.

What part of who we are is choice? And what part of who we are is predetermined? What are the percentage breakdowns of my Americanness, my Jewishness, my universalness, my Shtetlness? Is there a place where I truly, wholeheartedly belong?

After returning from my trip to Israel, I showed some of the teachers at school the pictures from my trip. In most of them I was donning my yarmulke, my seperation between myself and God. Why, they asked, don’t you wear that in Boyarka? Why don’t you show us that here?

It was an unexpected question, and I began searching my still somewhat limited Ukrainian vocabulary for the answer. I didn’t want to always have to explain I am a Jew. I didn’t want people to see the article on my head and think, he can never be one of us. It was going to be difficult enough to fit in. Why make it even harder?

“I Zaraz, chomu ni?” And now, why not? I still don’t have an answer.

Fear, I suppose. Fear of anti-Semitism, sure, fear of putting myself out there. But there is also a fear of admitting to myself how important to me my Jewishness truly is. If I put on the Yarmulke here, it is likely I will never take it off. And that is saying a whole lot about a future life that for me still remains largely unclear.

How Jewish am I, really? How patriotic am I, really? How liberal, how conservative, how immature, how right, how wrong, how confused? People come to the Peace Corps to “find themselves.” I’m still looking.

Because everything I’ve found so far suggests that our identity doesn’t always give us a choice. We are White or Black, we are Gay or Straight, we are the child of a Jewish mother or we are not. And Vannya was born in Ukraine and I was born in America and Israel would let us both in, but for what, and why?

The truth is, I want to wear my kippah. I want to wear it all the time. And although I am a vegetarian, I sometimes want to eat meat. And I want to not use electricity on the Sabbath and I want to live in Jerusalem and sometimes I want to throw a black hat on my head and grow out my forelocks and spend the rest of my days in some Yeshiva basement filling my mind with millenia of knowledge.

But I don’t think all of that is me, it doesn’t fit with the identity I’ve always imagined. So Im either fighting for or against my natural inclinations, battling or forging a future me.

And maybe thats a part of the appeal to my time in the Ukraine. Here, in my village, I’ll never truly fit in. So perhaps it takes off a bit of the pressure of figuring out exactly who I want to be.