Apparently I was converted when I was a baby. My grandmother's orthodox crew dunked me, said what needed to be said, and it was official. --The problem was fixed--
It wasn't until a few years after my bat mitzvah that I began questioning how I fit into 'jewish'. My parents were pretty un-religious, so jewish was more the custom than dogma in my house. But my sister and I did go to my grandmother's orthodox shul in the borscht-belt of upstate NY for the high holidays every year. That was a confusing mix of religiosity and heretical behavior. We would drive to the shul and park a few blocks away so no one would know we didn't walk. My grandmother and me and my sister would join all the other women and girls upstairs, banished (or was it hidden?) from the main floor, and would watch the men over the railings. Sometimes my mother would come with us and wear short leather skirts, tons of perfume and cascading gold and diamonds, while the rest of the wig-wearing believers would watch the spectacle of us. The point is that in some sense it was important for my grandmother and my mother that we showed up and participated in some way, but it wasn't reinforced in any disciplined way at home. We ate bacon and lobster. We weren't part of a synagogue where we lived, and I didn't even go to hebrew school. A year or two before thirteen, I began studying with a local cantor who taught me enough to get through a bat mitzvah service that we did at a local hotel. HA!
Fast forward 29 years later. I'm preparing to get married to my husband, we were going through our own to-be-or-not-to-be-religious wave and we choose a chabad rabbi with all of his rules and bars he needs to jump over. And there's the question: is she jewish? Prove it. We try to track down the proof. We go to the place where the records are kept, and they can't find any record of me. The rabbi who did the conversion has died and they can't find anything. The days are ticking away and we're getting close to the wedding and the officiating rabbi is saying he won't be able to marry us if we can't find the proof. My husband finally goes again to the place and finds someone to look through the books again. My grandmother is now involved and she's calling all of the people she can think of and trying to remember when I was dunked. I find the bat mitzvah cantor and try to get him to vouch for my jewish authenticity as a back up plan. No, not jewish enough they say. My soon-to-be-husband finds the ledger that corresponds to the month and year, and there is one line with the right date and it is erased. My jewishness was erased. And so, in my desperation and humiliation, I consent to go along with another conversion. I drive down to NJ and go to a mikvah where a nice lady gives me a robe and tells me to get naked and put it on, and I submerse myself in a pool and take off the robe in front of several old men and dunk three times. And then I get dressed and sit in a room where the men ask me to remember 3 laws from the torah. And then I am pronounced jewish. Again.
We go to Israel for our honeymoon. We fly on El Al. I get grilled by the asshole line-questioner. Am I jewish? Prove it. What temple did I go to as a child? Did I have a bat mitzvah? Who was the rabbi? etc. Fuck. We are on a group tour for the first half of the trip (!) I am with my husband (unmistakable full-blood jew) in the midst of a zealous group of jews just waiting to get to the Holy Land. They talk and talk about what its going to be like to get off the plane and step out onto the ground and feel it. They're going to feel it, you know, going HOME.
I step out and feel nothing and wonder who I am and wonder if I belong anywhere. I spend the rest of the trip feeling disconnected from the group and questioning my identity, feeling other-than. A week later we're walking down a street in some Israeli town and I sit down on a step and let the wave of my birth mother crash over me and cry about how fucking cruel this life is.
When I was in my late teens, finding my birth mother, I met with the attorney who brokered the deal. He gave me a picture of her. I went home and my (adoptive) mom and grandmother were sitting in the kitchen. I walked in and my mom asked me how it went. I told her I had a picture of her and she asked if she could see it. I handed it over to her with an implicit trust. She looked at it and blurted out, "I remember what she was going to name you! Eva." And then my grandmother, in all of her infinite compassion, said "yeah, Eva...after Eva Braun, Hitler's girl."
And so it goes. Who am I? I ask myself as I look in the mirror and see my upturned nose . Am I a jew or not? I sense the hidden wisdom, but its not in my genes. I am an orphan, picked out of the ether and dropped into this land that is not where I came from. I am no one, I am everyone.
