forgetful and respectful

My Mom is having a harder time remembering the schedule for each day.

My child Simone (Ess) and I joined her at 4 pm on the 23rd to go to the Chapel for the early Hanukkah Gathering. My Mom’s current residence is only a few blocks from where we lived as a girl. When we first moved to Boulder in 1976, it was a nunnery and their girl’s school. Neither my Mom, nor I, could remember what that was called. My Dad did: “Saint Gertrudes.” Ah, yes. Saint Gerts. Once it was closed down, as teens we would hang out in their sprawling if declining gardens with impunity.

Every year, beginning in the darkest of COVID, since living at what is now an upscale and tastefully renovated senior residence, my Mom has gone to this gathering. This is not because she is religious. She didn’t celebrate Hanukkah as a girl, or most anything Jewish. They did have an aluminum Christmas tree, she told me on the 23rd, until her sister Cathy insisted this was really one step too far. But, she’s one of only a small handful of Jews at this very WASPy establishment. Her Judaism feels differently live to her here. She knows who all the other Jews are, most critically, her loving careprovider Barbara, whose Jewishness is part of their connection.

Before we went, my Mom clearly and disdainfully recalled to me what would happen at this gathering, one which she wanted to attend even so. A man asks each of the participants about a childhood memory (of Hanukkah for those few who have experienced it). Then he tells some benign stories and latkes are served. A former English and Women’s Studies professor of real renown, my mother is critical of groups at her current residence. They don’t match her intellectual capacities, histories, or skills: the Hanukkah Gathering, the Short Story Circle. She understands her anomalous approach to reading, talking, and learning, to be some combination of her professional training and her Jewishness.

But this year, happy surprise, there was a new volunteer for Jewish Family Services. He imparted to the audience of respectful gentiles (and a few of us Jews) a complex and moving disquisition that covered history, liturgy, debates, and multiple meanings of Hanukkah. My mother’s religious, practicing, Jewish careprovider, also at our table, nodded appreciatively throughout his lecture, and gladly sang the songs and recited the prayers along with the willing if hesitant WASPs.

It’s not like I was doing any better than most in the audience. I knew none of this history, debate, song, or prayer; nor do I want to. My mother didn’t either, nor does she want to (a child of assimilation, “three generations in” on her mother’s side of wealthy Chicago German Jews—think the milieu of the actual Leopolds and Loebs—for my Mom and her parents, their Jewishness was a fact, and something to be proud of, if distantly.) She said as much to me at the Hanukkah Gathering: a lovely opportunity to ask her questions and allow her to remember. Just so, she relayed to me that her father, who was a working class Orthodox Jew from the other side of Chicago, was asked to forget, or submerge, his upbringing and beliefs in light of marrying up. My Mom thinks he would have liked to be more religious, but this was traded for more American and elitist aspirations.

My child Simone knew more than my Mom and I combined. “Not Jewish” by what I understand as racist matters of blood, Ess is deeply interested in our family’s Jewishness even as I am in a deepening period of despair, disavowal, and dread related to this same legacy. Simone can separate matters of faith, family, and Judaism’s commitments to questioning, study, and the material world better than I have ever been able to. Currently, like most American non-Zionist (and many other) Jews, I would love to see an end to what is happening in my name in Palestine, Israel, and across the Middle East. I have tried to be part of this response. Can I forget this horror (or at least disavow or disown or submerge) even for a moment? No.

But at the Hanukkah Gathering, most of the people in attendance had no or limited memories of this celebration for reasons of race, religion, inclination, or age. I have no idea what they know or feel about the current situation in Israel/Palestine. No one asked or said. I understood that this was not the place or time to bring up genocide or suffering or war, even as we were educated about how Hanukkah is rooted in such histories. Our small entourage followed my Mother’s lead. We sat proudly as Jews in a respectful but still modestly alienating chapel. Our Jewishness is related to so much suffering; but also to self-respect, and legacies of loss, love, and forgetting.

We all three had a pretty good time. When we walked back to my Mom’s apartment, we were greeted, as always, by a huge collection of family photos including these of my grandparents, Janet and Phillip Hecht, who I knew, and loved, and remembered during the Gathering with their daughter, Suzanne.

Children of the Depression, they embraced their Jewishness (although it’s not really like they had a choice). Highly educated (my Grandmother with a MA in Chemistry from the University of Chicago; my grandfather a late-in-life PhD in English, like his daughter’s, and his son’s by a second marriage, and mine, more or less), they also loved tennis and yachting and similar WASPy pastimes in which they excelled, albeit in segregated spaces.

I have committed to writing a blog post to gain wisdom, sustenance, or insight, every time I join an audience in the interval between election and inauguration. Out of respect for my extended family—Jews and others with a variety of opinions about this moment—I was dreading writing this one, and the Hanukkah Gathering it would need attend to. But, as has been true throughout this personal practice, taking the time needed to be present in diverse audiences, and then in my thinking and writing after, provides me a precious opportunity to be more generous with my observations; to communicate with care, complexity, and nuance (just as my mother wishes about the groups she attends). Groups and gatherings, their audiences and speakers, can be places of empathy and attention, across both differences and memory’s distances. I remember Janet and Phillip. I am thankful for the Jewish lives they led, and how I have had the opportunity to live mine as I see fit.