Stephen Vincent wrote:
>I think it 'natural' that all cross-cultural, ethnic, racial, geographic,
>etc. relationships possess the attraction of 'the other.'
>Are we not born to marry strangers? (Otherwise the race implode into
>incestuous wreckage).
>Yet, it's obvious also that some relations, 'other' or not, carry racist,
>sexist etc. agendas, consequences.
>How the off-spring, the young carry and deal with the karma of the couple is
>another equally important level.
>
>Stephen V
>
>
Took awhile to get to this. Read some of the postings, thought about
them (big mistake), then find out I most likely have a new job out of
this company and am with baited breath awaiting the formal offer
letter. So circumstances are a bit weird right now. Pleasingly so, but
weird anyway.
Stephen's "etc." omits religion, the long-lived elephant in the middle
of my particular sub-parlor. Religious faith/practice, as much as race
and ethnicity, demands self-protection and even, at times, a degree of
belligerence, especially if you are perceived to be Out Of Step with
prevailing orthodoxies.
In my previous Jewish incarnation I never encountered anti-Semitism
until I left New York City for Binghamton, a city and area I later
learned had a rip-snorting German-American Bund during the '30s as well
as a thriving KKK before that. Poor whites came up from Tennessee,
Kentucky, and West Virginia because there were jobs in the "Tri-Cities"
area. They brought their "issues" with them. The prevailing accent in
Binghamton reminded me of the Confederate volunteers in *Gettysburg*.
People kill each other over religion and their concept of God as much as
they kill each other for a drum of oil. When they conflate the two you
get Pat Robertson, a man I would like to see terminally injured. Big
news that religious differences have caused hideous practices throughout
history, and I fear some actions could appear: no stake or rack, but
various civil inconveniences at the very least. In my days hanging out
with Progressive Labor Maoists back in 1969, I read some theories that
religious conflicts are really fomented--as in Northern Ireland--in the
name of class warfare and economic control. "Marat, we're poor and the
poor stay poor." Maybe. But I have met Roman Catholic men who came
from the Six Counties, and when their churches were torched, they tended
to view the conflict as religious, not as some form of economic classism
intended to enrich a guy who looks like the character on Monopoly
money. While I am not a scholar of the Great Hunger, I doubt that the
Irish potato famine would have had become the horror of horrors it was
if most of the Irish were Protestants.
That was the digression.
What does marrying within one's ethnicity, race, or religion buy us?
You're asking the wrong guy. I was a Jew who married same and divorced
her. For my wife's mother, being a Jew was important. I maybe had a
common mind-set. But I was also not Orthodox: this was very important.
I would not make demands about Sabbath observance, ritual baths, etc.
So what were we? Cultural Jews, later half-assed practitioners. When I
actually got serious about it during the mid-1980s my wife was upset.
Can a presumably common point of view at least forestall disaster if not
prevent it? No clue. Yet that is the "common wisdom": marry inside
your own "tribe," be it religious, racial, or ethnic--it makes it
easier, and marriage is hard enough. Play pleasure games with all kinds
of people before you get married, but marry one of your own. Go back to
Uncle Asher's advice to Paul Hertz in Roth's early "Letting Go"--his
advice about Libby, the nice Catholic girl, is grossly phrased but it's
the folk wisdom I grew up with. Schtupp 'em, don't chuppah'em. And I
know an Irish guy who grew up with the same idea: Jewish girls would
pick you up in a bar and take you home for a one-night stand because
they saw you as Forbidden Fruit. But they'd marry one of their own. So
would he. It worked both ways. It worked all ways.
That said, and narrowing to where I came from, the "incestuous wreckage"
could include a custom-with-the-force-of-law such as what has existed in
Judaism forever: thou shalt not marry with a goy. Intermarriage between
Jews and gentiles is increasing. Spokespersons say that Jews are
finishing Hitler's work: I don't know how many times I heard that, felt
self-satisfied I was married to a Jew, then went to be with my current
goyishe girlfriend. When Rabbi (he really was) Meier Kahane was
assassinated in the early 1990s it came out that this paragon of
Orthodox Jewish virtue had a gentile woman as a mistress. Granted, she
had bad taste in men, but that isn't the point. What Kahane was doing
wasn't considered adultery in Jewish tradition because his girlfriend
wasn't a Jew. I don't know if that's Halakha (law) or minhag (custom
with the force of law). On Sunday evening I rewatched the surprisingly
wonderful film of "Fiddler on the Roof" and was reminded of Tevye's
grief at having to mourn his daughter who presumably converted to marry
a Russian Orthodox young man. She became dead. The old custom, I
believe, was to observe shiva, the seven days of ritual mourning, in
this case for a dead child. Drape the mirrors, sit on boxes in unshoed
feet, the child no longer exists. Tevye's forgiveness of this girl (the
cry across the road of "God go with you!") as she and her new husband
leave for Cracow may not be on the level of Hermione's resurrection to
Leontes, but still could squeeze tears from a rock, at least this rock.
I suppose in a way that poem I put up yesterday, about not being there,
glances at my own activities in 1997-98 when I went from Jewish to
Catholic. *I* became the Other, an elephant in two parlors at once.
I told my kids first. My younger son could not have cared less. My
older was angry. He reacted like I was Anakin Skywalker turned to the
Dark Side. He said "Dad, you taught us to be Jews." "Yes, I did," I
said, "and I did a good job. What I've done now I did to myself, for
myself, because I had to, and I hope it affects only me." Baptised in
the river DeNial. It was like a Clifford Odets drama, ne c'est pas?
My surprise was that the Church I found after years of nullity made it
worse. I went to Reconciliation (aka Confession) with a priest who
listened to what I had to 'fess up, then snapped at me "You should never
have left Judaism." (Thank you, Father, **&%# you too.) Even worse,
the parish through which I entered didn't know what to do with a
divorced male convert in his early 50s who could receive the Sacraments
but had no place in its family-oriented social community. They seized
on my religious impulse, trained me in far too short a time (8 months),
let me in, then ignored me. So I was proof that Limbo is not so easily
written out of dogma. The elephant in the center of the room again.
What has this to do with colonization? I don't have the vaguest. But
it *is* about being and becoming the Other. Some people have made it
work. Teresa of Avila was born of a Jewish converso father who bought
forged patents of nobility. Edith Stein, not even known by her
Carmelite "inside" name Teresa Benedicta. There are others. It is
often a kosher meat vs milk situation. Who ARE you? WHAT are you?
Parve (neither meat nor milk) is not an answer to issues of identity.
The consequence CAN be homelessness in two traditions at once. You can
be admired for your courage to embrace a new tradition, an idea,
repeated often enough, reminds me uncomfortably of people who praise the
appeal of a man or woman who has "such fine features," i.e., that cafe
au lait skin and/or the high cheekbones make it so they don't look TOO
Black or TOO Indian or TOO much of anything except "us." Religious
"miscegenation" happens too. I can be pain to be an Other unless you
realize you can be anything you want to be.
ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
-Douglas Adams
|
