I know that my grandparents left Turkey for G-d and went to America for G-d. They left Turkey to prevent their sons’ conscription into the army. Conditions were brutal and depraved. Hardened criminals were released from jail directly into the army. It was a good place to get killed and an impossible place in which to survive as a Jew. My grandfather’s younger brother David came home from the army half dead. My grandmother nursed him back to health.

Some families from their small town, Tikir Dag, had immigrated to Seattle, taking up fishing businesses in the salmon rich Puget Sound. They needed a Rav. My grandfather got wind that some of these people who had observed Shabat in Turkey broke Shabat observance in America. He already understood the potential for getting rich and the lure to money in America. He understood that the New World, constituted a kind of newspeak that implied the obsolescence of the Old World, the obsolescence of G-d.

My grandfather prepared himself. How? I imagine him on deck of the ship that will carry them to America.

He brings the sefer entitled Going Out of Egypt, written by the Abarbanel, during the Jews’ expulsion from Spain. He brings the experience of earlier exiles, other voices. This is not an entirely new experience. The mythology surrounding America is not quite as magical. Brought down to natural proportions, we can resist it. There are prior exiles, there are paths worn by the feet of our fathers and mothers, there is a map. He studies the map to divine its key. He is a mariner putting new maps over old ones. The originals bleed through. He prepares himself with a worldview of America before he ever arrives. In his hands, America shrinks to a small island, as small as Turkey or Jerusalem. The only important boundaries on the map are a Jew’s moral alternatives.

He does not fling himself off the boat in wide-eyed innocence, forgetting everything he knows. He does not cast himself as an eager exile but as a faithful mariner entrusted with the safety of the ship and its passengers. He is a figure of heroic proportions.

I write almost endlessly of their journey. I reach back into that journey for the code of my identity.

He tells his children they will be laughed at, mangling the new language, as immigrants do; the old accent an undertow pulling at the syntax of the new one. He immunizes them against caring too much what others think of them. I imagine him telling them to pledge to Shabat observance, that one-seventh of their lives will be free of materialism. From one-seventh a man can divine the rest. He inoculates them against the inevitable rush to blend in.

I imagine that among my grandmother’s prized possessions are some seeds in a velvet pouch. These are the seeds to her identity that I will someday plant in words. I will take everything I remember and all that I imagine to know her. Her psalms, her recipes for Shabat food, her recipes for healing, her humor, her gentle distancing from the culture around her. She immunizes her children: It’s not easy to be a Jew. She does not mean the lack of funds which they accept as part of the rabbi’s underpaid plight. She means the constant grooming of one’s identity. She means it is easy to slip out of one’s sense of self and into the prevailing sense of who you should be. She means a Jew is a mapmaker. The map is herself, a constant redrawing of borders. There is always a danger that the mapmaker become obsessed with Terra Incognita. Everywhere my grandparents put their feet is Terra Firma.

My mother and her family become reeds in a weave that cradles me. The lullaby is Judeo Spanish.

I am born into a distinct context but I still have to build the walls of my structure, to insulate between the inside and the outside, as I grow up in a Christian America in the 1950’s. I have to find my voice. I have to find a way to resist the rush to blend in. I am not an immigrant but I have to make my own relationship to Sabbath. I have to keep myself free.

It is a series of challenges to write past the complexities that tend to silence us. Once I told a writing workshop leader why I had not gotten further in my writing. I am too religious for the secular Jewish writers, too Sephardic for the mainstream, too female for the predominant male voice. She said write against the friction. It will be difficult but worthwhile.

Most of us know the framework of our family stories. The real story may be imagined between the rungs of facts that gird history.

Writing our ancestors heals an old wound that was created with stereotypes of observant immigrant Jews, deprecated and antiquated. To this day, there is no healthy positive Torah observant character in the so-called canon of Jewish literature. Every immigrant character succumbs. He dies at the hands of his own wide-eyed innocence upon entering the portals of America, or her sad resignation to her children's and grandchildren’s indoctrination into the New World. By design, Old World characters are a dying breed.

What are the children of the dying breed? Doomed to self-denigration. It is ironic that this literature refuses to die. It is now itself an old tired song, an anachronism. In it, all the Orthodox characters succumb to temptation as they did when they first landed in America. Now the lure of secular knowledge, the lure of sin brings them down.

If there are no heroes, then how is it that we are alive? How is it we are vibrant Jews alive in the pulsating river of history, alive in the unfolding beauty of tradition? How is it we are beautiful our skin glowing with life, our Sabbath strong?

Where are the heroes who breathed life into us? If there were breaks in the generations how did we find our way back?

We have to go back and retrieve our heroes, not just to replace theirs. But to discover where we came from and to enlarge and enlarge and enlarge our own sense of who we may be. When we hold up a mirror to our rich and sacred life, we need to see figures of heroic proportions. We need them to help us stretch and grow. To help us understand who we are.

To reveal these heroes, we need powerful, compelling, fresh language . An old story won’t do.

Shiru LaHashem Shir Chadash
 

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Links and Dr. Belsky's articles:
MASK
Introduction to Retorno 2003
Stages of Recovery in a MASK group
MASK Parents at Work