How Christmas Helped Me Discover—and Eventually Reclaim—My Jewish Roots

When I was a child, my family’s history was hidden from me. Now I’ve made sure that my own child will always know where she came from.

By Alison Pick for Tablet Magazine

I was born in the shadow of a secret.

My family was Christian. As a small girl, I loved to go into the cool church basement and make crosses out of Popsicle sticks and glue. I loved to hear my father in the pew beside me, loud and off key: Sons of God, here is Holy Word … He sang with more fervor than the rest of us, like he really believed. Or maybe like he had something to prove.

Like every Christian child, I especially loved—surprise!—Christmas. It wasn’t just the mountain of presents under the tree. I also thrilled to the more spiritual side of the season: the molten glow of Christmas lights under a soft dusting of snow; the tapestry of song weaved by the voices of the carolers who came to our front door. On Christmas Eve we bundled in our wood-paneled station wagon and went to midnight Mass. It was hours later than I was usually allowed to stay up, and I remember the long snowy drive through the darkness, my breath smoking in the cold, and the sense of anticipation, that something monumental was about to happen. In the morning I raced to the window to see my mother’s parents turning into the driveway, then teetering up our walk, their arms overburdened with packages. Less frequently, my father’s parents came. They spoke in thick European accents, and we treated them like royalty, bringing them breakfast in bed, tiptoeing around the house when they slept. They loved seeing my sister and me, but I knew that they didn’t love Christmas.

I couldn’t imagine why.

***

Ironically, I first stumbled on our family secret at Christmas. I was 8 or 9 years old. We were celebrating with Dad’s family that year: a shaggy pine tree in the corner bent under the weight of lights and candy canes. My Auntie Sheila was speaking to my mother, telling her something about a couple they both knew, the husband Jewish, the wife a gentile.

And me? I was cruising a plate of Black Magic chocolates, trying to guess which one would have a pink center.

Above me, I heard Auntie Sheila say, “So, their daughter isn’t Jewish. Because Judaism always comes from the mother.”

I bit into a chocolate and screwed up my face: marzipan.

Mum: “So, our girls aren’t … ?”

“Our girls aren’t Jewish, either,” Auntie Sheila said. “Family secret or no family secret.”

“Even though their fathers … ”

“Right. Because we aren’t,” my aunt said.

I remember this moment like they show it in cartoons, a little light bulb appearing in the air above my head, and the sound effect, the clear ting of a bell. My brain was working fast, trying to process this information. Who did Auntie Sheila mean by “our girls”? She meant my cousins, and my sister. And me.

I put my half-eaten marzipan back on the plate.

I was not Jewish because my mother was not Jewish. But my father, the implication seemed to be …

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