“Are You Jewish?”
The question that destroyed everything
This is a guest post from the JPF family by Ruchama Feuerman, author of "In The Courtyard of the Kabbalist"
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“Are You Jewish?”
When I was getting my MFA at Brooklyn College in the early 1990s, I worked on my novel in the library which had lines and rows of computers, and best of all, a computer tech guy who walked around giving help whenever anyone’s computer gave them trouble. For some reason, this happened a lot in the early 1990s.
It’s a very personal thing to be writing a novel. Let me explain. Say my character who is making a stir-fry gets a bad report about her high school kid. To write the scene effectively, I need to figure out what she’d be feeling. Her feelings, mind you. Not mine. Let’s say I arrived at “despair” and “frustration.” My next step is to reproduce those same feelings in myself. I need to figure out what she’d do with her hands — viciously slice another onion? brusquely flick off the stove? — and in which part of her body these emotions would be registering. So I might scrunch up and contort my face, close my eyes, and grope about, trying to feel and do as she would. That’s why fiction writers toil away in attics, far from the public eye. Because if you were to catch them in the act of writing a scene, you’d think they were loony. But I couldn’t retreat to any attic because I didn’t own a computer, or at least not yet.
The thing is, I didn’t realize my face looked like silly putty pulled in eight directions. I didn’t realize how odd I appeared until the computer tech fellow, a husky Latino guy who must’ve been ten years younger than me, stopped in front of my computer one day and said, “Is everything okay?”
I blushed to the roots of my scalp. In a library, everything happens in a quiet aura, in a whisper. I was sitting there quietly typing and yet sending enormous vibrations, unbeknownst to me.
I explained I was writing a novel, and I was trying to enter my character’s heads, hearts, and lives. He gave me a quizzical look, nodded as if he understood, then moved on.
The next day when again Computer Guy happened to be passing by and caught my face contorted in some weird expression, he said, “Still working on that novel?”
I nodded, still embarrassed, but at least less so than yesterday. Writing a novel always seemed a Don Quixote thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself. This book was writing me as much as I was writing it.
“Wow.” He stood there, mulling something. He was a tad on the goofy-looking side with a square head and boingy head curls. He looked 18 to my 28. “What’s it about?”
I never told anyone except for people in my writing workshop. I didn’t want to deal with bland comments like “Oh, that’s nice” or forced enthusiastic “How fascinating!” I gave him some vague answer and that was that.
Or so I thought. Every now and then I’d be immersed in one of my characters — a never-been-kissed 39-year-old single woman in Jerusalem who’d fallen for a man with an outrageous body tic — when I’d sense something, a hovering presence. I whirled around. There he was, grinning, leaning over my shoulder, trying to glimpse my screen. I gasped, and bolted upright.
“Come on, let me see your story,” he cajoled.
No waaay. I really felt shy and protective about my writing. But he kept trying. It got to be a game, a shtick between us. Whenever he walked down my row, I splayed my arms out over the screen, lest he see what I’d written. Some might think he was flirting with me — and that I was catching the flirting ball and throwing it back — but no. He was just being playful and goofy. I didn’t even know his name or he mine.
One day I thought: Why not? He was such a nice, smart, and helpful guy. Besides, the shtick was wearing thin. So I printed out a page. The part where my character visits a Hassidic rabbi and gets some blessing. “Here,” I said. “You can read this.”
He beamed and grabbed the sheet. He began to read eagerly. My stomach tensed. It was my first novel attempt. What if he thought it stank?
After a minute or two, he glanced up, his face bleached of color. I thought: Was it that bad?
“You’re Jewish?” he said loudly, in disbelief. He looked shocked, no — horrified.
“Yes,” I said a little uneasily, “and what are you?”
“Egyptian.”
Ah, yes, now that I thought about it, he did have a slightly Egyptian look to him, whatever that meant. But why was he staring at me suddenly, like he’d seen some monstrosity? He looked shaken, even.
And here, we’d been playing so nicely with each other.
I don’t remember if he finished reading the page. I don’t even remember if I asked him if he liked it.
I continued working on my novel. In the ensuing months, whenever I had computer trouble, I still asked him for help, and he gave it willingly. He was still a polite, kind young man. But the easy banter, the playfulness between us had disappeared.
I tried to speculate what had gone wrong. It probably had to do with politics, and how being Jewish bound me to Israel in his eyes. In the past forty-some years, Israel had defeated his country in three, not four disastrous wars initiated by Egypt. But then President Sadat took that famous trek to Jerusalem and made peace with Israel, in exchange for the return of Sinai with its oil wells and the uprooting of Jewish towns and settlements. The peace, even though it was a cold peace, held, and is still holding in 2024, more or less. So what was his problem?
Could it be the very idea of a Jew brought up feelings of shame and emasculation? In the Quran, the non-Islam resident was supposed to be less than, forbidden from riding a horse or camel or doing anything that put the Dhimmi on the same level as the Muslim believer. The Dhimmi could not give evidence against a Muslim in court. He had no legal recourse. He had to wear clothing that identified him as a Jew. (In Baghdad it was a yellow badge). But here, in modern times, the lowly Jew had risen up, unseated, and unmanned his Muslim master. Not only was this a scalding humiliation for Arab men throughout the Middle East, but it was…how can I put it? Unnatural. It went against the order of the world ordained by the Quran. Could that be it? It shocked me that people I might meet in a college library would still be thinking that way.
I played with the idea of talking to him about what happened, then nixed it.
I graduated soon after. Eventually, the novel would be published by St. Martin’s Press, God bless them.
You would’ve thought I’d forgotten about Computer Guy, but every now and then — and this is years later — his face drifts through the screen of my mind and again I wonder: What had he heard, what had Computer Guy been told about Jews, that would make his face go white like that? What put the horror into his voice, when he surmised I was a Jew?
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Excellent post ! Every once in awhile someone finds out I’m not Jewish even though I’m a very vocal ally. They seem relieved. I am disgusted. If you don’t stand with my Jewish family I have nothing to say to you. So glad this blog is bringing forth important stories!
Envy and resentment are things most of us are uncomfortable talking about, they're almost never posited as poss causes of any dispute, but have to be recognized as one of the factors involved in unkillable Jew hate. The Germans were deeply jealous of Jews, as are some blacks of the Farrakhan type, and Arabs must be both deeply envious and humiliated by Jewish achievement and success. Jews turned a desert swamp into a rich modern country in decades while Arabs werent able to do much more than goat herd there. Jews are the smartest, richest, most accomplished tribe in the world--it makes sense that various bitter losers hate them.