SEP’ 20

17

 Happy (Jewish) New Year, friends!

Rosh Hashanah began yesterday at sundown and will end tomorrow at sundown. We will celebrate later today with family and friends. We began celebrating the Jewish high holy days as a family when Willa was born. As a first-generation American, I am acutely sensitive to the selective amnesia endemic among Americans that enables white Americans to imagine themselves as "native." It felt incumbent upon me to make sure that we raise a child who knows her history.

I was raised in a families that experienced immense pressure to assimilate. I experienced the loss of language, heritage, history and culture that comes with wanting to fit in, with wanting to be thoroughly "American." However else they felt about it, my parents accepted the assimilation of their children as the best way to ensure their success in this country. My willful amnesia, now, near total ignorance, created a schism that our relationship will likely never recover from. Love helps us bridge the gap but it does not erase it. It is a wound that increasingly aggrieves me.

Through his mother's family, my husband is a third-generation Jewish American! My mother-in-law's grandparents on her father's side of the family were Russian Jews who went through Ellis Island and, on her mother's side, surviving members of a family who had managed to evade capture and deportation by the Third Reich and emigrated to the U.S. from the UK after World War II.

In wanting to salvage what little I can of my own heritage for my daughter, I felt it was important for our family to do the same for my husband and his family's heritage. The holidays are an important way for us to do this. In our day-to-day life (worry about the rise of anti-Asian xenophobia and anti-semetism aside), we feel that we are your typical American family. The Chinese and Jewish holidays punctuate our daily life with the reminder that we are not. And, for that matter, no one else is either unless you are Indigenous American. Celebrating the holidays also creates engaging opportunities for us as a family to learn/remember/reclaim what was lost.

All of this is to say that I am going to be busy today making challah and kugel, putting apples and honey in everything, and, in these small ways, making history.