My wife and I accepted an invitation to a Purim party at the Willetts Street Jewish Center in Manhattan. Purim or the Feast of Lots is a time of joy for the minor holyday celebrates the thwarting of a plot to kill the Jews in Babylonian exile. It also is time to read the Megillah or Scroll of Esther, and calls for wearing of costumes, eating, ‘parfuming’ or drinking, merrymaking and eating fruit filled triangular cookies called ‘hamantaschen’.
So it came as no surprise that my wife donned a gaily colored caftan with gold and silver threads and around her neck she wore a family heirloom, an amber oval inscribed with the Shema in Hebrew. Copper toned skin with high cheek bones and slightly slanted dark brown eyes, and her henna touched jet black hair artfully arranged, she looked as though she was Queen Esther or a Berber queen of the Anti Atlas Mountains, at least. Much to her annoyance, I was dressed in my usual ‘shabby chic’.
We did not expect much from the food, which is standard awful institutional dreadful. But we were very much looking forward to lively conversation and much conviviality. Our hopes were quickly dashed by Natasha and Nathan who shared our table. The two Ns, 24 years in America, came from the Soviet Union. Natasha looks like a ‘matryoshka’ doll, small, round and plump with rosy cheeks and alert Meissen blue and unknowing eyes, and wears a wig. Nathan is tall and heavy set; under a baseball cap sits dull brown eyes, and by his coloring he has traces of Kazakh ancestors. His hands, the most noticeable thing about him, are huge with fingers the size of sausages and discolored nails, a testimony to years of hard work.
Natasha did most of the talking, but occasionally Nathan would break into the conversation with his accented English if he were not whispering to her something in Russian.
During the meal of bland turkey meatloaf and soggy green beans and sad looking mashed potatoes, washed down with either Coca Cola or Seltzer or hot tea, Natasha and Nathan kept eyeing my wife Sultana and then me. Natasha was curious first about Sultana’s amber piece of jewelry. Surprised to learn, it was something handed down from generation to generation among my wife’s family who originally lived in the mountains of south Morocco for more than 2000 years. Nathan wanted to know if she adopted her husband’s religion, and what was her Hebrew name. And then he was a little taken aback that although born in North Africa she wasn’t black, since for him all Africans are black.
Nothing seemed to embarrass the couple in expressing their ignorance and prejudices. Nathan wanted to know if Sultana would perform belly dancing on the spot. At that moment, she gave me a weary look. Natasha wanted to know about the hovels she supposed that Sultana had lived in the mountains or the goats or sheep she had tended as a child or the ‘exotic’ way of ‘primitive’ mountain folk . And, what’s more, she wondered how could my wife have lived among Arabs, for in her neighborhood in Brooklyn had more and more Muslims were moving in and they frightened her. She and Nathan, consequently, were thinking of shifting to another place but the rents being what they are these days, the two Ns are resigning themselves to stay where they are living.
Then Nathan questioned me about my ancestry. Am I of Russian stock? His face froze when he learnt that my family had always lived on either side of the Mediterranean for as far back as we could trace. Since I have light skin and grey eyes, he seemed puzzled. Not happy with that bit of news, he grilled me on my bona fides, my ancestry, my education, my work and my style of life, to which I took great exception.
For Sultana and me, this is a tale many time told. It is a wearing battle, if you think in those terms.
Any time someone hears, say, that Sultana is from Morocco, the high degree of misinformation she hears goes off the Richter scale of the belief. Consequently we inure our mental carapace to weather the storms and high waves of ignorance. Seeing that wild look in my eyes that signaled I was about to have a sudden moment of madness, Sultana whispered soothing words in French, and my anger calmed. Natasha and Nathan, for us, had gone beyond the bounds of civilized behavior, and I, for one, was looking for way to shut them up.
Call it ‘divine intervention’, when the women Reformed rabbi began reading the Megillah, all conversation ended. Still Natasha and Nathan had to have the final word: they harrumphed that they ‘disapproved’ of women in the rabbinate, as Orthodox and practicing Jews. Nonetheless they stayed for the reading and the stomping and the twirling ‘graggers’ or noisemakers and hissing at the mention of the name the villain of the story– Haman. They stayed, despite their censoriousness, because they were witnessing for their faith.
As the ceremony ended and the hamantashen — filled with prunes, poppy seeds, apricots, apples, or dates—distributed, the two Ns said they looked forwarded to seeing us again at another party. Sultana and I smiled and the same thought flashed through our long married minds, but I will keep it in the family.
