Nobody's God

February 18, 2011.

One part of writing I especially like is the process of shaping words and phrases into accessible, clear sentences. Sentences a reader can enter without being scratched by verbal brambles. Sentences a reader can feel free to respond to, confident that he understands what I meant to say. When I work as an editor with other writers, I talk about clarity and accessability more than any other topics. But I see that, in this blog I have been less diligent about its shape than the shape of its individual parts. So it’s time to "shape up." Every other week, I will discuss how I see my belief that God "belongs" to no one group of believers playing out in real life. Alternate weeks, I will share an experience or person or book that became part of the path which led me to the conviction that God is "nobody’s God."

I’m going to start with the second kind of post, and ask you to return with me to my experience, in childhood, of Yiddishkeit. When, long before I came to believe that God is nobody’s God, I was part of a family where He was indeed nobody’s God.

Had anyone asked my parents whether they were more Jewish than American–or the reverse–my father would doubtless have shaken his head and smiled indulgently, while my mother would have pointed out, fairly politely, that it was a foolish question. Like asking someone if he valued one leg more than the other, she might have added. To my parents, being Jewish was why they came to America. My father came first, AWOL from the czar’s army; my mother arrived a few years later, leaving behind a job as supervisor of secondary evening school in the Ukraine. Louis Stein never finished fifth grade; Zelda Zam had completed the work for a doctorate at the University of Kiev. She was tall, quite stunning, and too serious; he was short, closer to homely than plain–and a champion charmer. In Chicago, the two of them met, fell in love, and married. Only in America.

With both arms, my mother wrapped her Bronx-born daughter warmly–in love and Yiddish lullabies, Yiddish songs, and Yiddish stories. They put me in a Jewish pre-school, where Yiddish was the lingua franca. My vocabulary was entirely Yiddish, and not short on words; but at two and a half, I stubbornly refused to combine words into a sentence. Until the afternoon, desperate for a push on the swings which the pre-school director calmly refused to give me until I asked in a complete sentence, I grudgingly emitted: "Zeit azoi gut und gib mich a shtup"–which may belong in Ripley as the longest first sentence ever, at least in Yiddish.


When I graduated to an Arbiter Ring shule, we studied the teacher’s own version of our formation as a people, a version from which God was somehow entirely absent. Who knew? It was a good story, anyway. I even went for a year of weekends to a Jewish High School–but God wasn’t part of the curriculum there either.

Only one element was lacking from my intensely Jewish upbringing: God. Mind you, neither of my parents ever said a word against God. God was–simply?–never mentioned. Instead, Truth was raised to the level of The Ultimate. To tell the Truth always took the top spot in my family’s creed. Not once did it occur to me that either of my parents might lie. They lied. My father lied continually about the health of our family’s finances–especially their prognosis. My mother, as proud as she was smart but determined that we’d eat, lied about taking a job scrubbing the floors of the common rooms in the Amalgamated, the housing project in which we lived. My father lived his life entirely encapsulated in fantastical thinking. My mother The Realist created fantasies to keep my childhood happy. Once, when Con Ed had had it with us, and turned off the electricity, my mother lit candles on the kitchen table, declaring it a holiday. Our holiday meal was smelts. Smelts by candlelight? It worked. Proof: the first time I ever went to the 21 Club, I saw smelts on the menu, and ordered them–my forever idea of celebratory fare.

My favorite of the lies my mother told me was repeated whenever she managed to purchase theater tickets. As she led me upstairs to the $1.80 seats, she would, step after step, say "best seats in the house, best seats in the house." Once we were in our sky-high seats, and she had caught her breath, she would–each time–explain that these were the best seats because the people who sat there loved the theater. When I was twenty-four and she dead for six years, I sat in house seats for the first time. When the curtain came down on the first act, I cried out "My mother lied to me!" And then I laughed. Laughed with pride at my mother’s brilliance. What a wonderful lie to tell a child–a lie thickly laden with truth. Lack of money alone would not supply stamina enough to hike all the way up to the second balcony. It would take love.

I got a lot of that. My Yiddishkeit childhood was happy. In the snapshots of me, my one dimple is unmistakable.