Recently I went to an event where we were asked to write what being Jewish means to us on a personal level. In many ways my connection to Judaism and being Jewish is similar to my connection to music, literature and film: it evokes a sense of nostalgia that literally colours my life and allows me to live beyond the daily grind of waking, eating, working, sleeping etc. This is what I wrote. The story is ficticious but the feelings are all fact.

I remember it clearly. It was my first day in New York on my own. My friends  were all at work and I was finally left with just myself for company. I was standing by the window of the sterilised high-rise apartment my company had sub-let for me, looking down at 1st Avenue and wondering how I was ever going to get used to living in this crazy city.  I’d been out that morning to walk in Central Park and explore some of my neighbourhood but I  had been completely overwhelmed by the outside world which was hot and steamy and crowded and  had left me breathless and disoriented.  I remember feeling detached and lost and lonely and also like I’d left a big part of myself in London that I would never get back. After a while spent cooling down in the air-conditioned cocoon of my apartment  I started to feel less anxious and I sat back on the sofa and tried to think about what I wanted to do for the rest of the day. An image kept on coming to me of sitting on the sand at Coney Island, watching the  Hassids stroll along the boardwalk, whilst their children and wives played in the sea, the sun beaming in a brilliant blue sky.  Objectively  I knew it was probably not a reality anymore. I was thinking of the Brooklyn of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the  1950s,  when this area thrived with  Yiddish - speaking  Jews, mostly fresh off the boat from Eastern Europe.  Although I had no idea in what way it had changed, I was conscious of the fact that it probably had.  But still, the image was comforting  and enticing and I decided to brave the intense humidity of the outside world again.

I remember sitting on the F train  with my back leaning against the carriage partition and staring out of the window, noticing how ethnically defined the areas were which passed by: the first ones with people hanging out on doorsteps, African hair-dressers,  rich smells of jerk chicken,  and loud blasts of reggaeton, then ones where all the signs were in Russian , windows were dressed with  unlit candles and net curtains  and old people sat around outside chatting on benches.  Finally I began to smell the ocean, and then see the empty high-rise condo buildings, built in the expectation that Coney Island was soon to become a luxury residential destination. I got off the train waiting to be hit with the street scene  from my imagination : collections of Hassids on the boardwalk, religious women bathing in the ocean, old-style cafeterias selling chicken soup and rye bread.  Unsurprisingly there was nothing of the sort.  There were rollercoasters: their cars lazily resting on the tracks in preparation for the evening’s entertainment, Italian-Americans selling doughnuts to recent  Russian immigrants, an empty basketball court , and the iconic Ferris Wheel, its carriages swaying in the breeze.  The scene was different but the sea and the boardwalk were still there and I decided to sit down and relax in the sunshine for a while .  I took out my copy of Singer and started reading the story which had seemed so evocative of this place.   Slowly  I began to relax and I dug my bare feet into the sand and lay down flat staring up at the perfect cloudless sky. Then I remember feeling a wave of extreme happiness rise inside me . The sun, the sea, the sand, the words. It was all perfect.  And then I realised I’d been searching for something to connect me to this place, where I felt so out of my depth and so alone. And for that connection I had sought out the Jewish past. It didn’t even matter that for the most part it no longer existed. In that moment I felt grounded and solid and real for the first time in  months  after a period of packing, moving, emotional goodbyes and  more  emotional hellos.  This is the part of being Jewish and Judaism that is the most meaningful for me. Memory and memories. Communal and personal. Imagined and real.  The thought that I am connected to a history rich with literature, art, music, places, and most importantly, people, is one that warms me and  gives me strength .   In this vein I just wanted to finish with a passage from Leviticus which , in the rare occasion that I do go and also listen in synagogue, is one that always resonates strongly  with me and evokes the same feeling as the one I had that day in Coney Island “I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.”

Advertisement