Accidents of Influence: Writing as a Woman and a Jew in America

On Living in Two Cultures

On Living in Two Cultures When the question is asked: "As a Jew in America, how do you feel living in two cultures?" my answer is that I'm relieved to know that it is only two cultures with which 1am struggling. 1thought it was more. Two cultures, after all, is only the usual difficulty. We can all cite examples apart from Jewish life. I'll give only two that have recently impressed themselves on me. The first is a friend of my daughter's, a Korean girl, whose father desperately tries to intervene between her and Americanization, although she goes to an American school. She must practice Korean, the way my daughter must practice her Hebrew; she must go to Korean religious services and is forbidden to go to American movies. Some day, her father tells her, they may return to Korea. But even if they don't, he wants her to keep her Korean self intact inside the American one. The second example is that of a brilliant Japanese pianist, twentythree years old, who has been studying here since he was eighteen, practicing thirteen hours a day, building up and mastering a piano repertory. But he has premonitions, he tells me, that one day he will give up the piano. The music, the instrument itself, is completely western, and he is, after all, Japanese. What does all that mean to him, 1 ask? It means, aside from a myriad distinctions concerning tonality, pitch, form, and mood, that perhaps he ought to perform while sitting on the floor. Very well. Maybe at some time, after years of carrying such an anguish through thirteen hours of daily practice, he will find a way, like Harpo, to take apart the piano-literally or symbolically-and make of it again a nonpercussive stringed instrument which he can play while he sits on the floor. Who, among Americans-aside from Mayflower people, an ever receding breed-does not live in two cultures? If 1were beginning to write a new novel instead of answering a question in a symposium, 1 would want to fill in "I" as much as 127 128 LIFE NOTES possible, supply the reader with evaluative credentials for "I" 's views. Even in symposia, it's best to know who it is saying what, and I can at least do what I say I'd like. In terms, that is, of the relationship between "I" and Judaism. Because although we are fond of saying "All Israel is one," we know it isn't. So then: I was born of an immaculate Jewish conception. That is, my parents, who were Jews by birth, refrained from intercourse with the Jewish religion and proudly passed me, in an untainted state, into the world. Not that we were assimilated. No, we stood in a proud and terrible place outside the "two cultures." Some years, my father went to reform services on the extra-special "high" days. But not my mother, who could not stand even this skimpy slice of official Jewish life. I think now that she was an early women's liberationist, at least in Jewish matters. Even then I knew that she bitterly resented the treatment of women in her mother's orthodox synagogue-on the one hand, the denial of women's spiritual life, on the other, the physical wearing down of women under the burdens of homemaking. No religion, no philosophy, no language, no literature, no custom . My parents were giving me all this, and thousands of Jewish parents were giving the same to their children. "No blame," as I CHING says. These parents were mostly first-born-heregeneration Americans, who had heard about or guessed at the indignities of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe (seldom were the glories mentioned: parental compassion inhibits much of the nostalgia and loss under whose weight we might be crushed if the irredeemable past were truly made vivid for us). These parents in America were squeezing, as they thought, the slave from their souls, and were preserving the souls of their children from intruSIOn . Naturally, I had a splendid Jewish fantasy life. I was conscious of a crowd of Jewish geniuses, whose great names lit up in the ungrudging gentile world and whose genes one might be thought, after all, to have at least partially inherited. How nice to know that one was chosen to have good brains. How comfortable not to know what the brains were supposed to be for. Here is a...