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conversion: the trail of a resident alien
- University of North Texas Press
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287 conversion: the trail of a resident alien Gail Hosking Gilberg “I am descended from a people who knew there is a God with the same certainty that they know walking into a river will get them wet.” rick bragg I’m afraid my ancestors would roll over in their graves at the thought of my conversion. My great-great-great grandmother, Mary Sophia Ramsey, who never played cards on Sunday and donated a stained glass window for the Dutch Reformed Church in Wyckoff, New Jersey, would think my children heathens. So would my ancestor, Guilamme Bertholf, who came here in 1694 as the first pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, though I imagine he knew about crossing borders because he made momentous shifts in his own life with a new language, a new land, and a new people. In the end, he reflected more a mosaic shape than the steadfast Flanders man he was when he first arrived on these shores. He who tried to convert others should understand. Though my mother attended a Pentecostal Church at the end of her life— a church that could not fathom someone not accepting the Trinity—I think she understood my conversion. She wouldn’t have been able to explain it to Brother Tommy the minister, or the others who fell on the floor weekly in frenzied ecstasy and sang songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” She never said so, but I imagine she based her acceptance on her understanding of people , the spirit, and her own concessions within a marriage. She never asked me why my children weren’t being baptized or how it was I could change after so many years of Sunday School. If she prayed about my conversion, she never told me so. I’ve been Jewish now long enough to have memories when I sip the ceremonial Passover wine, long enough to let Yiddish phrases roll off my tongue naturally as if my great-grandfather came from Russia instead of Cornwall, England. I’ve been Jewish long enough to argue the value of a briss, to respect kosher laws, and to dance the hora at Bar Mitzvahs as if God himself were my partner. Sometimes I forget that I once sang in the Presbyterian Church choir Risk, Courage, and Women 288 or took communion every Sunday. So when people ask me questions about my conversion, they surprise me; though they shouldn’t after so many years— twenty to be exact. For the sake of the question, I try to return to the moment I decided to convert, but I don’t find it easily. No I saw the light murmurs from my memory. What I remember instead is not having ever met a Jew before my husband—at least not one I recognized as a Jew. Growing up on an American army base an hour from Dachau, I thought all Jews had been killed. My father drove me to the concentration camp several times after the war. As I stared at those gruesome photographs and thought about the graves of millions, I couldn’t imagine that anyone had survived such terror. There were no Jews on the base—one was either Catholic or Protestant. I knew of no other choices. So when my husband -to-be first told me at college that he was Jewish, I insisted he was Irish. No, he kept saying. I am Jewish. The history between that moment and the day we decided to get married was fraught with my own spiritual crises. How to love and still hold fast to the person I am? How to balance two different worlds? How to live with the threads of two separate histories? My decision to become a Jew came nearly six years after my wedding. We lived on an Israeli kibbutz that first year of marriage, just off the road to Damascus and above the Sea of Galilee—places I had studied in Sunday School: Paul of Tarsus, the fishes and the loaves, the Sermon on the Mount. It was my husband’s idea to take a break from his graduate studies and travel to Israel, not mine. I had no idea what to expect, but I followed him anyway to a country where people on a bus headed for Jerusalem fondled my long blond hair, where children who had never met a Christian before quizzed me on my family history, where strangers continually asked me if I were a Jew...