Burn and Dodge

Passing

 PaSSing on the elevator down with her dad, the blonde baby girl careens out full kilter. On another day she nimbles alongside her mom whose face wears a permanent tan and freckles as she strolls beside her dark-skinned mom in a generational parade, so I can’t help marveling at the quick progress of lightening from grandmother to grandchild and wondering: What will Ruby (for that’s the little girl’s name) call herself when she goes to check the boxes all of us must fill? And you probably don’t think it’s the same (do you?) when I hesitate each time I check Caucasian, of European descent that I, too, am passing, in hiding with my -sky clipped off so I sport an Irish surname with straight blonde hair, blue-green eyes, snub nose. That even the rabbis have always believed I must be a convert. In Brooklyn, fifty years after the Holocaust, in my Italian working-class neighborhood, I never could bring myself to light a menorah in the window. One Saturday morning, when I descended three flights from my walkup in a spring skirt, the worker who swept the walkway looked up, Where are you going all dressed up?  What I tossed off I’m no longer ashamed to say was true and also a cover, for a voice inside whispered, Don’t tell him you’re going to synagogue, where it doesn’t matter that Jews (ask yourself what you think) are never quite white enough: I’m going to meet someone, I said in passing. ...