Hybrid

Hybrid: the offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties. Syn: Crossbreed. Blend. Interbred. Composite. Compound. Mongrel. Impure. 

In elementary school we learn about Gregor Mendel, the 19th century Augustinian monk who experimented with pea plants and discovered the basis on which we understand genetics and heredity today. Mendel explored the crossbreeding of traits and the resulting predictability of color, size and shape of the plants. The recessive and dominant genes. As a child I imagined Mendel in his garden, whispering to the peas and coaxing them into revealing their secrets, the monk whose quiet existence revolutionized scientific thought. 

In the heat of the summer, I used to sit with my grandmother on the slate patio in her garden, shucking peas out of their pods and readying them for dinner. Peas were easier than corn; with corn you had to peel off the husk and strip the silk. The peapod merely needed to be popped open and your bare finger could play the six or seven little pealets like a piano, zhupping them into the bowl with one swipe. It took a lot of pea pods to make a full bowl of peas to feed everyone. My grandmother had silvery blue eyes. I have green eyes, like the peas. We shared a love of ice cream, but I don’t think that’s genetic.

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Growing up, I called myself “half and half,” like the mixture of cream and milk that my mother poured into her cup of Sanka each morning. My Jewish mother and my non-Jewish father were both atheists and anti-organized religion in any form. My dark-haired mother, orphaned at 13, was uninterested in being Jewish; her dream was to have a Christmas tree. My blonde father, flogged by nuns and reared in a home rife with alcoholism and secrets, had no use for religion of any kind, but was drawn to everything that he thought a Jewish home represented—warmth, conversation, family.

They found each other as teenagers and eloped before my father had graduated from college. I like to think it was a love story. But their chiaroscuro — the dark and the light — were tumultuous together and eventually tore apart.

I grew up with Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts; the only nod to my mother’s Jewish heritage came in the form of a sturdy brass menorah. Each year we would light it and watch the flames dance, growing brighter on each of the eight nights. But there were no prayers, no Chanukah songs. It was merely an addendum to the real show. An afterthought. 

On Christmas day my parents’ friends would come to our house to celebrate. My mother served boozy punch and Christmas-y food. She was famous for her Yule log cake. Candles of every height burned brightly in our fireplace front. Everyone was merry. Our friends were all Jewish and had nowhere else to be. 

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Mischling, pejorative legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed Aryan and non-Aryan ancestry. Denotation of hybrid, mongrel or half-breed.

When I learned about the Holocaust in high school, I wondered if the Nazis would have sent me to Auschwitz. I’ve since learned that even with my Jewish mother, having only two Jewish grandparents would have made me a second degree Mischling — a person of mixed parentage — and Hitler, with his lunatic genetic theories, at first wanted to assimilate second degree Mischlings into the Aryan nation. My fully Jewish partner — who, like most diaspora Jews, believes the cattle cars are always around the corner — thinks Hitler would have branded me with a gold star and etched numbers into my arm. I wonder if I could have lived a dual life, acting like a Nazi but secreting supplies to Jews. I don’t think I am that brave.

I had a lovely boyfriend in college with a giant heart. He took care of me in the wake of my mother’s decision to leave us. At the time my mother’s departure seemed like a natural outgrowth of my parents’ escalating fights. She moved to a one-room apartment; my sister and I remained with our father. There was no visitation, no sleepovers at our mother’s place. Our lives continued mostly without her, although at some point she wanted back in. But she never really fit. Like me. 

My boyfriend once took me to his church, an Episcopalian service. I remember the bright red door and feeling inept for not knowing what to do when there was communion, worried that I would desanctify the whole service. I recall the dialogue between the priest and the congregation, called the Sursum Corda – literally, lift up your hearts. But I felt no connection to god or religion or community in the church that day. I knew that it was a deeply meaningful and important part of my boyfriend’s life, and that if I was going to stay with him, accepting all his loving support, I would also need to accept his faith and potentially incorporate it as my own.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I soon started down a road of self-discovery that I refer to as my young adult Jewish journey. This of course had nothing and everything to do with my mother and her disconnection to Judaism and her departure from my life. I ended my relationship, breaking my boyfriend’s heart but knowing that he was meant to be with someone whose life included that red door. Mine did not, not even only half-way open.

I started slowly, toying with the question of what makes someone Jewish. I had a new boyfriend, one who wouldn’t have dated me if I wasn’t Jewish, which appealed to me and gave me the heckscher, or kosher stamp, without having truly earned it. He was my catalyst. We went to High Holiday services. We celebrated Hanukkah. I went to the ritual bath – the mikvah – and we got married under the chuppah. I broke the glass alongside my husband, a feminist but Jewish bride.

We joined a synagogue. We had children. The boys had brises and the girl had a naming ceremony. They grew and had bar and bat mitzvahs. We celebrated the cycles of the Jewish year, with its many holidays and meaningful interpretations. We surrounded ourselves with Jewish friends who marked the life moments with us. The Jewish calendar matched the seasons, providing grounding in practice and thought. I loved the deepened meaning of my life. 

I kept thinking I had overcome the Mischling status that had haunted me, overcame the fact that I barely knew I was Jewish growing up, had no connection to either my roots or my future. My mother, in permanent pain from her parents’ early deaths, told no stories. My husband was enmeshed in his own Jewish line. It was up to me to concretize what this belonging meant. But without the tools usually embedded in childhood like family lore and religious teaching, I still doubted my legitimacy. 

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I doubled down on my Jewish journey. I started working for a Jewish organization. We went to synagogue, making six days out of seven in a week dedicated to Jewish community. For those who didn’t know me prior to my non-converting immersion into Jewish life there was no question that I belonged. 

My parents, divorced by now, took sides. My non-Jewish father, whose new wife was Jewish, from a large Brooklyn family with the Holocaust ringing through the generations, was supportive. He understood the need for the connection to something that felt real and open. My Jewish mother suspected that my new husband secretly tucked pays—side curls— behind his ears when he came to visit. She thought he was being subversive, hiding his true intentions to turn me into a religious fanatic. She didn’t understand.

In the early days of my work life in the Jewish world in the early 1990s there was a phrase that was accepted as gospel: “Jewish continuity.” This meant that the single most important goal of the Jewish community was to ensure its survival. Jews should only marry and breed with Jews. Interfaith relationships were thought to be impure, unwise, antithetical to being Jewish. This was powerful stuff, the trauma of the Holocaust casting its long shadow on several generations removed. It made me feel small. Like I didn’t really belong. Again.

Under this umbrella, I was still a mongrel. A Mischling after all. This terrible pronouncement reinforced everything I already struggled with as I tried to weave my way into the Jewish world. 

So I kept to the progressive end of the Jewish world, both in politics and in my spiritual community, where I was legitimized, welcomed. Where my questions were normalized, where my lack of Hebrew and lack of experience with prayer and practice was remediable. 

Thankfully the transgressive “continuity” aspiration has long been retired. The community has woken up to the brilliant variation in diaspora Jewish life. But I had to work hard to adopt the rituals, the language, the insider-ness of a world that was not baked in me as a child. It might be my DNA, but so much of my life’s practices have been learned. 

Like my father, I crave an instinctive, intuitive family connection that I will never have.

Compound. Water, which is a chemical compound of hydrogen and oxygen in the ratio two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom, contains H₂O molecules. 

I am a compound. I am compounded. 

When I float in the waters of the mikvah, I feel a lightness. A buoyancy. I feel beautiful and weightless. I have gone to the mikvah to mark my wedding, to mark the end of my marriage after death, to mark my new partnership and commitment to another, to wrestle with my grief. The water holds me. I immerse myself under the pure rain water cover of the mikvah well, eliminating sound, and the water embraces me as it folds me into its path. I am whole and complete when I emerge, a compound, not a divided soul. The water, in search of its own direction, has sewn me together. 

Writer Dani Shapiro learned in midlife that her father was not her biological father. In her memoir, Inheritance, she describes how her parents had used an illegal fertility doctor to get pregnant back in the early 1960s, and Dani’s biological father was, in fact, someone other than the father who raised her. 

Her memoir spills over with her grief upon learning she didn’t belong when she thought she did. She doesn’t know how to parse the new contours of her identity that have constricted her understanding of the world. She agonizes.

My grief comes from learning I belong when I never knew I did. And not knowing how to parse the contours of my identity that expand the world to which I want to belong. I agonize.

My grief compounds with every loss that accompanies my journey.

When my mother left. 

When my infant son died. In Jewish tradition, you don’t bury a baby under 30 days. Or say kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, for a baby who doesn’t live to be a month. 

When my Jewish mother died, and I said kaddish for her, even though I knew she wouldn’t want me to. 

When my non-Jewish father died, and I didn’t say kaddish for him because I didn’t know if I was allowed to. 

When my husband died, my guide and link to our Jewish life for so many years. And yet the person I betrayed by eliminating the kosher rules in our home while he lay in the next room with a tumor in his brain preventing him from knowing that I crossed the dishes and used the meat plates for a cheese sandwich, because I was overwhelmed with caregiving and impending death. 

When my dearest friend died and I sat shomer with her body, keeping her spirit company until burial. 

And still I worry about fitting in. About being enough. I am still perseverating in my own garden, wondering where I come from and what it means.

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Mendel’s peas taught us that we can predict the nature of nature. But we can’t predict the nature of how the genetic code will make us feel. Of how we’ll wear our blue or brown eyes, our frizzy or straight hair, our dark or pale skin. Of how it will feel when we come out of the cocoon of our family and learn that, in fact, we don’t fit in. Or we belong to a history that we’ve never been taught. Or that we are a hybrid product, sprouting from generations of mutations. How do we reconcile the disparate pieces of our genetic whorl with the legacy of our lineage? 

The monk in the garden unlocked a key to the science of identity. It appears it is up to us to weave that strand into an entirely different helix that contains the multitudes that comprise our humanity. And as it was for Mendel, it’s a lifetime of work.