This essay appears in our July 2015 digital issue. Read the rest of the story and the entire issue by downloading it today.
EVEN AS A CHILD, I wrinkled my nose, wrapped my hair around my thumb and forefinger, and took it as a compliment when someone said to me, “You don’t look Jewish.”
For years, I haven’t acted Jewish either (if there is such a thing as a Jewish way to act). I don’t just mean I haven’t worn my Jewish star. I mean I’ve avoided the stereotypes: talking with my hands, bragging about my kids, showing off my money, playing mahjong.
Last year, though, at the age of seventy-four, I chopped chicken livers in my grandmother’s wooden bowl, which I had had to search for in the recesses of my kitchen. I probably hadn’t used it in at least thirty years.
During those years, I didn’t think about chopping chicken livers—or about brisket or kasha of the High Holidays. Instead, I decorated dozens of Christmas trees, attached feathery birds to their branches, and perched a white dove on top. Cold winter nights, I roasted pork. When I told one of my friends, a poet I share work with, about this essay, she said, “I didn’t even know you were Jewish.”
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JOYCE GREENBERG LOTT has published two chapbooks, “Dear Mrs. Dalloway” and “An Unexpected World,” with Finishing Line Press. Her essays and poems have appeared in Journal of NJ Poets, U.S. 1 Worksheets, The Patterson Literary Review, Ms. Magazine, The Times and other publications. Boynton/Cook Heinemann published her book “A Teacher’s Stories”. Recently, Joyce was published in Marion Behr’s “Surviving Cancer: Our Voices & Choices.” At the age of 77, she moved from New Jersey, where she lived all her life, to Long Beach, California, where her daughter Suzanne Greenberg, a fiction writer, has been living and teaching for over 20 years. Joyce is beginning to write about her adventures there.
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