Somewhere Beyond Reason

By Marissa Korbel

I don’t know how to talk about being Jewish.

Whether I want it or not, an ancestral fear lives in my body. Fear of being singled out, of being known, shamed, stoned, beaten, run out of town, killed. Somewhere beyond reason, I fear being discovered, shipped like cattle in boxcars, emptied under a cold gray sky, and separated. This fear creeps up the back of my arms, across my shoulder blades, making me tighter, wound, ready to spring.

In the past, we were the baby-eaters. The Christ-killers. The money-lenders. In the past we were the hook-nosed, brown-eyed snakes.

After Charlottesville, I went to Temple for the first time since I was in Israel, ten years ago. I took my three year-old daughter, and we sat on the lawn outside the temple with the congregants. Then I watched her dance to Hebrew songs that I recognized but never knew all the words to. This has been a hard time, the Rabbi said, and the tears came.

Then I took my family north, to an island in the middle of Puget Sound. I felt the urge to pack up everything and flee, but instead I called it vacation.

My family was not religious. We lit Hanukkah candles most years, at least once, but we also put up Christmas trees. I spent childhood mornings on the 25th of December swimming in red and green wrapping paper. We were secular, or as my mom liked to joke, “Jew-ish?” She said that last part with an exaggerated lift.

On the island, my family walked a boardwalk path, through a nature preserve, to the edge of the Sound. Far away from my house, my belongings, I found hiding places for my valuables in my mind. My grandmother’s engagement ring, my great-grandmother’s locket. Perhaps I could bury a small box in the backyard of one of my Christian friends?

I was not taught to speak Yiddish. I gathered a few words from my mother, secondhand. As a child, I watched friends studying for their confirmations and communions, going to catechism after school. It felt like another way I was weird, separate, doomed. I yearned for religion, for the clubbiness of Sunday school. When I was thirteen years old, I met a rabbi in a community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Even though I was Bat Mitzvahed, I don’t know how to braid a Shabbat challah. I don’t remember how to observe Sukkot, or the rules of keeping Kosher. I don’t know all the many names for G-d, but I do know Jews don’t like to write the name of G-d, so they leave the little dash out, as though the naming itself is a spell.

Marissa's featured column Backbone is a 6-month series on Corporeal Clamor. More of her work can be found in The Rumpus, The Manifest Station, Nailed Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, and The Establishment, among others. Her essay, "No, Lolita," was named one of Entropy Magazine's Best Online Articles & Essays of 2016. Her poetry has been anthologized in Only Light Can Do That (PEN/ The Rattling Wall 2016) and Things I Have to Tell You (Candlewick, 1998). Marissa is currently writing a collection of lyric essays and revising an experimental memoir. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and their toddler.