Some Tentative Conclusions
Returning to my grandmother’s photograph, I am struck by both the connections and the differences that separate my grandmother from my mother and those that separate me from both my mother and my grandmother. Although there is much we share, like my father and his father, and my brother and his father and grandfather, there are generational differences that mark our notions of self and home. For our grandparents, just being able to claim American citizenship was a challenge. For our parents who were more comfortable claiming this country as their home, the challenge has been to prove to themselves and others the worthiness of their belonging as cultured and educated Jews. As this essay has suggested, this is a project they continue to engage in on a daily basis.
For my brother and me, there is a kind of exhaustion that marks our response to our parents’ labor intensive efforts to become a part of American culture or to fully feel at home. As the inheritors of these legacies, home has become that much more elusive. My brother and I have come to appreciate that productivity or excessive effort, trying too hard, cannot make up for the ways in which our family has never quite fit into the dominant culture of this country. We long for other ways of being in the world, something less excessive, and we have each consciously attempted to enact this less cluttered way of being in our everyday lives. Given this, in our different and all too gendered ways, we have each come to accept that nothing is permanent, and that in and of itself offers a kind of comfort. Like my brother’s exhibitions and my writing, we can make places for ourselves and share them with others only for a time, and that can be enough.20 For me, this is a Jewish enactment, a way of claiming a different, more contingent Jewish identity.21 Mine is a kind of distorted immigrant legacy. I no longer need to assume that my place in the world, my home or my identity will ever be secure.
Seeing all these family pictures through the lenses of both gender and generation has enabled me to begin to see that as much as my mother and I have identified with that photograph of my grandmother, her ambivalent embrace is not really ours.
I want to thank Ruth Ost for reading this essay and for having come home with me and seen all the faces in all of their glory. I also want to thank all of those who came in and out of the Temple Honors office as I was editing this journal for helping me with all of my technical questions about the unfamiliar computers and programs I was using.
