Danit Brown – Jewcy

No Like Secular

Danit Brown — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 03:27:03 +0000

We didn’t mean to end up at a Jewish daycare. Originally, we’d enrolled our then four-month-old at the ritzy, organic place, where infants fell asleep in a darkened room to the sound of whale song. But then two things happened. The first was that our son’s teacher had a nervous breakdown, which she described to us with relish: “What about the children?” she’d apparently cried as they were loading her into the ambulance. “My babies!” The second was that she asked us to stop holding him so much at home. “We’re working on the self-play,” she said. Because if you give it a fancy sounding term that evokes masturbation, then it’s not just your child lying ignored in some corner. So we switched to the daycare at our local JCC. At the time, I hadn’t stopped to consider what it meant to send my child to a Jewish school. I just wanted a place where the teachers didn’t mind cuddling him. But then the challahs started coming home every Friday, along with notes reminding us that no, the JCC did not celebrate Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s. Instead of bringing us paper ornaments and Easter eggs, our son brought home paintings of frogs at Passover and little flags at Simchat Torah. And while the daycare did shut down for Christmas, the literature they handed out referred to this period euphemistically as “the last week in December.” Still, it wasn’t until I found myself tearing up at the sight of all the children parading around in their Purim costumes that it really sunk in that the Jewish part mattered. When my family first moved to Michigan from Israel, a girl in my fifth-grade class asked me, “Do you believe in the son of God?” What I heard, however, was “sun of God.” “Of course we don’t believe in the sun,” I told her, indignant. Sheesh. We weren’t pagans. The thing is, of course, that you can’t grow up in the U.S. without knowing all about Jesus. After a while, my family grew resigned to the Christianity all around us, adopting defensive strategies like turning out the lights whenever Christmas carolers were making the rounds and rolling our eyes indulgently when grocery store cashiers asked us if dreidels were a kind of cracker. But that was then, when I was secure in my Israeli-ness, before I married a lapsed Catholic and had children who most likely will never know what it’s like to be part of a cultural or religious majority. My son is two now, and learning to talk. He comes home from daycare singing, “Good morning! Boker tov!” He goes around pretending his toys are miniature shofars. Tonight he will go trick or treating for the first time without any idea of what Halloween might mean, because, you know, they don’t mention it at daycare. Lately, he’s been screaming the HaMotzi blessing at the top of his lungs. “Come on,” I told him once in an effort to shut him up. “We’re supposed to be secular.” He made a face. “No,” he said. “No like secular, Mommy.” And much to my surprise, it turns out, neither do I.

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How Judge Judy Helped Me Grow A Spine

Danit Brown — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:37:23 +0000

When I was twenty-four, I decided to return to Israel for good. For a while, things seemed to be going fine: I was making the rounds among scores of relatives and going on lots of dates with guys who picked me up at bus stops, at the grocery store, at the post office. I’d never been this popular in the U.S. After a while, though, I’d visited every relative there was to visit and had dinner with all the single guys in my neighborhood. So I did what any self-respecting American in my position would do: I started watching TV. Lots of it. Because I’m a recovering TV addict, I didn’t have cable, which meant I could only get two channels. On a good day, I watched back-to-back episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch, although occasionally I also caught pilots of shows that never made it in the U.S., like the one where a hippie, an accountant, a soccer mom, and a token African-American end up being the sole survivors of a nuclear war; wacky hijinx ensue. My hands-down favorite, though, was Judge Judy. I liked the way Judge Judy always got worked up and ended up yelling at the litigants. “You’re a piece of garbage!” she’d shout. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” I come from a family where nobody shouts—we prefer guilt trips and silent treatments because, you know, we’re civilized. The transition to living in Israel, then, where people were forever yelling at each other, was a difficult one for me, and Judge Judy functioned as a kind of life coach. “What would Judge Judy do?” I’d ask myself during conflicts large and small. In the evening, I’d practice in front of the mirror: “Do you think I’m an idiot? Are you crazy??” During the day, I’d try out my new skills on cabbies: “Either turn on the meter or let me out!” “No can do, motek,” the cabbies would say. “The meter’s broken. Honest.” And then they’d charge me ten dollars for going two blocks. After a while, increasingly desperate, I went to see a cross-cultural counselor who’d successfully made aliyah from Canada twenty years earlier. And I swear to God that I’m telling the truth when I write that she looked exactly like Judge Judy. I sat in her office, surrounded by shelves of miniature plastic figurines. “What do I do?” I cried. “Teach me how to be a real Israeli!” “First of all,” she said, “you might consider wearing more makeup.” Then she said, “That’ll be seventy shekels.” Back to Judge Judy it was. A while later, I received a call from the cable company. “Do you want cable?” a man asked. “I can’t,” I told him. “I’m already watching too much TV.” Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. “Cable company!” the man announced from the other side of the door. “Come on,” he said once I’d opened up. “You know you want it. I could tell on the phone, which is why I rushed over.” Come on, Judge Judy, I prayed. Help me be strong. “No thanks,” I said. “There are twenty-six apartments in this building,” he told me. “You’re the only one without cable. You can’t be serious.” We stared each other down, and then finally, two hours later, he turned around and left, defeated. Okay, maybe it wasn’t two hours, but it was a long time. Really. He hadn’t asked for my phone number, so it was only a moral victory, but it was a victory nonetheless. Now if only I could figure out how to use eyeliner…

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Yitzhak Rabin And Me

Danit Brown — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:49:41 +0000

Election day this year happens to be the 13th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. It’s also the 13th anniversary of Michigan’s 28-25 loss to Michigan State in football. I was a recent grad-school dropout (I’d go on to drop out once more for good measure), and I was living in a small apartment just around the block from my parents’ house, because why cut the cord before you have to? Plus, they let me come home to do laundry. And eat their food. For free. My father and I were in the basement TV room, watching the game, when the announcement came that Rabin had been shot. For his birthday, my father had gotten a big-screen TV, and here was the perfect occasion to try out the fancy picture-in-picture feature. On the big screen: Michigan and Michigan State battling it out; on the small screen: a press conference live from Tel Aviv. My Israeli mother was home too, doing something in the kitchen, and my father waited until the end of the quarter to go tell her what was up. She cried and I watched her, unsure what to feel. Clearly something big was happening. The next afternoon, Sunday, I found myself at a memorial on U of M’s campus. One speaker told us that he never answers the phone on Shabbat, and so he and his extended family had devised a sequence of rings to notify him if there was an emergency. “So you can imagine my panic and fear,” he said, “when the phone started ringing.” It turned out to be a distant aunt for whom the news couldn’t wait until sundown. At first, the speaker had been angry for having his Shabbat spoiled, but then he had some kind of epiphany about how we were all one extended family, blah blah blah. Except it wasn’t all blah blah blah, because the following morning I woke up early to go watch a live broadcast of the funeral with my mother. The last time I’d seen her weep like that was when Rabin and Arafat shook hands two years earlier, only then it had been with joy. That night, I lay awake in bed listening to the steam pipes in my building clunking. My family had left Israel when I was ten because my father, a Canadian, was unhappy. At the time, there was a stigma associated with leaving. If moving to Israel is making aliyah or ascent, then leaving it was yerida or descent, a kind of betrayal. And here I was, twenty-four, working as a programmer at a local software company and feeling so lonely that to pass the time, I daydreamed about the guy who arranged the produce at my local grocery store. Surely there was more that I could be doing with my life. And just like that, I knew: I had to return to Israel. If you weren’t doing anything special with your life anyway, I realized, there was really no excuse for staying in the States. The plan was ingenious in its simplicity: I’d move to Israel, get a job, and find a nice Israeli boy to marry. There were also other parts to this fantasy. In Israel, we had lots of relatives, and in Michigan, we had none. If I moved to Israel, Jewish holidays would never be lonely, and—more importantly—I’d never have to listen to Christmas carols again. Plus, I was tired of making friends only to have them move away to a different time zone, never to be heard from again. Israel was small, and any friends I’d make would have nowhere to hide. And my parents, when they retired, would return to Israel as well, and grow old happily in the family hub instead of bitter and alone in some Florida nursing home. Really, it was the perfect plan, and a few months later I was on my way, certain that I was never coming back. Except, of course, that I was wrong, In retrospect, the signs of imminent failure were there from the very beginning: On the flight to Tel-Aviv, I sat next to a teary woman about my age whose visa to the U.S. had expired. “I hate Israel,” she sobbed. “I miss my boyfriend.” I did my best to ignore her, choosing to focus instead on the man who in front of us who was humming joyfully to himself. Later, he stood ahead of me in the line for passport control. “I’m making aliyah!” he told the woman who was checking his papers. She rolled her eyes, and when it was my turn, she told me, “I give him three months.” I should have asked her how long she gave me, but I didn’t. “Pessimist,” I thought. “I’ll show her.” And then I walked out into the bright sunlight, mistakenly believing I was finally home.

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Battle of the Genes

Danit Brown — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:54:06 +0000

Today I thought it would be fun to interview my husband about the joys (the joys!) of being married to someone who was born in Israel and moved to the U.S. when she was ten.

Danit: How is it being married to me? Bill: I’d give it a seven. Danit: That’s only a C. What the hell??

Well, I guess that’s enough of that.

The truth is, my husband is a lapsed Catholic from Minnesota. That makes him nicer than just about everyone except Canadians. On snowy days, he drives around the neighborhood trolling for people digging their cars out, and then he stops to help them. If their car needs a jump, it makes his whole day.

I met my husband in graduate school back in 2001. I had spent the previous four years in Israel, and the one useful skill I’d picked up was the ability to yell at people—preferably from the services sector—without even breaking a sweat. “This soup is cold!” I’d yell. Or, “What do you mean my deposit is non-refundable?!”

You can imagine the wacky sitcom potential here, if we weren’t both so fundamentally dull. It also led me to expect that when we had children, my aggressive dark genes would beat the crap out of his wussy blond ones. Instead, we ended up with this:

(Obviously, my older son is already casting out demons.)

I guess it’s too soon to tell about the little one, but the big one is all peaches and cream and, at least according to my parents, who aren’t at all bitter, he looks exactly like my mother-in-law. Plus, except when he’s screaming that his food is too hot, he tends to be kind and helpful and even-tempered.

The reason I’m sharing this is because I’m surprised. I’d honestly believed that the survival of the Jews in the face of millennia of adversity would translate into genetic dominance, if not necessarily athletic prowess.

One final story:

I had my second baby six and a half weeks ago. When the first one was born two years earlier, the nurses at the hospital fell all over themselves to tell me how handsome he was. "Oh, you say that to everyone, don’t you?" my husband fake-protested modestly.

"Actually, we don’t," said the nurse. "If the baby’s ugly, we say something like, ‘Boy, what a lot of hair!’"

With the birth of boy #2, we discovered that this nurse had been telling the truth. This time around, not one person complimented our new baby’s looks. And it wasn’t just that these nurses happened to be reticent: I had to share a room with two other women, and I could hear these very same nurses exclaiming, "So sweet! So beautiful!" once they reached the other side of the privacy curtain. (Like my parents, I’m not bitter.)

Is it a coincidence, then, that #2 is the one who supposedly looks like me? (I’m not bitter about that either.)

But back to my husband, who’s so nice that he’s fetching me a Popsicle from the kitchen as we ready ourselves to watch CSI Miami (no, we don’t have cable).

Danit: Any other tips for marrying semi-Israelis? Bill: Learn to like gefilte fish. And never, ever make them angry

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Secret Blogger Crushes

Danit Brown — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:39:36 +0000

Danit Brown, author of Ask for a Convertible, will be blogging all week as one of Jewcy‘s Lit Klatsch bloggers. Danit’s book uses a fictional character to discuss life as an Israeli-American who has trouble fitting into both her parents’ homelands.

When I was a teenager, I knew a girl who was such a big fan of the TV show Fame that she would take snapshots of her TV screen and send the stars of the show gifts on their birthdays. At the time, I thought she was weird: yes, I too have had dreams in which I was being wooed by celebrities (most notably, Barry Williams a.k.a. Greg Brady, but also, more recently, Barack Obama and Kelly Ripa), but even way back in junior high, I already knew instinctively that these people had better things to do than answer my mail.

And then my husband introduced me to the wonder that is blogging.

These days, I spend my waking hours cultivating crushes on women who would surely be my best friends if only they knew me better. Some of these are women I know–e.g. my downstairs neighbor with the kick-ass boots, my son’s doe-eyed pediatrician–but more of them are women who blog, and some of them are well-known writers.

And while odds are that I’ll never run into Alexa, who writes the Flotsam blog, or Tiffany who writes Electric Boogaloo, this isn’t the case with those professional writers who go on book tours and occasionally end up in your hometown.

Take Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries. If any one writer is responsible for my marriage, it’s Meg (see? We’re on a first-name basis). My third date with my husband was to see the movie, and we spent hours during our courtship reading Meg’s oeuvre aloud to each other–no small task since the woman is frighteningly prolific. We also read her blog. Every single day. And go to her book signings.

And this false sense of intimacy (Meg likes smoked almonds! And Gwen Stefani!) has led to several awkward encounters.

Encounter 1:

Me: My husband and I read your books all the time! To each other! And we’re way over thirty! What Meg should have said: Great! Here’s my phone number!! What Meg did say: That’s nice.

Encounter 2:

Me: My husband and I went to school in Bloomington, which is where you grew up! And I’m pregnant and planning to read your books in between contractions! What Meg should have said: Wonderful! Let me know when the baby comes! Here’s my phone number!! What Meg did say: That’s nice.

Encounter 3:

Desperate for recognition, I resorted to extreme measures and offered Meg a gift, a book by my former best friend, who shall remain nameless (Ha! Take that!). In theory, it was the perfect plan. Meg always thanks the people who bring her presents on her blog, and I was hoping that in doing so she’d mention my ex-friend’s book, thereby spiking her sales and enabling me to win back her affections as well.

Me: Here’s a book by my ex-best friend! It’s happy! I know from reading your blog that you only like happy books! What Meg should have said: What a coincidence! I’m in the market for a new best friend! Here’s my phone number!! What Meg did say: That’s nice.

And she didn’t mention my gift on her blog. After that, I was mad at her, and she didn’t even know we were fighting.

It was a shame, really. I mean, we have so much in common: she has brown hair, I have brown hair; we’re both Midwestern; she’s rich and famous, and I really really want to be rich and famous… Meg, I’m serious, call me!

Despite this bitter experience, I still often find myself gazing at author photos of the writers whose books I’m reading: Margo Rabb, Elisa Albert, Lorrie Moore. "She’s so beautiful!" I’ll gush to my husband. "And doesn’t she look nice?" And then I’ll rush to my computer and check if the writer has a blog. "Look!" I’ll cry in triumph. "Margo Rabb has a baby! We have a baby! Surely we’re meant to be best friends!!" (Margo, if you’re out there, call me!! )

Of course, I’m still sitting by the phone, waiting and passing the time reading Meg and Margo’s blogs. Which is how I know that Meg celebrated last Passover with Judy Blume. Meg! My mom makes gefilte fish that’s way better than Judy’s! I’m sure of it! Call me!!

Who’s your Secret Blogger Crush?

Danit Brown, author of Ask for a Convertible, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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