1968: A necklace from Jerusalem

In 1968, a year after the Six Day War and nine years after my own birth, my parents went to Israel. It was their first visit to the Holy Land. Back home in suburban Virginia, my parents’ two-week absence was, for me, a nightmare, a bleak, lonely, unrelenting and seemingly endless blur of going to school, going to bed, and doing it all over again. Our babysitter was a devout Christian who insisted that we say our prayers to the Lord Jesus nightly, which made me hate her. Plus, she so flagrantly favored my one-year-younger brother over me and my sisters that I hated my brother for what I considered to be tantamount to the betrayal of the entire Judaic enterprise too.

The four of us went to a small private school favored by the Washington, D.C., elite. Four dark, curly-haired children whose faces mapped the entire history of the Jews and (with the exception of my brother) could not hit, throw or catch a ball if our lives depended on it, surrounded by a sea of blond, blue-eyed, competitively athletic children — and OK, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. There were brown and gray-eyed kids too. Even so, we were among the token non-WASPs — a Black kid here, a Pakistani kid there and a handful of Jews spread out over nine grade levels. Because in our house we didn’t eat shellfish or pork products, a couple of girls in the grade above mine started calling me Piggy. To this day I don’t know if the nickname was affectionate or casually, if unconsciously, antisemitic.

The point is that for me it was hard to be a Jew in such a setting. Not that the place was a hotbed of prejudice or antisemitism, God forbid. It was more that I felt like such a weirdo there, so dark, so uncoordinated, so bad at the stuff that girls were supposed to be good at, and yes, so Jewish. Not because we were, in our house, kosher, nor were we anything like regular synagogue-goers. Only my father went to shul, and to do so he had to drive all the way into Washington, where he sat downstairs among the other men, while the incomprehensible Hebrew chanting, an utter mystery to the rest of us, wafted into his soul. It was more that, as assimilated as we were — and we couldn’t have been more assimilated — the fact of our Jewishness was nonetheless front and center in such a way that made any future opt-out impossible.

Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

And now our parents were in Jerusalem, eating hummus and grilled fish, while I was at home being looked after by a mean, blonde Bible-thumper, and regularly tortured at school by my own doleful and spazzy un-coolness. And then, after an endless dark time, there they were: Mom and Dad, looking tanned and bright, their imaginations overflowing with the hope that was the Holy Land, and their luggage packed with presents for the kids.

I don’t remember what my brother’s gift was. To each of their three daughters, my parents gave a gold pendant inscribed with tiny flowers and Hebrew lettering. One of the pendants was oval, one round. Mine was in the shape of a teardrop, with enamel engraving and tiny flowers. My father explained that the Hebrew letters spelled “chai,” life. I wore it to school the next day. For me, it was a badge of pride: This is who I am, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem.

I wore it almost every day until sometime around high school, when I started going in for other kinds of jewelry — big silver earrings, turquoise beads. By then I was attending our town’s rough-and-tumble public school, and in the much bigger mix (540 kids to a grade), I didn’t feel quite so out-of-it, quite so appallingly different, so curly-haired, so unacceptable and so unfashionably semitic.

And then the decades passed during which my life happened, and though I continued to wear my chai necklace, it was never again an everyday event, like it had been when I was a Jewish child attending a private school surrounded by the largely Episcopalian children of Washington’s crème-de-la-crème.

Until Oct. 7, that is. On that day, I put the necklace back on. I’m wearing it now. PJC

Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction. Her journalistic and opinion pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Newark Star Ledger, USA Today, Salon, The Jerusalem Report, Commentary, Moment and many other publications. This first appeared on The Times of Israel.