Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig

would continue going to Hebrew school long after the rest of
the car pool dropped out. When our religious instruction finally
devolved into monthly potlucks at which we were encouraged to ‘rap’
with other Jewish kids, my sister dropped out, too, but I kept
showing up, tamale pie in hand.
    It was all I had. Outside of Hebrew school our religious
practice, in keeping with our half-and-half household, was
half-assed. My scrupulosity hadn’t come along to ruin the fun for
everyone yet, and we still ate shrimp and bacon with abandon. On
Friday nights, our only ritual was watching the entire ABC lineup.
We observed the Jewish holidays halfheartedly, preferring the
Christian ones, which tended to involve more candy and presents.
Oh, we were careful to secularize them. There was never any Jesus
talk, and the icing on the hot cross buns looked more like
asterisks than crucifixes, generous frosting being more important
to us than religious imagery – but they still weren’t bagels.
    Of course there was going to be crossover. Of course things were
going to get messy. That’s just how it works. In our house the
commingling was compounded, because it was our Catholic mother who
was in charge of our Jewish upbringing. My mother was the one who
carted us off to Hebrew school and synagogue, who cooked seders and sufganiyot . Our Hebrew teachers knew we were half Jewish,
but they assumed the Jewish side was the maternal one; our mother
was the one who came to shul. Besides, she passed. She’s got a
Jewish first name and features. She is, in fact, the only person on
either side of the family who’s had work done on her nose. My
father’s Jewishness, on the other hand, was invisible, deeply felt
but impossible to see. “I don’t need to practice,” he told us.
“I’ve got it down already.”
    It was how he’d been raised, born to Russians who’d grown up in
Manchuria, settled in France, then moved to China before ending up
in San Francisco. Jewishness was their only constant. But it was a
particular kind of Jewishness, a cultural one that relied less on
strictures than sensibilities. It was fine to eat ham and to drive
on Shabbat, but to put a bumper sticker on the car – that was
unthinkable.
    They weren’t anti-Catholic but anti-catholic. Their aesthetics
were particular but hard to parse out. It wasn’t the Jewish
American norm. They drank sugared sodas and dry wine, wore
sunglasses but not sunscreen. Their Judaism meant shopping at
Gump’s but not Emporium, eating kasha but not kishke, reading Isaac
Bashevis Singer but not Isaac Asimov. It meant doing things a
certain way.
    They had a large circle of friends whose tastes and background
were nearly identical to theirs, eclectic as they were, but they
didn’t really fit into the larger Jewish community. Oh, they made a
stab at it. They joined a synagogue shortly after coming to the
United States. It was a showy Reform temple, unlike the Orthodox
congregations of their youth, and they hadn’t cared for the robed
choir and English prayers. But it would do. They enrolled the kids
in its Sunday school and made my father have a bar mitzvah. It was
a glorious orgy of gifts, pens and watches and gadgets, most of
them broken before the day was out because he disassembled them to
see how they worked. His relationship with formal Jewish practice
met a similar end. He learned the prayers and the principles, saw
how it all went together, and put it aside. It was a nice thing to
have around, but you didn’t have to play with it every day.
    Our mother, however, was used to great daily helpings of dogma
and devotion. She had been raised attending parochial schools,
going to church every week, decorating her bedroom with crepe paper
altars to Mary. Her parents were devoutly religious and made the
family say the rosary together after dinner well into the kids’
teens. Every night they would kneel in a circle on the living room
carpet, the girls’ skirts fanning out like bluebells as