Friday, September 03, 2010

Imagined Identities

Every year, in early September, when tomatoes and burnished peppers hang heavy on their vines, I experience a ripening of another sort.  It’s almost Rosh Hashana, and while I am not Jewish, I have such a long track record of people assuming I am that in this season my desire ripens to be the person so many have mistaken me for – an insider in a community that isn’t actually my own.

Many of us have experienced being mistaken for someone or something we’re not.  It’s both eerie and interesting – a reminder that our social identities are an unpredictable blend of who we are, and who others believe we are. Jonathan Alter’s current cover story in Newsweek captures the potential dangers of this mix in his piece about President Obama, tellingly titled

“The Making of a Terrorist-Coddling, Warmongering, Wall Street-Loving, Socialistic, Godless, Muslim President – who isn’t actually any of these things.” [end quote] The stickiness of these false labels is a sad sign of our times.

For most of us, experiences of mistaken identity are far more benign, but no less instructive.  In my case, assumptions about me being Jewish have nothing to do with my spirituality.  In fact, my religious background is a hazy mix of my father’s lapsed Catholicism, my mother’s devoted Yoga practice, and a childhood of skiing on Sundays, which in the Colorado Rockies certainly inspires spiritual communion.

But I’ve had a life-long affinity for the ethnic heritage of Eastern European Jews, no doubt fostered by the 1970s film version of Fiddler on the Roof, featuring sexy Starsky of Starsky and Hutch.  Layer in the ethnic-folk fashion of the Seventies – you remember those embroidered peasant blouses, scarves and hoop earrings – and it was pretty easy to glamorize old world identity, particularly as a contrast to the seeming blank slate of my sterile Denver suburbs.  As a budding nerd, I fed my interest in Jewish identity by devouring the children’s book series by Sydney Taylor, the All-of-a-Kind Family books, which conjured a family of five lively sisters in turn-of-the-twentieth century lower Manhattan, rich with descriptions of puckery Kosher pickles, spicy chickpeas sold in paper cones, and city smells of soot and smoked meat. In contrast to the Wonder Bread world of Nancy Drew, the Sydney Taylor books offered acomplex tapestry of Yiddish phrases, and a new-to-me calendar of holidays to learn, each with irresistible rituals, like building a harvest Succah, a backyard hut decorated with branches and edible delights that seemed straight out of a childhood fantasy.

As a consequence, while my middle-school peers were blasting Shaun Cassidy tunes on their 8-track tapes, I’d lounge before my bedroom mirror, my hair wrapped in a bandana, singing “Sunrise, Sunset” so mournfully that I’d bring myself to tears.  I knew, of course, that my affinity for Judaism bore no relation to the actual experiences of the one Jewish family I knew of in our neighborhood, the Greenbergs, who carried the tiring burden of being Others in our largely Protestant neighborhood, having to explain Jewish customs to puzzled teachers every single year. But I envied their knowledge and difference.

And then I moved away to Iowa for college, and found to my surprise that in the land of gigantic blondes, I, suddenly, was see as the Other, my small, dark self being mistaken for Italian, Native American, and, once folks heard my Czechoslovakian last name, Lidinsky, for being Jewish. It was as if my childhood of internal longing to be different, to be connected to a strong ethnic community, had finally manifested itself on my surface. I didn’t pretend to be what I wasn’t, but I enjoyed the consistent misrecognition. Mistaken identity, I’d argue, reminds us of the permeability of our all our identities – and the ways we might, though study and imagination, really try on the knowledge and sympathies of others.

The New York Times recently ran a century-old drawing of a jolly, jumbled street scene in lower Manhattan, then known as “Little Syria,” a lively Arab-American community that would have adjoined the historic Jewish enclave of my childhood books. That same neighborhood, down through earthen layers, is also the burial site of thousands of enslaved Africans, Muslims among them … and it is also the currently contested site for an Islamic cultural center.  Could there be a more promising space for imagining a future that reflects a history of permeable boundaries and overlapping traditions?  In the spirit of Rosh Hashana, heralding the sweetness and hope of a new year, might we consider that our identities are only as limited as our imaginations, and our identifications with others are as real and realizable as a cherished holiday meal or a space built for spiritual reflection?  Surely, there must be advantages to being grown up.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on September 03, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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