I am still making sense of this whole “being Jewish” thing. For two decades now I’ve been managing the news. It’s not a disease, I know, like Diabetes or Cystic Fibrosis, and to “manage it” makes it sound like a misfortune, but to be dealt a Jewish hand in the card game of life has never felt like a full house. Nor of course, is it a bust. Managed is all; because as I get older  and am confronted with the responsibility of creating my own life, with its own identity, this Jewish thing keeps turning up like an exhausted lover in an undefined relationship, asking: are we together or not?

In Rome, the world’s most Catholic city, I recently celebrated Passover, the Jewish escape from Egypt. Like misogynists who use women solely for sex, I’ve used Judaism solely for free food, and it wasn’t until I felt a sharp loneliness in Italy, that I coughed up thirty Euros to be surrounded by Jews in the country’s capital. A choice so wholly inconsistent with my relationship to the tribe, that it felt I was watching someone else make the decision. For years now, I’ve been playing an unspoken game of hide and seek with the Rabbis of Chabad and in Italy, I willingly forfeited.

Considered an expansive Orthodox-Jewish-Hasidic-movement, Chabad ironically seems as ubiquitous as the God they worship, and what better medium to spread their doctrine than Facebook.  Whenever arriving in a new city, an indiscernible face of a Jewish man with a bedraggled beard and an austere black hat  will pop up in my Facebook inbox. The notes they send are as similar as they are inevitable. It will generally include three things: they are so glad I am in the area, I should come for shabbat, and we Jews must always stick together. The first time it happened was in  2016, while studying in the U.K, Rabbi Mendy Singer messaged me on Facebook, insisting I celebrate the Sabbath with him over in Bristol. A year later in Hawaii, after having blown myself up trying to fix a car, there he was, Rabbi Moshe Greenblatt waiting for me outside the hospital, standing in a full orthodox get-up under the oppressive Hawaiian sun. Brussels, Paris, Montreal, wherever, the Yids will find me. Never has it been entirely clear how the Eliezers, the Moshes, and the Solomons learn of my arrival but amidst Italian solitude, such a concern fell second to my need for companionship. So when Rabbi Eisenbach from my grandfather’s town in Connecticut caught me at a vulnerable time, I was receptive to his urging that I go to a seder in Rome. Many years back he had been the camp counselor of a boy who was now a Rabbi in Rome and was eager to connect us. My vulnerability made it so I’d be inclined to respond, but I hadn’t yet visited Rome and the religious irony of such a thing is what motivated me to commit. What an idea. Passover in Rome.

I bought my train ticket thinking only of the experience as an opportunity to write something funny, words that would have probably only made a mockery of it. So it served me right that by the time I finally responded to the Rabbi from Rome,  he’d already started to shun technology for the Shabbat. I’d be without a seder as I boarded the train, southbound. Such was a blessing, because in the scramble to find a seder, I stumbled upon a reform congregation on Facebook. They responded to my email immediately with warm welcomes and directions to find them. Their congregation was small, only four-hundred members and thus not big enough to warrant having their own synagogue. They operated out of a nice Hotel situated in the south of Rome. When I arrived, they treated me like the guest of honor. Hugs and handshakes were given like I had just hit the game winning shot at the buzzer.

I sat at the president’s table with his family and seamlessly fit in. The service was in Italian, but the pace and the melody were familiar. An ordinary evening by all accounts. The highlight for me however, after the hummus platters were cleared, was learning about the president’s connection to the holocaust. His grandparents were survivors just like mine, but immigrated to Italy after their release from a concentration camp rather than the United States. Our congruous familial biographies, with their diverging paths created the allusion we were reuniting. This might explain why being surrounded by jews, for worse or better, is always familiar, like coming home. Despite the various foreign languages being spoken, the general disposition of the room was recognizable. The slouching older folks. The Tums. The pocket tissues. The weary, skeptical looks that rested on the faces of those not in conversation. The periodic moaning. Such a scene was likely identical to thousands of other seders happening simultaneously around the globe. Even in my prolonged absences from the Jewish community, each return, at its core, has been a homecoming.

But this I’ve realized is the complication of living in the aftermath of a giant religious diaspora; the bitter sweet relief and frustration of reassembling. Of course many encounter conflicting experiences within their religion, but I have only now, after connecting with my Jewish kin in Rome, been able to crystalize the two intersections in which my Jewish crossroads have met. And so intertwined are they, I’ve never tried to separate the two. I call it. The Pride and the Embarrassment.

The pride. It has become clear that I don’t know what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century without experiencing it, both religiously and culturally, underneath the dark and looming shadow of the Holocaust. The sheer sentiment of survival — of seeing those black, sobering numbers tattooed on the forearms of my grandparents, has provided me, from an early age, the visceral understanding of my existences’ improbability, and therefore an innate and heightened sense of importance. My presence is a miracle.  

And then The Embarrassment. While the dark shadow may cast this mixed up sense of undeserved pride, it also possesses this unshakable attitude of Jewish victimhood.  A victimhood, no matter how significant or petty, that seems, at least for me, to undermine the idea that the strength my grandparents summoned to survive over five concentration camps, could be passed down through blood. That I was born, through either genetics or a collective familial consciousness, to be resilient, to be unshakeable, to be untouchable. The allergies, the doctor’s notes, the overbearing mothers, the “needing to stick together,” all of it, removed over the years, any  wonderment of how we as a people got nearly wiped out a century ago. Oh, do we know how to complain.

This could be a distorted perception — my people’s knack for victimhood. Everyone takes turns playing the victim throughout history. But this is the perception I have, rooted somewhere between personal experience and public opinion. Of course I am aware anti-semitism exists, I’ve witnessed it. But by god, we’re still here and will continue to be, so can’t we act like it? Can’t we shrug at the swastikas drawn on the blackboards and the cheap comments about frugality at our expense. Unfortunately the collective consciousness doesn’t share with us only the  virtuous characteristics, but the clinical attributes like neurotic anxiety and anger. Naive is it to think these two don’t coexist, and will continue to do so in junction.

The free food has always been an effective distraction from the crosshairs I feel I’ve stumbled into but no longer will it suffice. As of now, yes, my Jewish experience seems to exist on two contradictory plains, but it is also naive to think there aren’t others that feel this way, and that it will take a few generations to shed and reshape what it means to be a Jew in America. Patience will have to be the prescription and until then, we’ll continue to “manage it.”

An unexpected kiss. Right on the knuckles. On my first Tuesday in Italy, a sturdy and yet delicate woman sat next to me on the bus, took my right hand, and laid upon it an assertive smooch. This was her way of earnestly apologizing for “weak English.” Actually her English was quite impressive, especially considering it was her third language. A refugee from Senegal, this smooth dark-skinned woman named Dalia, who was granted Italian asylum in 2015, took just four years to become fluent in Italian and English. And here she was kissing my hand in broad daylight, apologizing for her language skills.  

In Padova, the hostility towards refugees is as omnipresent as the smell of espresso. Even before I knew of the political leanings of the region, I noticed resentful eyes glaring in Dalia’s direction. And since then, specifically on public transportation where diversity is unavoidable, my awareness of the racial antagonism has heightened. Conversely, whenever I speak my unyieldingly American English, the people of Padova seem to perk up and show genuine interest in me. It appears that to be me – that is, to be white and speak an American dialect –  is essentially to be granted a social passport wherever I go. It’s not just the knuckles kissed or the welcoming smiles, but the willingness – the curiosity, the enthusiasm – to cater to my monolinguistic, Costco perusing, ketchup-eating ass.

In just over two months in Italy, the number of complete thoughts I have expressed to someone in Italian could be counted on one hand. Occasionally I’ll resort to pantomiming to communicate elementary messages. To tell the children I look after that they need to start their homework, I’ll say the Italian word for homework, pick up their backpack, and yell “adesso,” meaning now. They understand. They don’t listen, but they understand.

My limited vocabulary and awkward gesticulations were even less effective while searching for my lost disposable camera. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, I re-entered the church where the boy I chaperone had his guitar lesson earlier in the week. The place looked more like a senior-center cafeteria, and I was at least fifty years everyone’s junior. My relative youth, and the fact I scream American Jew, granted me all the attention in the room. I pretended to hold a camera up to my eye, and I extended and bent my pointer finger a few times to mimic the act of snapping a photo.

I spun around with my mouth open, my palms pointed towards the ceiling and my shoulders shrugged. I concluded the show by rapidly pointing around the room. All this to indicate I lost my camera and it might be there. It’s easy to imagine now, weeks later, that these charades looked more like some bizarre worship dance. In just a seven hour flight to Italy, I somehow had reverted to communicating as I did twenty years ago – like a toddler. And yet, it seemed not to matter. Not one bit. Come sit and have a coffee.

I’ve started to recognize the difference between being tolerated and being accepted. In Italy, I have the privilege of being both. And it’s not just in Italy; everywhere I have travelled I have enjoyed this dual sense of security. But there are moments in Italy where I feel alienated from the culture. And it is these fleeting moments that bring unignorable thoughts that one of my favorite authors, Zadie Smith, categorizes as “the retrospective swirl.” These retrospections, and I’m paraphrasing, are the realizations of another’s struggle, that come to you once you have found yourself in similar situations. In her essay titled The Bathroom, she discusses her retrospective swirl as a mother, slowly coming to understand the actions and choices of her own mother’s parenting. In my moments of vulnerability in Italy – when I struggle to communicate with the children, mistakenly order twelve coffees as opposed to a 12 oz coffee, when I dramatically pantomime to a group of elderly Italians – I remember my friend Mark Johnson, a former exchange student from Liberia who stayed with my family years ago.

At the beginning of his time in the States, he was some other kid’s exchange student and possibly the only exchange student at my high school. I met Mark in drawing class, and if I wasn’t fast asleep at my desk, we would usually laugh together at my sketches of cubes or penises. At that time in my art, I was strictly a Cubist and a Phallicist, and Mark seemed to appreciate the way I chose to depict adolescent life. We became not quite friends, but playmates – the worst artists in the class who bonded over their ineptitude. It was not until his lunch period transferred to mine that we became friends.

I sat with Mark because I was curious about his life and I was tired of my friends’ discussions about shoes and girls. But I also got off on sitting with Mark. At a large table for everyone to see, I sat on the stool next to him like it was a moral throne of superiority. An intellectual throne of superiority. There I was, genuinely thrilled to be sitting with Mark, for Mark, simultaneously and acutely aware of how I thought this would make me seem to everyone else. It was a strange high-school version of the white savior complex.

It seemed only right that fate would test my commitment after months of friendship when one afternoon Mark came to lunch with tears swelling in his eyes. His host family no longer wanted to host him, and if he didn’t find a new place to stay in two weeks’ time, he’d have to go back to Liberia. Once the tears passed and he was no longer choked up, he gathered the courage to speak. “Jono, could I stay with you?”

With one leg irreversibly bent (from an untreated infection in his youth), Mark slowly hobbled up to his new room in my mother’s house that weekend. The six months Mark and I lived together were challenging. For starters, after I tore my ACL playing football and was at the mercy of crutches, we rode the special needs minibus together. Mark, who had been using a walker long before I met him, was acclimated to the minibus life. He thrived there. Aside from me, he was the only one on the bus not to have down-syndrome. He hugged everyone on the bus every morning. He played Maroon 5’s Moves like Jagger on his portable speaker, getting the entire bus, all five rows, amped for the day. With his walker, he hobbled up and down the aisle, gently tapping the other passengers on the back, letting them know he was their friend. In hindsight it was beautiful, watching him with his terribly oversized clothes, his flat brimmed hat slanted off to the side, so assured in himself as he uplifted everyone in his proximity. Camp. Pure camp. But grappling with my injury and fears of being seen on the special needs bus, I couldn’t see the beauty of those morning bus rides.

A bulk of my time with Mark was spent in front of the TV He was never shy about what he wanted to watch and he always wanted to watch the same thing, The Three Stooges. He could watch The Stooges for hours. The eye poking, head smacking, nose breaking, all of it made him jump up and down in his chair. He couldn’t contain his glee. At first, I loved watching him get hysterical with The Stooges. Anyone who saw this, loved it. But eventually I grew tired of the spectacle and protested putting it on. There was only so much 1930s physical comedy I could take. If I put on a sitcom, which I often did, Mark would watch for a few minutes before going to his room and listening to gospel on his tiny black portable radio.

In Italy these days, the choreography of my life has me waltz into the house at around eleven thirty. Davide, my host father who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh, will be sitting in a dark room on a thin blue sofa, his face glowing from the luminosity of the local news. For weeks, I would instinctively sit next to him and watch the entire program, nodding along as if I understood. After a while, I grew afraid he’d think I was informed about local current events and want to discuss further at dinner. In reality, all I gathered from these sessions were that the news anchor’s breasts seemed to fluctuate size each night.

Occasionally, he’d be bored and flip the station to a rerun of Italia’s Got Talent. Like America and Britain’s talent show, IGA follows the same formula. Three judges. One is mean. One is saccharine. The third tells it like it is – a real vessel for the average viewer. I don’t need to speak Italian to understand that the rodeo clown from Rome isn’t going to make it to the next round or that the fifteen year old sweetheart cancer survivor from Turin is universally adored. When Davide changes the channel back to the news, my posture sinks a little and I feel this ephemeral jab. Hey, I was watching that. I understood that. But rather than retreating to gospel radio, I sit there silent, listening to my own internal talk show.

It can sting, the retrospective swirl. How much of a relief it must have been, after a long day of hardly understanding what people were saying and hardly being understood, to sit back and watch The Stooges communicate with hardly any words. To think of the days I took that away from Mark makes me cringe. Why, on a daily basis, do I search on YouTube, Italia’s Got Talent Highlights?

Every additional day in Italy brings back memories of Mark. And with each of these memories comes a shift in perspective. The memory forms into a recollection through eyes that are not my own, but not quite Mark’s either.  And here, in the retrospective swirl, the differences between being tolerated and being accepted become clear. The disparity became most transparent to me while at a dinner party organized by my host family . From the moment I come downstairs, I felt as though I was the main attraction. Those who didn’t speak English immediately apologized for it, and those who did, asked me questions like it is was a requirement to do so. At a point in the meal, a heavy set Sicilian man, who commanded the attention of the table, asked if I’d ever move to Italy. Everyone waited for my answer. Behind me, the kids, all of whom had used up their repository for sitting still, played with Legos on the floor. It was as odd to me as it was familiar. A few years earlier, Mark had been in the same seat.

In the winter of 2012, my mother and I brought Mark up the street to the annual neighborhood Hanukah party. People greeted Mark with warm smiles and wide eyes. He too was a spectacle, but I don’t recall anyone apologizing for their stilted Loma, the tribal language of Monrovia, Liberia. People took photos with him. I saw those later on Facebook. A cultural badge I suppose, a mitzvah badge. Though, I’m not sure what exactly was the mitzvah.

There were two main rooms at the Hanukah party. The dining room, which had a seat for you if you were over twelve, and the playroom, designated for a rambunctious group of moppy headed toddlers, all of whom were celebrating the holiday with the then popular game, Rock Band. In the dining room, Mark answered the expected questions: name, birth place, diseases he has survived. No one asked if he’d ever consider a permanent move to America.

Mark faded to the background as the adults transitioned to a new topic. After the Matzah ball soup bowls were cleared, Mark retreated to the playroom to jam out. Four year old “Jew-fro Joshie” was on the drums. “Half asleep Hymie” was on the bass. “Solomon Schechter Soprano Theo” was on vocals. And a seventeen year old Liberian teenager was on lead guitar. Their overall rating was as low as the game could measure, but Mark felt at ease there. He was not a spectacle in that room, but an element of its harmony.

It’s the assumptions we make about those who speak English and those who don’t. It is our narrow views of what it means to live in a “developed” world. To be welcomed is to have someone kindly acknowledge your presence in the world for a moment. To be accepted is to be granted confirmation that your presence has value, both in that moment, and after you depart. Of course he’d move to America! Why would you even ask?

It’s a strange reality to be summoned into, the one where it feels I can do no wrong and excite people just by the sounds that leave my mouth. Moments where I am sad or lethargic seem to be interpreted as politeness or calmness. Mark, on the other hand, had to Americanize his name before arriving. His name! His name is Manko. Manko! To think we could be so terribly inconvenienced with the replacement of the n, and the addition of the o! God forbid!

I have no solution to the discomfort that follows the retrospective swirl. It is the very small price for this privilege. Nor do I have a solution to minimize the disparity between feeling tolerated versus feeling accepted. But travel seems to chip away at it. Because when I travel I am able to sense how arbitrary my fate is, and that it is by sheer circumstance I inhabit this thing called my life. It’s then, once I’ve been vulnerable to that fact that I am a product of circumstance rather than some divine predisposition, that I can sit with someone because the seat is open, not because I am aware of how that seat might make me look. I don’t think I owe anything to the stranger next to me, but I do owe it to myself to acknowledge I can’t hate anybody’s story I know. Because aren’t we all trying to make the best hand of the cards we’re dealt?

It’s a shame to me, these bus rides. Watching Dalia weave through white seas of people, trying to go unnoticed. I can see Manko in those moments. I can see what we are all missing. A friend, bumping up and down the aisle, gently squeezing our shoulders, letting each of us know we matter –  we each have value.

Hanukah 2012

If you type “why do Asians” into the Google search bar, Google intelligence will likely suggest you finish your question with the words “wear masks.” Why do Asians wear masks? Above “do well in school,” “bow,” “buy baby formula,” and “drink hot water,” people around the world want to know what the deal is with these surgical masks.

No more than three years ago, I’d been sitting on the Q train, heading from Astoria to Greenwich Village, on what I remember being a beautiful, clear summer day. On the third or fourth stop a covey of young Asian women trickled in, each in matching navy striped skirts, tiny backpacks that have the capacity to hold a single tissue, and of course, surgical masks. In a coordinated succession, they sat across from me. Had there been a desk between us, it would have felt like an interview with eight surgeons; had there been a bed between us, it would have felt like a cliche “the end is near so let’s just have an orgy” themed porno; and had there been a counter between us, well, it would have felt like ordering takeout from a place needing a long overdue health inspection. This was the first time I remember the masks being unignorable. I was out numbered in that subway.

What did they know that I didn’t? Had Ebola returned? I eventually moved subway cars, not because of the awkward, lingering silence between the nine of us, but because without a mask, I felt like I did back in grammar school, embarrassed for showing up yet again without my homework. And now, when I’m in the unmasked minority, I feel fleeting panic.

In Padova, where I currently live, it is common knowledge that the air quality here is worse than in any other part of Italy. Nestled into a valley between two industrial regions, Padova is hospitable to pollution, smog, and dust. Walking the cobblestoned streets and the corrugated alleyways, you’d have difficulty spotting the walking Asian trope. The conditions don’t warrant the risk.

Italians however, seem indifferent. Stationed at every corner appear to be the blaśe chain smoker, and every bike ride from my house into the city center is filled with a periodic and rotten smell emanating from the numerous landfills I’ll pass along the way. Five or six landfills in just a three mile stretch. Incessant and yet I still see people zooming around on mopeds, taking in as much air as one can, and as quickly as possible.

It is on these bike rides I am likely to think back to those girls in that subway car years ago and the prudence of their masks. Is it insensible I’m not wearing a mask right now, on this very bike ride?  Just late last year I had been in the Bay Area of California when the state declared that the air quality reached purple on the Air Quality Index, which at the time, was said to be worst in the world.                           Only then did people scurry for surgical masks and the streets looked like a scene from Contagion. Online that week I remember watching a comedian say something along the lines of, “have you seen on the news how bad the air quality is in San Francisco? Even black people are wearing those masks. DO YOU KNOW HOW BAD THE AIR HAS TO BE IF YOU’RE SEEING A GROWN ASS BLACK MAN WEARING ONE OF THOSE ASIAN TRAVEL MASKS.”

It is odd to me, and apparent, as I travel, how health priorities differ among cultures. It is clear no one has it all figured out, but how our habits and anxieties form is something I’ve grown to find fascinating as I hop from country to country. I also think back to college, puzzled as to how often I watched Asian students both wear surgical masks on walks to class and then, no more than an hour later, see them slide their masks to their neck and smoke a cigarette. Maybe I am getting this wrong, and I didn’t see this as often as my memory thinks I did. But if my recollection isn’t distorted, then the masks aren’t really a sign of prudence but rather social courtesy. And considering all that Eastern Asia has endured; the 2002 SARS outbreak, the 2006 Bird Flu panic, and worst of the outbreaks, the flu that spread throughout Japan and onwards, killing more than twenty million people world wide at the beginning of the 20th century. But epidemics occur everywhere. Why the bind between Asians and masks? Perhaps the practice is influenced by Taoism and the effort to preserve the sanctity of breath. Or maybe it is related to over-population and the consequences of living without personal space in a collectivist society, passively asks its citizens to at least make it look like they’re trying to keep everyone else safe.

So where do we draw the line with this air quality conundrum. In Padova the air quality is often in the orange or the red, and no one is wearing a mask anytime soon. It’s odd how Americans, a people not known for their self-control, reduced the habit of smoking from 42% of adults smokers in 1965 to 14% in 2018. The only way I can explain this to myself is the fact America is a society rooted in individualism. We quit smoking because it could kill us, and by us I mean the individual me. The only way I could see Italians reducing their smoking is if they felt the pressure from their neighbor to stop. There would have to be a when you smoke you’re slowly killing us mentality, because in a collectivist society, health movements seem to stem from not wanting to be different, in contrast to America, where we are always trying to be.

It’s a subtle joy of travel – seeing how different cultures embrace their health. In America there has been a gym craze for the last thirty years, and a yoga craze, and a spin craze, fitbits and diets, rice crackers and mindfulness, and yet we still eat more than the eye can see. In Italy, they chain smoke, but scoff at unnatural honey. I see old ladies on bicycles, hardly any runners, and as a whole have learned people are less likely to go to therapy, but also seem less likely to repress their feelings.

No one has the answer. Good health is as much observation as it is a practice. But it is one of the many joys I’ve found while traveling – seeing what is worth trying and avoiding, worth adopting and forgoing. Like these long smelly bike rides into town, filled with exercise and exploration, dust and smoke.