1st Place

THE MONSTER
Lenore Shapiro

When I cleaned out my mother’s apartment after she died, I discovered the small metal box.  It was wedged in back of old matronly print dresses with white lace collars that she wore in her later years.  Inside the box was a packet of letters in an unfamiliar hand.  As I read the letters, I realized that they were from “the monster,” the man I knew had been my mother’s first husband.  Throughout my early childhood she had told me stories of working seven days a week, 12 hours a day in a millinery sweat shop so she could finance his dream to go to medical school.  When he was at school in Cincinnati, they only saw each other during semester breaks.  And how did the monster repay her?  When he finally became a doctor, he was too important for her, became verbally abusive, most often upbraiding her for not having a child and often saying, “you are not a woman.”  He criticized her housekeeping, forcing her to crawl under the bed to sweep up the “dust” by hand.  But I knew my mother was a good housekeeper.  She also thought he was having a fling with another woman.  When the abuse became more than she could bear, she considered divorcing him despite the scoldings of her sisters.

“Be grateful.  Being married to a doctor is the highest a Jewish girl can aspire.”

“You -- an uneducated girl, an immigrant.  What did you do to make him act that way?  Try to be a better wife -- a good Jewish wife.”

But she divorced him and eventually married my father.  Lonely, isolated, a social step down from being a doctor’s wife to the wife of a man who though educated, worked in a restaurant, she often recounted to me her life before and after her first husband became “the monster.”

In the old apartment, I opened the top letter which began thus, “My darling Tess, when you stepped off the train I saw your sweet face, anxious and looking for me.”  I don’t remember the rest but this letter and the others were so tender and loving, perceptive, sensitive and intelligent.  How could this be?  In one letter he referred to his graduation key that would be hers forever because she had earned it.  Could this be the “monster” I had grown up hating by proxy? 

I had met him only once, when I was 13.  I needed a medical clearance to climb ropes in gym class at school.

My mother said, “He owes me,” and before I could object, had made an appointment for me at his office.  On some level, I understood that sending me to him was an act of revenge.   I was the prize, the child he’d never have.  I loved my mother, was protective of her, because of her difficult early life.  At age three she had lost her mother.  As a Jew, she experienced persecution in Czarist Russia.  At age 13, she crossed the ocean to a seven day week of hard work in a sweat shop in New York City.  In her adult years, when she should have “lived happily ever after,” she suffered the abuse of the “monster.”  Now, I felt responsible to make her happy.  I would be important as the instrument of her revenge.  But at the same time, I was angry at being manipulated.  The thought of meeting the “monster” was also scary.           

The trolley car climbed the hills to a strange neighborhood at the other end of Brooklyn and I was at his office.  I sat in the waiting room staring at a massive black carved table in the center.  Dust filled the deep grooves of the wood.  I recognized the table from my mother’s description of their trip in the “good days” to purchase the table, elegant in those times, for his first office.

The door to the examining room opened, releasing the piercing smell of antiseptic.  A funny, gnome-like man with grey hair and glasses came out.  This was the monster?  His hand shook when he clasped mine.  I realized that he too was very nervous about meeting me. 

At the time, I had very long, thick, wavy hair, which fanned out on my shoulders and my back.  In our house, one photograph of my mother as a young woman revealed very long beautiful chestnut-brown hair rippling down her white embroidered blouse.  She had been and still was a  beautiful woman.

The “monster” looked at me for a long time and finally spoke.  “Your hair.  You’re so beautiful, like my beautiful Tess.”  He wiped away a tear.  Could a monster cry?

My Tess?  Head down, I scuffed at an imaginary spot on the floor, my cheeks hot with embarrassment at the compliment to me and then anger at his presumption.  How dare this man still love my mother.  With his words, this stranger had suddenly destroyed my mental picture of my family.  What was he doing in my family?

I touched my throat where my confusion nested, always ready to rise again on evenings when I overhead angry words between my parents.  The next day, they’d hug the walls of the small apartment as they passed each other, not touching, not speaking.  How could the two people so loving and kind to me be so unkind to each other?

At that moment standing in the waiting room of the “monster,” I began to understand.  His shadow would always wedge its way between my mother and father.

My wonderful, smart, and loving daddy, whose key in the lock when he returned in the evening with his funny stories of his workday transformed the sad apartment – my daddy, who’d greet me each evening with “Lenore, Vera, Sunshine, Goodman, Gladness, what did you do today?”  He’d pull out a Swiss chocolate bar from his pocket and give it to me and with the other hand give me the comic pages from the New York Post, containing my favorite comic strip, “Little Lulu.”

Clutching the doctor’s note for school, I left the office as fast as I could, confused and angry at my loss of the image of a “monster.”  I refused to go back to his office ever again for any of the many other medical permission notes needed for school.  But anyway, my mother didn’t push it.  Her point had been made.

Now, thirty-five years later, back in the old apartment, I slammed the metal box shut. No longer in the limbo of adolescence, but an adult, I was furious at the man who, being a “monster,” could not have, but had indeed, written those love letters.  “Go to hell,” I said.  I went into the hall of the building, chucked the letters down the incinerator and watched with satisfaction as they were consumed by the flames below.

2nd Place

THE RUN-IN
Deb Frank

I stood at the edge of a dusty field in Southern Utah watching as Tim, the baby-faced social worker, passed out blindfolds–thick black ones–the kind the Taliban probably uses on their prisoners.  All around all of the other parents, including my husband Dave, were putting theirs on, calmly agreeing to seal off their visual channels for who knows how long.

Suckers! I nearly screamed. We were the ones who had raised these teenaged beasts, then shelled out $15,000–more if you added in the cost of airline tickets, transporters fees and psychological evaluations–to send them this hip new age obedience school out here. And now here we were, decked out in our relaxed-fit jeans and too-white tennis shoes to attend their graduation.

I‘d never heard of wilderness programs until our daughter Ellie came out here. In my orthodox Jewish world they didn’t exist. “Our” kids weren’t  supposed to need them and yet a Rabbi cum substance abuse  counselor came up with the idea.

Even though Ellie was a nightly denizen of the East Village bars, I was aghast. Leave my child with goyim in Utah, Mormons who were so eager to get their hands on our Jewish souls that they even converted our dead? No way!

“It’s pikuach nefesh, saving her life,” the Rabbi said. ”If you don’t send her, you’ll be killing her. “

Then the Rabbi dug deeply into his pants pocket and removed a card.

“Call them. They are the best.”

When I told Dave what the Rabbi had said he frowned.

“Are you sure she needs this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “How can I convince you. By spying on her?

“Yes,” said Dave.

The following morning I opened up the Brooklyn yellow pages and called the first private eye listed, a burly ex-Mossad agent, who videoed Ellie at midnight bombing down Ocean Parkway at twice the legal speed limit, an older man at the wheel.

“Do you want to see it?”

“No thanks,” we said, both shaking our heads.

After that we signed her up for wilderness.

On the telephone, the sales rep said that the program had an eighty percent recovery rate.  

It was much later that I learned that the success rate was probably closer to thirty-three per cent and that  even the successful kids relapsed.  I also found out that ten kids who died in these programs, the best known being fifteen year old Aaron Bacon, who starved to death in 1994, in the same place where I was right now.

As I stood here, blindfold still in my hand, all of this information scattered through my mind like so many snowflakes inside of a paperweight. Then Tim shot me the kind of look kindergarten teachers reserve for the kids who won’t sit still at circle time.

No, not me, I wanted to say. I can’t do this. I was too wiped, from flying out of New York at three a.m. and, besides, I don’t need a blindfold; I’m already physically and emotionally visionless.

When Ellie was twelve she threatened to scissor her parochial school uniforms into ribbons. I swiftly transferred her into another class and then another school.  I thought I was saving her. Instead, I unwittingly turned her into a tween pariah, shunned by her old schoolmates, out casted by her new ones who were locked into a tortuous network of cliques Ellie couldn’t begin to penetrate.

She looked glum, and depressed, so I put her in therapy.  I also did my own retail therapy taking her shopping and buying her way too many clothes. I relaxed her curfew, letting her stay out late and I allowed Shira,  Ellie’s one remaining friend, the daughter of an addict and ex-con to live in our home.

It was only after Ellie came out here and wrote her “letter of responsibility,” a  confessional the kids are forced to write, that I learned that she’d been a  shoplifter, a drug dealer and an alcoholic binge drinker.

Tim’s eyes were now trained on me like spotlights. I took my blindfold out of my hand and tied it on. It trailed  beneath the slope of my nose almost dangling  into my mouth.

”Could I have a smaller size?” I started to say, but then I stopped myself. From the  program’s parent reeducation CDs I knew that request would brand me as “entitled’ what my parents’ generation used to call “spoiled.”

My parents were Holocaust survivors. In Auschwitz you didn’t return your uniform. No was the sound my parents’ vocal chords naturally produced.  No junk food, no skipping school (without proof of 100° F temperature), no clothing not marked “sale”. So I said yes to my kids. Yes, so they wouldn’t feel deprived, so that I wouldn’t have to fight with them, so they would love me. Yes, yes, yes until it got me here.

Now Tim was ordering us into single file like a choo choo train. Dave took his place near the front. I stayed behind–the caboose. We were going to walk across this field, the size of four city blocks, linked together in dark silence, the way our kids did when they were first brought here.

This blind walk, with its gulag overtones wasn’t in the promo video with its   breathtaking landscapes and smiling, sunburned kids.

How did Ellie survive this in her mini skirt and flip flops?

Tim gave a walking lesson. “Lay your hand on the hand of the person in front of you and follow the rhythm of his steps.”

As I mimicked his movements, a hand reached toward me. I crossed my eyes downward toward the tiny pocket where my blindfold bubbled up from my skin until I saw blue.  Blue denim.  The blue of Cyndi’s Ralph Lauren jeans. 

I’d met Cyndi at this morning’s orientation. She was a skinny blonde, married to a stout, mustachioed car salesman. He looked about twenty years her senior. At break time Cyndi’s hubbie told our group that one wrong move and he’d be sending their son to military school.

While the other parents swooned in horror, I quietly cheered. Miss these kids?  No way. Not after they hit us, cursed at us, stole our cars, our cash, our jewelry and our peace of mind.

 At night, as Dave and I slept, Ellie took my car.  She was fourteen.  No license. No learner’s permit. She did this every night for almost a year, until we caught her pulling into our driveway at dawn.

As we lumbered across the field, Cyndi’s moisturized and manicured hand felt soft, and warm, surprisingly maternal. The walk was doing its job. My mental focus had narrowed to my feet; I thought only of where to place them, so that I wouldn’t end up in traction.

After what felt like a very long time, I heard Tim yelling again. This time he wanted us to remove our blindfolds.  As I peeled mine off, the noonday sunlight flew into my pupils, but once my eyes adjusted I could see that this so-called desert was teeming with life. Under my feet, there were marigolds, poppies, heliotrope, primrose and other flowers I couldn’t name, blossoming in a thousand shades of red, lavender, pink, yellow and periwinkle.

Now Julie, a willowy woman-girl with a folksinger’s honey voice stepped up to the rock podium. I half expected her to start strumming a guitar, leading all of us in song. Instead, she read us a poem authored by a teenager.

Was all wisdom out here filtered through the teenaged brain? 

The poem was about living in the moment, Ram Dass’s old ‘be here now” slogan. It was a good message for me with a mind like a haunted house except that I wasn’t taking it in My mind rambled off, wandering to Ellie and  the kosher food fiasco.

For the past seven weeks, ever since she got here, we’d sent  her packages --- kosher wilderness rations, the same yogurts, powdered milk, instant oatmeal, rice and beans,  tortillas, wraps and canned chicken the other kids were eating, except that Ellie’s were stamped with OUs and OKs and Star Ks.

But instead of eating it, Ellie joined the other girls around the campfire each night for a treyf cookout. She was the only Orthodox girl in the whole program. I knew that eating differently would be hard, but somehow, I thought she could do it. When the Rabbi told me that she’d failed, I began to cry.  

As I understood it kashrus wasn’t just about the body; it was about the soul, feeding it the right elements to keep it holy. For a Jew, non-kosher food was spiritual poison.

How would Ellie heal with pig in her gut?

“Don’t make an issue of it,” the Rabbi said.

“When she’ll really begin to get recovery  the Yiddishkeit will come back.”

Easy for him to say. He wasn’t her kid. How come my great uncle Aaron refused the food in Auschwitz and Ellie broke down right away! On the other hand, Aaron died.

Tim had promised that the therapists would be on call 24/7, prowling our campsites in case we needed them. I was expecting to need them, a lot.

Tim’s bullhorn voice shocked me out of my day dreaming. He was yelling telling us that the big moment was approaching.

“There are your kids,” he said, pointing to a series of black specks on the next hill. All I saw was an undifferentiated smear of black.  
Was Ellie really there?

I bit my hangnails and mouthed a prayer,

Hashem  help.  Hashem help. Help. Help.

Ellie and I hadn’t exchanged one word since she left six weeks before.  Every week she faxed a letter home, but that was only because the program required communication with parents. Otherwise, she’d forfeit some privilege like brown sugar on her oatmeal or spices for her rice and beans.  Every day, I responded with a bubbly “miss you darling” note, as if she were away at summer camp.

On Wednesday nights we got an update call from Pam, Ellie’s Wilderness therapist. Dave and I huddled together over one receiver, hanging on every word as Pam made us feel glad that our daughter was living in a place without beds, bathtubs, toilets, or toilet paper.

I loved Pam, her quiet laid back style and her Zen-like way of being soft and firm at the same time.

“Ellie was sassy, real whiny,” she told us one evening. “I said she needed to make her tone match my tone. “

“Make her tone match my tone.” I memorized that phrase, repeated it to my other kids, even affecting Pam’s drawl.  On good days, I told myself that Pam was the reason Ellie had to come out here, the hidden blessing in this mess.

But now my faith was weak. I bit my hangnails as my stomach churned up sour juices and under my breath I prayed.

Help Hashem. Help. Help. Help.

“Hug ‘em hard. Show ‘em all your love,” Tim yelled, his cheeks red and puffy like a football coach before a big game.

Suddenly, I heard a thundering whoop as if a herd of buffaloes was stampeding across the plains. It was them, two dozen teenaged boys and girls racing at us all wearing identical, dusty chinos and faded black T-shirts, as if they were members of one tribe.

This was the “run in,” the kick off event of the three-day long graduation.  Though this scene recurred each week–the program had rolling admissions and there were at least forty graduations a year– I felt like the first Mom in history to witness this moment.

All around me kids were running wildly toward their parents and families were dead-bolting in embrace. Moms and daughters and fathers and sons were falling into each other’s arms, their voices forming a stereophonic chorus of “oh honey’s” and “I love you’s” and “I missed you’s.” Some parents even took photographs, as if this was  a scene they wanted to remember: Here’s the place we sent junior when the only other choice was jail.

I expected to see piercings and tattoos, dreadlocks or Mohawks or blue hair, or all of the above, but these kids looked clean-cut, as if they could be honor students at some tony, suburban high school. The only exception was one obvious stoner, a sallow-faced boy, who wore his wooly cap down to his eyeballs in the mid-August heat.

After a few minutes the running stopped.  The noise faded out as families dispersed, each heading to their own campsite.

Dave and I found ourselves alone.

“Where’s Ellie?” Dave asked.

“Probably behind some rock hoping we won’t find her,”

“Fat chance. They’ve got a staff to student ratio of one to one.”

“Yeah, but what if they really don’t find her? What if she ran away?”

Help Hashem, I whispered. Help, help, help.

My prayers hit heaven. Ellie appeared before us, glowing like a movie star who’d walked off the screen or a newborn baby. Her cheeks were ruddy, her thick, blonde hair was woven into two braids. She was bigger now. I couldn’t figure out how she had gained weight hiking all day and eating unkosher K-rations, but  she had grown from nearly anorexic to almost pleasingly plump.

Earlier in the day, Tim warned us that our kids would stink because they rarely showered and weren’t allowed to use deodorant. Ellie looked beautiful; her smell was as sweet as the wildflowers around us. As she threw her arms over me, I felt like I  was holding the old Ellie, the girl  who wore frilly pink night gowns and drank chocolate milk instead of Vodka with Red Bull.

Then Dave hugged her, his glasses fogging up with tears.

“This is 48 years of crying,” he said. 

Initially, Dave hadn’t even wanted to come. “You go. Represent us both, “he told me, but Pam applied gentle pressure, coaxing him into making the trip. Ellie knew about that.

“I’m so glad you are both here,”  she said. Her grey eyes were wet.

Then the three of us linked arms and walked across the field to the place where Ellie had made camp.

How long would this moment last, all of us together and happy.

I didn’t know and I wouldn’t think about it. Not now.

 Right now, I would just be in this moment, right inside of it.

3rd Place

CONCERTO OF WORDS: OSTRACISM, MUSIC AND FAITH
Linda K. Wertheimer

“Praise the Lord, Oh, Jesus, Praise the Lord.”

 My ears burn and my throat tightens as the music rises to a crescendo. I slam back the wooden seat, stand up, and wiggle myself around peers to escape. A teen band, comprised of several classmates, jams to a Christian hymn in my public high school auditorium as a pastor nearby beams in spiritual bliss. I rush into the hall, run into the band room, grab my flute, and slip into a practice room.

Breathe. Breathe. Relax.

The calm, soft words that my flute teacher says at the start of every lesson reverberate in my head. As I open my flute case, I still fume. A surprise assembly will be held today, the principal had announced minutes earlier. The surprise is a pre-Easter religious assembly. Most of my classmates, save my friend Ann, appear thrilled. Ann, a Catholic, can stomach staying in the assembly. I cannot. I am 16, and with my middle brother’s graduation the year before, I am the only Jew left at Van Buren High School in this town of barely 200 in northwest Ohio. Since my family moved to this area seven years ago, in 1974, I have heard the name of Jesus invoked in school too many times. I have been forced too often to feel different.

I am not Christian, classmates tell me as I give them a ride home from basketball practice. Therefore, I am doomed. When I die, I will go to hell because I have not been saved. I tell them it does not matter. I am Jewish, so I do not believe in heaven or hell. The memories left behind matter most. Yet, my peers’ words disturb me.

Breathe. Breathe.

I twist my flute’s silver mouthpiece into the body joint, then attach the foot. I am a Jew, but my religious faith is no salve. Before my family’s move from the Finger Lakes Region in New York State to rural Ohio, Judaism is of little consequence. It is something my two older brothers and I receive at birth. Our parents are Jews; so are we.  Like many Jews across America, we are assimilated and uninvolved in most religious aspects of our faith.

My father considers himself an agnostic; his family put up Christmas trees in December. It was not a religious act; it was just something many Jews did. Dad calls himself a Jew, but has no use for any organized religion. Mom is the reason we have any semblance of a Jewish education. She rarely attends services during my childhood, but later tells me she might have if she did not have to attend alone. She grew up in a close-knit, nearly all-Jewish neighborhood in Dorchester, a section of Boston. Her schools shut down for major Jewish holidays. Mom’s parents were unobservant Jews who rebelled at the orthodoxy practiced by their parents, who kept kosher homes. Mom’s maternal grandfather walked to shul every day to pray until he became too ill to go, then cried when he could no longer attend. 

Breathe. Breathe.

I want to be a professional flutist, yet am nowhere good enough. I always make first chair flute in my high school band and in the county band. I place first one year in the state band, but Interlochen and other summer programs for talented young musicians turn me down. For years, my music lacks soul, and my tone is as choppy as a toddler’s gait. My new teacher, a college professor, works to give me what I lack.

In the windowless practice room at school, I shut out sounds of the nearby assembly. Practicing what my teacher preaches, I first lay on the room’s gray rug and blow softly into the mouthpiece marked with the imprint of my lips. The notes are clear, pure. My breath rises and falls, a gentle rhythm from my diaphragm rather than the shoulder heaves of years past. I warm up with scales, then stand and open the piece I at first shun when my teacher assigns it: Gluck’s Menuet and Spirit Dance. The piece is deceptively slow and easy. My teacher persuaded me that playing this simple piece well is a challenge. Breathe too quickly, and the piece sounds harsh. She teaches me to play every note as if I still lay on the floor, letting each breath rise and fall. Let the music flow. Dance the haunting menuet. Twirl just a tad faster in the spirit dance.

Notes float effortlessly. This is music. This is peace.

A mechanical bell rings. The assembly is over. I clean the flute with a shoe cloth, and rest each piece in its velvety slot, then join the crowd returning to class.

Music is only part of the salve. My brother Kevin also helps me endure the years at Van Buren. We share almost identical experiences from the time we enter the school system in the middle of my fourth-grade and the middle of his sixth-grade year. Our brother Steve, five years older, is a high school freshman by then. He has his struggles, but they differ from ours. For in elementary school at Van Buren, religious instruction is a part of the package.

Enter, the Church Lady. It is the first week at our new school in Van Buren, where the elementary, junior high and high schools share the same plot of land on top of one of the region’s rare hills. In the middle of the afternoon, my teacher leaves the fourth-grade classroom, and a stranger walks in with a felt-covered board and a briefcase. She sticks bearded figures on the board and tells us a story about Jesus and the men who believe in his teachings. Disciples, she calls them. Then, she asks us questions about Jesus and his effect on our lives.

My face reddens in embarrassment, confusion, and anger. Why is this woman talking about Jesus? Religion belongs in a church, temple, or mosque, not a public school class. I know that even at age 9. In Horseheads, New York, where we used to live, no one came into our elementary school to talk about religious figures. The Church Lady leads the class in hymns and my peers lustily sing along.  I try to shrink behind the top of the old-style school desk. I want to run, yet I also want to fit in. The same day, at a different time, in his sixth-grade classroom, Kevin also has a visit from the Church Lady.

We come home angry and confused and run off the school bus into our family’s one-story brick ranch in a rural subdivision in Findlay, which feeds into the Van Buren school system. Each of us pushes the yellow vinyl bar stools close to the kitchen counter, where Mom waits with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and milk. My Dad works 9-5 at his engineering job, and Mom takes care of us. She does not work full-time until I am 12, but even then her job teaching foreign students English allows her to be home by the time my school is out.

Our mother’s roundish face flushes with anger when Kevin talks about how the Church Lady said something derogatory about Jews, inferring that we killed Jesus. We both tell Mom that we do not want to sit in any more of those classes, taught by volunteers from local churches at schools in Hancock County in the 1970s. Mom agrees, saying that not only should we not have to sit in those classes, but such programs are illegal, a violation of the US Constitution and separation of church and state. She vows that she and Dad will pursue this with the Van Buren superintendent. That night, Dad, in his booming voice, echoes Mom’s anger.

Mom writes to the local Congressman, then Tennyson Guyer, also a minister in the Church of God branch, a popular Christian denomination in Findlay. Guyer writes back, saying that even though he was a minister, he knows what the school is doing is wrong. Empowered with information, my parents protest the existence of the class to the superintendent. He tells them, “I don’t want to make waves.” Yet, he agrees to speak to the school board. “Do it privately,” my mother said. “I don’t want my children hurt.” 

The school board refuses to eliminate the classes, which are popular with most families.  The superintendent tells my parents that Kevin and I could be excused during the religious class. My parents debate whether to do more, then veto the idea of taking our situation to the American Civil Liberties Union. They fear retaliation from bigots if our objection draws newspaper headlines. The week they speak with the superintendent, the local branch of the KKK burns a cross on the yard of one of the few black families in the area. My parents figure that eventually we will move, but the economy is so-so during the 1970s and early 1980s, making it hard to find work elsewhere. We stay.

Kevin and I are excused from the religious classes each week. At first, my fourth-grade teacher sits with me in another room. Then, apparently annoyed that she has to watch me rather than have a break, she ushers me to a room the size of a broom closet, and tells me to stay until she returns. I complain to Mom, who calls the school and gets the teacher to agree to send me to the spacious library where another adult can supervise me. I love to read, and to have singular access to a library is a gift. Kevin, also sent to the library during his Bible studies class, hates reading. For both of us, the worst torture is leaving the classroom each week as our classmates watch. We do not hide our Jewish identity from others, but prefer not to advertise it. Now, we are subject to regular interrogations by curious classmates. 

“Why can’t you sit in the class with us?” one classmate asks me one day.

“I’m Jewish,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘You’re Jewish’?” she said.

I am not sure how to answer. Neither is Kevin. What is a Jew? Are we defined by what we eat or read? Are we defined by what we are not – neither Christian nor Muslim? Are we defined by those who treat us with disdain, who see us as hell-bound because we do not believe Jesus is our savior?

In Ohio, as we did in New York State, we learn about Judaism in religious school classes on Sundays. The temple was 20 minutes away in New York, but in Ohio, our parents must wake us around 7:30 a.m., push us to hurry up and pile into the station wagon to drive an hour to Lima. The car soon reeks of cigarettes as my father puffs one after another, refusing to stop even as we complain that the smoke travels from the front to the back seat where the three of us sit leg to leg, elbow often striking elbow. My eyes smart from the smoke, and my nose becomes plugged by the end of the car ride. At the temple, my parents let us out, and then usually bowl we receive our weekly dose of Judaism. My class has three other students, all from Lima. I am the outsider even among my own faith: a Jew from Findlay.

Kevin and I collaborate in our drive to quit Sunday school. In seventh grade, he makes his pitch to our parents that there is no need to continue Sunday school. He does not want a Bar Mitzvah ceremony, which would have required more chauffeuring between Findlay and Lima. He barely knows any of the Hebrew that he would have to chant from the Torah at a Bar Mitzvah. My parents, neither of whom celebrated the ritual at age 13, let Kevin quit Sunday school. I try to quit at the same time, but my parents insist that I take classes at least as long as Kevin did, then decide what I want. For another year, my parents and I trek to Lima. After Sunday school, we habitually stop at Wendy’s. My most vivid memories of Sunday school are of Dad’s cigarette smoke and the treat of a Wendy’s cheeseburger and fries.

At age 12 or 13, I follow in Kevin’s footsteps and become a Sunday school dropout. I do not celebrate my coming of age as a Jewish female, a bat mitzvah, and care little at the time, given that I have little comprehension of what it means. At that point, I have not witnessed a Bat Mitzvah ceremony. I do not understand that a bar or bat mitzvah shows the transition from childhood to adulthood and readiness to read from the Torah and accept the responsibilities the Torah outlines, including the Ten Commandments. At 13, I am growing up quickly but my maturing has nothing to do with liturgy. I am learning what it means to be part of a scorned, little understood minority at school and in my community. No boys ask me to dance at the seventh- and eighth-grade dances. I receive few invitations to birthday parties. I do not belong to one of the biggest social outlets in our school system and town– church.

I create a jaded definition of what it means to be a Jew: to hover on society’s sidelines, trying to blend in yet constantly being pushed away. To be a Jew is to be different and alone. It is a sentiment, I suspect, all Jews feel at some point. Christmastime in America, even in metropolitan areas, can be a lonely time to be a Jew.

“You Jewish son of a bitch,” a boy taunts Kevin on the school bus during his junior and my freshman year of high school.

I hear the epithet and flinch. Kevin grimaces, but lets the taunt go. He and some neighborhood boys disagree over something. A few days later, on a Saturday morning, we wake to find anti-Semitic graffiti on nearly every window of our house. The same graffiti – a swastika – is etched in white wax on the windows of Kevin’s lime green Barracuda in the driveway. Our house is set back far enough to shield the vandalism from people walking by. The incident brings back painful memories of those first years in Van Buren schools when we were sequestered in the library during the Bible studies classes. Isolated from our peers, that feeling of being different is hard to scrub off our skins. It sticks to us like the mud that coats the region’s farm fields after a long rain.

Our family does not make a police report, but Kevin calls a deputy sheriff he has become friends with through his Boy Scout troop. The deputy visits the homes of the young suspects, speaks to them and their parents, and emphasizes the seriousness of the act. No one confesses. But for several mornings on the school bus, we hear whispers around us about the marks left on our windows. We are angry, puzzled. What fuels such venom? Is it anti-Semitism, or is it ignorance? We will never know.

The isolation and ostracism draws Kevin and me closer to each other. We fight bitterly at times at home over stupid stuff like whose turn it is to wash dishes, or who gets to use the bathroom first in the morning. But at school, we are allies. Kevin and I each find friends who do not care about our religion, and we often share our friends, hanging out together in our basement at the ping pong table or building snow forts. We often see each other in the hallways at Van Buren, and if one of us looks downcast, the other winks or grins as if to say, “Don’t worry. Tomorrow will be better.” In early childhood photos, we stand by each other’s side, smiling, holding hands. Maybe we are destined to be close by virtue of our age difference of two years. But the adversity we share, I am sure, strengthens the sibling bond.

In family home movies of Kevin’s high school graduation, I look wistful as I stare at Kevin’s diploma and watch Mom hug him. I do not want to be on my own at Van Buren. He is there at every one of my basketball games. He is there in the hallway on those days when I wish to be some place else. He shares the same distaste for the regular sight of a youth minister in the cafeteria, a curly-haired young man who invites all of us to religious activities after school. Come pray with us, he urges. I want friends and solidarity, but this is not my community. Kevin and I agree: our lives will improve when we are in the bigger, diverse world of college.

“I, Kevin Wertheimer, being of sound mind and small body, will all of the good times I have had to my sister Linda.”  It is a joke, part of the seniors’ will in the Van Buren 1980 Yearbook.  My brother is leaving me for the first time, heading to Ohio University in Athens, a three-hour’s drive from Findlay. I have a few select friends and still find sanctuary in practice rooms.

Breathe, breathe, relax.

“And in Jesus’ name, we pray.”

My face reddens. It is June 1982. Wearing a black graduation gown and cap and a yellow honor cord, I sit among my classmates in the same gym where I played basketball for four years, where I watched my brothers graduate, and where I heard too many preachers advise us to find peace from Jesus. This time I cannot flee the room. It is my high school graduation, and the speaker giving the benediction is the youth minister who used to pal around with students in the cafeteria. My classmates voted to have him participate. I begged the high school principal to ask the minister to give a benediction amenable to all religions, a prayer that excludes Jesus. With a few words, the speaker isolates me from peers. I am again the Jew, the bespectacled fourth-grader with pig-tails who slides behind her desk wanting to plug her ears and close her eyes as classmates sing Christian hymns. And yet, I breathe and relax with little effort this time. Comfort is nearby; my brother Kevin, ready with a knowing grin, sits a few rows away understanding exactly how I feel.

I set foot in my high school only a few times after graduation day. The pain of feeling different is forever raw. Still, I owe something to that school set on a tiny hill.

The nine years in Van Buren schools tie me closer to my brother Kevin. In school, he was a flashing beacon on a lighthouse, always guiding me back to a safe place with his reassuring, wide-mouthed grin. And that image of him remains the most clear even now, particularly now.

Kevin and I shared only four more years of our lives together after my high school graduation. On March 1, 1986, he died suddenly after falling asleep at the wheel while driving from California home to Colorado, where he moved after college. He was only 23, and I, 21.

I ache to fill the hole in my gut left by Kevin’s absence in the years after his death, and the experiences at Van Buren, albeit bittersweet, planted a seed. Driven by grief and by an inability to explain anything about my faith as a child, I steadily learn more about my faith as an adult.

Breathe. Breathe. Relax.

It is more than a decade after Kevin’s death, and I am in my 30s now. I stand next to a rabbi before a circle of some 40 other Jews during a folk-style Shabbat service in a Dallas temple. At the rabbi’s nod, I put my flute to my mouth and play as he strums the guitar and sings, “Oseh Shalom.” It is a prayer about peace and healing, the last lines of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer said at Jewish funerals and every year on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. The prayer is a wish that God grants peace to us and all of our people. The tune we play is easy, deceptively so like Gluck’s Menuet and Spirit Dance.  And yet, it takes me years to play a Jewish prayer like the way it is meant to be shared – with meaning and spirit.

Breathe. Breathe. Relax.

I again hear the voice of my old flute teacher coaxing me to just let the music speak for itself. The melody comes from my flute, but the sound is sweeter than I thought I could ever play. I am a Jew, a proud Jew. The prayers of my people, I finally understand, have the power to bring peace.