 |
I moved to Austin was to feel Jewish again. I had a really good Jewish thing
going when I left San Antonio at the age of 16. I could have made a run at
president of the San Antonio Federation of Temple Youth (SAFTY); that’s how
popular I felt. And this was a big thing, because when my family moved to San
Antonio, Texas from Long Island, New York, I didn’t know what a boutonniere
was, or a pep rally — and there was no way, once I found out, that I could
credibly pretend to care. So I felt not just on the sidelines, but not even at
the game for all of sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Then in ninth grade all
the people in SAFTY who I thought were dorky and goofy turned out to be…
well, interested in me.
I remember a SAFTY brunch the morning after the Saturday Night Massacre. I was
the only one in the group who could name all the people who Nixon fired. That
was my personal turning point; I had finally found a group of people who cared
that I might be smart. Through SAFTY, I got to write Saturday Night
Live-style skits and play my favorite Jackson Browne and Randy Newman songs
at Teen Services. I met Jewish people from Muskogee and Beaumont. I felt like I
was not just learning about Jewish stuff, but also fitting in in Texas.
One girl gave me very deep eye contact at the last SAFTY meeting I attended. I
think back on that look sometimes and wonder what I gave up by not continuing
to be Jewish in Texas. I did go back for a visit the next spring vacation and
discovered that although my Texas friends were glad enough to see me, they had
continued to live their lives, which I had somewhat been neglecting to do. I
moved to New Jersey and pretty much moved on to worshipping Springsteen,
because it didn’t really matter if you were Jewish in New Jersey.
It mattered a lot if you were Jewish in Texas. Our family banded together
because we weren’t with our aunts and uncles and friends on Long Island any
more, and we had to fend for ourselves. I have this memory of my whole family
getting up on the bima at Temple Beth-El, the first Chanukah we lived in San
Antonio — we were being honored for being the perfect family.
Getting soulful looks and being in the perfect family: I wondered if those
things ever really happened, and if so, on what planet — during all the time I
didn’t live in Texas, from 1977 when we moved away, through 1988 when I moved
back with my then-girlfriend, from San Francisco, where I never felt like I
belonged at all, being neither a student nor an ex-radical. I didn’t feel very
Jewish there, either. I went to High Holy Day services at the Berkeley Hillel a
couple of times and it just made me feel lonely.
Meanwhile, I had this nagging Texas thing going — pulsing deep down inside,
in the form of a song I had heard just once on the AM radio on the way to
school — something about wanting to “go home with the armadillo.” All I had
was this fragment of a lyric and poignant chord change, but it tugged at me. It
wasn’t that I felt any bogus quasi-cowboy thing… I keenly remember driving on
Sundays with my family through a parking lot full of mating high school kids
tailgating with their pickups and thinking, “That is so not me.” There
was some other thing, a sense of wonderment within myself that I had at some
point lived in Texas and it was a totally different experience from anything
else in my life. I wanted to go back and find out what it was all about.
So when my then-girlfriend got her Ph.D. and searched for a good place to do
post-doctoral work, a position opened up at UT. We jumped on it.
 |
services at Hillel again, and this time, I liked the rabbi there a lot. I liked
his conversational tone, his philosophical bent. I really extra-liked it that
when he asked a Talmudic-style question, I would often know the answer, even
though I usually kept it to myself. I felt an ancestral rabbinic stirring —
like I had something alive from my shtetl forebears, some of whom, at
some point, probably had to have been rabbis.
Yeah, so, I remember going to services at Hillel, and then sometimes at
Agudas Achim, but going to services was not really what being Jewish in Austin
was really all about for me. I mean, finding an authentic Jewish experience
anywhere, for me, as an adult, has been tremendously difficult because I
haven’t had a family to share it with. I know my parents back East really like
it when I say I’m going to shul. And I’m pretty sure my wife and her
parents get some satisfaction from my sporadic appearances at shul —
like, someone at least is looking out after that end of things. But, it really
blows to sit there in a congregation and not know anyone, and be wishing you
were back home with your family, except that my family doesn’t really practice
Judaism beyond enjoying a lovely smoked fish platter on brunch on Sundays
(which is a truly exquisitely fine thing). But at services I still feel like
I’m hearkening back to my perfect childhood family in San Antonio, the
kiddush-reciting Gozonskys united against the cruel world of high school
football. And since that sort of hearkening feels like the nowhere-est kind of
conservative nostalgia, I don’t really know where to go with my Judaism. I just
sense that I can’t get anywhere without it.
So now that I live in Los Angeles, my Jewish experience involves gradually
doing something, though I’m not sure what. (I might start taking each of
my daughters to alternating Shabbats — I think they’d like the singing.) It
still feels like my milestone Jewish experiences as an adult happened while I
lived in Austin, roughly five years ago, when I’d think, at the end of a run,
looking up at the UT Tower, “Remember this! Remember this forever! This is
the time in your life when you are completely happy!”
This article appears in December 27 • 1996 and December 27 • 1996 (Cover).