Part One: Beginnings
Prologue: Michelle: Summer, 1995
If Jewish time is circular, perhaps I could say that my family’s line began on August 10, 1995, when I arrived in Israel to visit my aunt and uncle.
I was 13 years old—the age of boys and (some) girls when they received bnai mitzvot—though my mother is in no way religious, and would never allow me to join a synagogue, much less to partake in becoming any sort of official Jewish adult. But instead, she sent me off to see my uncle Doran—and my aunt, Reina, my mother’s sister, who had moved there with her husband several years before.
I had met them before. I had lived with my aunt, or rather, she had lived with my mother and me—when I was very young, before Doran took Reina back to his homeland. I even served as the flower girl at their wedding five years prior. My recollections, at the time, were hazy; a joint effort, I suppose, of my young age, and the growing tension between the Davidson sisters. At least, with one of them in Israel, and the other two long ago having gotten used to the habit of barely keeping in contact, they could ignore this rift. Until my mother, of all people, Donna Davidson, the perpetual middle child, for reasons unknown to me, sent me off as an ambassador.
All I am really sure of is that during those two weeks when my uncle Doran took me around Israel, gesticulating deftly at his prized heritage, that something changed in me. I saw myself in the sunset over Masada. In the heart of the old city in Jerusalem, eating falafel and bartering with Arab traders. Wading through the silky Dead Sea. I fit in like an engorged puzzle piece, desperate but resisting, constantly reminding myself that I was Michelle Davidson, an American citizen, a secular, Generation Y girl, with no ties to this antiquidated religion other than the fact that because of it, my grandmother and her parents had to escape Germany in the ’30s.
I was not my aunt. Reina (formerly Kathleen) with her innocent baby face, and another one growing round in her belly. Her beautiful, long hair was swept up in a scarf to hide it from other mens’ eyes, a custom my aunt Deborah sneered at from across the ocean. My mother had wanted me to become a doctor, or a scientist in a lab like her, and she had certainly tried to instill those values into her baby sister. What had compelled my aunt to shirk off this lofty tradition?
It was with asking these questions that I, Michelle, the youngest, brought the Davidson family back into fruition. In time, the tales of our own heritage grew, spinning out from the stories I pieced together. My grandmother, Gerdie Schreiber, was a childhood immigrant to America, who morphed into a caricature of a ’50s housewife as best she could in Brooklyn. My grandfather, Jack, had been in America so long that his roots ran dry. They had given birth to three daughters, but they were more like three nations. Deborah, the oldest, had thrown herself into the Women’s Movement as soon as she was able, and stayed with it until it betrayed her. My mother, Donna, calmly and quietly devoted herself to one thing only—science. And no one, not even my phantom father, whom I have only ever known as “Mr X,” was allowed to get in the way of that. And Reina… Reina was the “surprise,” born 18 years after Deborah, 16 after my mother, who, as her sisters gave their names to secular American pursuits, chose first a return to traditional Judaism, and then a marriage to an Orthodox Israeli, who took her back to the Galilee, to domestic tasks, to young and frequent pregnancies. That was the plan for the future. But what about the past?
Who were these people, after all? My mother and aunts, growing up in the ’60s through ’80s, who took such different paths in life? What was this Judaism, which my uncle, passionately, insisted still ran through my veins? What was this secular American culture, which my grandmother’s family once ran to for salvation?
When my mother and her sisters turned 13, they started to ask these questions for their own lives, but I, Michelle Davidson, attempt to look at the entirety, all three of their legacies. How is it that they could spiral into three different directions, when originating from the same source? Why did they choose the choices that they made?
What follows is the best I could possibly do. This is my memoir to them, Deborah, Donna and Kathleen Davidson. And this is my answer for myself. The way to finally and succinctly, bridge the true heritage of my family.
