August 12, 2008
Other than the rabbi, Walter was the only person who spoke to me for my entire first year at the Reform shul in central Texas, and Walter spoke to me only because he was the temple’s greeter and was supposed to do so. I remember all too well sitting between chattering Torah study attendees on Shabbat mornings listening silently while they would make their plans to meet for coffee. It took roughly a year of regular study sessions before they thought to invite me. I would see these same folks at various places around town — supermarkets, Starbucks, wherever — and it was rare that I was ever even acknowledged. I didn’t get it.
At Torah study, these members of a relatively small Jewish community would boast about their practice of Judaism’s “welcoming the stranger,” and I would sit there in absolute wonder trying to figure out whom they were welcoming. I spent 10 years in the city at a job in which I had to deal with some very nasty coworkers, and I had hoped the temple would provide me with some much-needed peace and spiritual calm. In all those years there, no one ever invited me to share their Thanksgiving meal with them, nor a Pesach seder. I knew without a doubt after my first year or so in Texas that “Southern hospitality” was an oxymoron.
Walter was the first Jewish person I ever heard pronounce Hebrew words with a Southern accent. He grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas. At that time it was a fair-sized city of roughly 80,000 near the Oklahoma border. Walter said he couldn’t even call the attitudes of his neighbors anti-Semitism — plain ignorance was more like it. Walter’s family was nearly the only Jewish family in his North Texas community, and they were well-known for this reason alone. Walter bore the brunt of Jewish jokes, which, of course, were not jokes at all.
Other members of our synagogue had similar stories, like the Jewish sheriff from a small East Texas community who told me that the sheriff’s department was “okay with the fact I’m Jewish.” He didn’t seem to have a clue that he was apologizing for his identity and asking for their permission to be a Jew.
Having spent my formative years in New York and New Jersey and most of my adulthood living far away from the Northeast, I knew that many in the South and Southwest think that Northeasterners are smug, abrasive, and, if Jewish, very demanding. And yet some of the worst road rage I have ever witnessed firsthand occurred in Austin, Phoenix, and Raleigh, NC.
I’ve recently returned to New Jersey after 22 years, to a new shul in Princeton, only to be greeted and treated by my fellow Jews as I thought I would be in Texas — as if it mattered that I was there. The only theory I’ve come up with is that, generally speaking, Southerners, Jewish or Gentile, do not like Yankees occupying their space. I occasionally heard “the South will rise again” nonsense, and I grew to really dislike the overused “Yankee go home.”
And there’s no accounting for ignorance. I can attest to the fact that many folks growing up in the South and/or Southwest know virtually nothing about Jews. Even in a big, cosmopolitan city in Texas there was a mixture of many people. One attorney I worked with asked me, referring to another colleague prone to saying “oy” and the like, “Is he Yiddish?” I replied that Yiddish is a language — our colleague was Jewish! Oy vey.
The most frequent question I was asked when someone found out I was Jewish was “How long have you been Jewish?” The majority of Texans I met thought that one must choose to be Jewish. When I would reply, “I’ve been Jewish since birth,” I wish I had a video camera to authenticate the surprised, quizzical look on their faces. When I told a social worker I knew that my father and mother were Jewish, she said, “What…how does that work?”
I came across several Texans who had never heard of the Holocaust — or worse, perhaps, in the case of one man I met, who had. He hailed from Vidor in East Texas, still notorious as a “sundown town” where African Americans are purportedly unwelcome after dark. He felt strongly that the Jews were somewhat responsible for their destiny. He told me that the Jews should have grabbed a broom, a chair, anything, to stop the Nazis. Exasperated by his comments, I asked him if he really thought a chair or a broom could stand up to guns and SS storm troopers. No response.
At my Princeton synagogue, meanwhile, a warmth envelopes me as I attend Torah study and other functions. Not only did the rabbi remember my name after our first meeting, but many of the congregants also did as well. At the very first Torah study I attended, the rabbi asked me to stand up and talk about myself for a bit. In Texas I was ignored for a year. In Princeton, I was ignored only for the five minutes it took to get from my car into the shul. This Yankee has come home again.
Janet Hughes is a published playwright and poet and lives in Princeton with her beloved cat, Marilyn from San Antonio. Her current project involves personal travel memoirs from Europe and the Middle East.
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