Home on the Border

“Bueno, ya sabes – esas mezclas...”  Right, those mixtures – those mongrels. My new mother-in-law’s comments, having been asked for her opinion on meeting me. Yeah, that’s me ¡y a mucha honra! Must I, must I, check one of those “race” boxes? Isn’t there a box for “esas mezclas”? For my comfort zone? This color and that color and those colors in between. My religion, your religion, no religion. He/she/they/we.  Good hair, bad hair, no hair, hair.

I drop into a cigar store in Rome, curious – what kinds of Cuban tobacco do they have – “Lei è italiana, vero?” – No, I’m not Italian. But what a joy - I’m passing! We had only been in Rome for a week and somehow I had slipped into a new zone, without going through customs, no passport needed, through an invisible, dissolving membrane, passing from otherness to belonging. A place from which I could get us a table in the crowded Cave Canem in Trastevere or a ticket to a Passover Seder. Welcome to my Homeland, the Diaspora: this year (not next year), now (not someday), in [fill the blank with your ideal homeland]! Not renouncing my culture, not appropriating yours, savoring both.

Back to the times when I was auditing a class in Indian vocal music at Mills College. After a few days, Pandit Pranh Nath spoke directly to me, interpreted by his assistant: “Are you Indian?” I suppose that in that moment, I was as Indian as was necessary in order to intone a Bhairavi raga; after all, I felt as comfortable in that space as with an Andalusian cadence or with the Phrygian mode, the mi mode I taught in my classes of Spanish folk music and later one student reported hearing a bell chiming in a little town in México and calling out to her roommate, “¡Bárbara!  ¡El modo de mi!”

My Jewish mother had told me “the Palestinians are our cousins” and I must have interpreted that phrase to mean “the Palestinians are me,” as today this is the side of occupation in which my activism resides. But wait – I gravitate most easily to Jewish friends and am married to a Jewish man (after the Spanish ex-priest). I admit to feeling sometimes uncomfortable when pressed to “qualify” as Jewish.  Is it because my identity lies in that borderland that I can’t really define, a borderland with no borders, a homeland forged from diaspora, a category I don’t think anyone can define? I must have shared that place with the counterman at Berkeley’s Eat-a-Pita, who always addressed me in Hebrew (most of which I didn’t understand) while I replied to him in Arabic (most of which I cannot speak). Our common ground, mutable and shifting, but steady enough to sustain an agreed communication.

Not all of these border locations work for me. One situation that became so uncomfortable that I ultimately withdrew from it concerned a musical group I belonged to that performed music from Spanish days in gold rush era California. The music was lovely, and I got to sing and play percussion and serve as a sort of linguistic expert for the song lyrics. But our gigs took place at hotspots of colonialism and genocide: the California missions and the adobe rancho homes of the Spanish occupiers. At one event, a member of the audience challenged a claim made by our group leader that the “neophytes” (captured native peoples) had been paid for their labors that allowed the missions to function. Our leader dismissed the challenge, but the interchange nudged my conscience.  And then came May 25, 2020 – the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent politicization and mobilization of what felt like the entire human family. Ashamed by my delay, and by what felt like my betrayal of humanity for having performed the music of colonialism, I resigned from the group. The expression “ars gratia artis” may work for MGM, but producing art at the seething center of a moral border and being pulled in opposing directions was not an acceptable way of life for me.

So many Jews are drawn to Blacks as partners and to Black history’s role-models, but borders are not always clear in this area either. In Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever the main character confides to a friend that his girlfriend is white. “She’s Jewish, right?” asks the friend.  “No, she’s Italian,” is the response - which of course is an illogical conclusion, as these are not mutually exclusive conditions – and not all Jews are white.  

In her column in the San Francisco Chronicle maybe twenty years ago, Annie Nakao spotlighted the homes designed and built by Joe Eichler.  Joe was a Jew from New York (distantly related!) who introduced Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired living to tract-home budgeted families of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950’s. Annie quoted from her interview with the members of a Black family who were thrilled to have been able to purchase a lovely home in the burbs, during the heyday of redlining.  Then she continued: “PLENTY OF OTHER folks of color became Eichler owners -- Jews, Chinese and Japanese…” “Uh-oh,” I declared, aloud, upon reading this line, “she’s going to hear from some readers.”  So I wrote her a letter – I suppose it was an email – gently cautioning her that Jews didn’t necessarily fall into the “folks of color” realm and that she should expect to receive some not-necessarily-friendly feedback. And indeed she did, thrown into the “who is a Jew” controversy, evidently for the first time. That night I brought up the issue with my friend Linda during a rehearsal break of the Oakland Symphony Chorus: “So Linda, do you feel like a person of color?” Her skin tone is about like mine, maybe even more skin-cancer prone. “Well yes, I do, don’t you?” - ”Yes, of course.” Bingo! That’s what I am:  a person of color. But of what color?

 All three of my daughters have had Black boyfriends. I would tell friends, “her boyfriend is Black but she’s converting.” My beloved aunt Marie married an African-American man (long divorced from Hy, the Jewish photographer/filmmaker).  Uncle “Aaron” (she named him) assimilated beautifully, referring to their houseplant as “my wandering Yid” and sighing, “my mother is going through a lot of tsuris right now.” At the same time he was named by McCarthy’s Un-Americans for his subversive connections, having run for office on the Freedom Now Party ticket. Maybe Uncle Aaron lived on the border as well.  We never talked about that.

Academia drew me into its confines early, probably because I was always such an obnoxious know-it-all, though I did take typing, encouraged by my mother (so I would have “something to fall back on”).  Served me nicely for my PhD dissertation. But tenure (“la ternura,” pace my friend la Susi) was never mine. On the fringe, unable (unwilling?) to concentrate or contribute in faculty meetings, I published, lest I perish, interesting but not groundbreaking articles, never the Fundamental Book, more dedicated as I was to family stories and oral histories than to critical studies.  Though even as I write this, I’m tempted to check sources, add footnotes. But those family stories gradually became my story and by conventional retirement age, I was shunning the canons of academia for a brave new genre: fiction.  I probably wouldn’t be able to experience the freedom of fiction without having haunted the halls of universities, but being in this space is a liberation. Free to use metaphor!  Free from the complete sentence! Free to invoke memories shared by few, at times known to me only! Creating and then becoming acquainted with and finally succumbing to the whims, desires, and actions of fictional characters feels like working from home, a home I inhabit while feeling bolstered by all those years in seminars and at conferences, and yes, drawing on specific details of my formal education, while the “footnotes” remain within me, at the ready, in case anyone inquires.

So how old am I?  Definitely old. Senior Discount old.  Card-carrying old, not “elderly” or “aging.”  I have just one friend who is older than I am and I have to help her and her walker into my car from her assisted living residence. Yet another space where I’m an insider-outsider. A new (ten-years-younger) friend with whom I ride to and from chorus rehearsals remarked the other night that our age difference seems unreal; even though our memories bring up events from separate eras, our responses are shared. I am realizing at this moment that I’m not consciously aware of age difference when I embark on a new friendship, but I can’t recall even one friend, aside from S.K., who is older than I. Am I missing something? I communicate with my elders and my ancestors through our family history, along the paper trails and the invented tales. Perhaps my attraction to historical fiction is my way of allowing my age to claim the legacy of those forgotten events that produced the trauma that I now carry, that sometimes governs my thoughts and actions.  The reason why today’s movement in Spain to revive and to nourish the once-forbidden Historical Memory resonates so strongly with me. Why seeing the exhumed bones of Spanish Civil War victims affects me viscerally as much as reading the death certificates from the Theresienstadt Ghetto with their trumped-up causes of death (“Altersschwäche,” “enteritis,” not “starvation,” never “murder”).

One thing that is immutable:  my birthdate, March 31, 1939. The last day of groundbreaking democratic rule in Spain before 36 years of dictatorship, the day the Second Republic dissolved as Franco’s troops poured into the invincible Madrid, the Madrid of “No pasarán,” and the ideals of the pioneering 1931 Spanish Constitution were blown to shreds as thousands were murdered and packed into mass graves, forced into concentration camps, or exiled to nations not bound to some shameful non-intervention act.  

Lest I be tagged as neutral or non-committal as I claim a homeland with no borders, I admit to an allegiance to the memory of Lázaro Cárdenas, whose humanity rose above the corporate zealots around him to invite the refugees from the Spanish Republic to México in the most generous gesture since the declaration of the Roman poet Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me.” So distant, so – yes, alien - from the box-checking commitment to monotony and exclusion that cuts us off from each other, from our memory and from our roots.  The question put forth in the film, The Mexican Suitcase, “¿A qué país pertenece el exiliado?” (”What is the exile’s homeland?”) can suggest an abyss of terror and loss or it can open to a place free of restrictions and persecution.  I wish this place for all fellow-exiles. Welcome to my home. Come and visit me any time.