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When Jewish and Asian Meet
My father, a German Jewish boy, spent World War II in a British boarding school, where I expect that he was tormented for both parts of his heritage. His arrival in America in 1948 gave him a chance at a clean slate. I’m sorry that in most ways, he wiped away as much as he could of his double heritage from the slate; he married a Mayflower descendant (a farmer’s daughter), served the PTA and school board, and delighted in teasing the people in his adopted country using wry and often off-color British humor.
I did not find my own Jewish self until, at age fifty, I met and married my b’shert (“meant to be”), David Kanell, who’d grown up with Hebrew school, was an ardent leader of the Jewish community in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and spoke out for Jewish life in every way. It became a merry adventure for me to keep a Jewish home and cook the best Jewish food. When Dave died two years ago, I joined an online Torah study group and walked with my beloved in a new way.
My older son K., a gifted linguist, spent his junior year of college studying at Keio University in Japan. There he met a Korean woman doing the same, and they returned to America. They chose to marry in Korea, with her politically strong parents at her side; I flew in for three days of wedding festivities, and with anti-Semitism in mind, my son and I worried about how the bride’s father would react to me…
