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Your Culture, My Culture, and All the Foods of Both
When I was about 12 years old, my grandfather Ernest came from England to visit the five of us American grandchildren. Naturally tall and accustomed to stooping to meet the gaze of others, he’d include me in conversations, blinking under his bushy eyebrows, his full lower lip drooping where his cigar usually rested on it, with a powdering of cigar ash down his tie. I had little idea what he did, who he was, besides my PopPop, although I knew that in London, he worked for a bank. And I knew he appreciated and understood fine art, even had friends who were composers and artists — although it would be many years before I understood that some of those friends were in the books I studied in school.
But I was an unusual child who’d already “skipped a grade” and who devoured books and knowledge. I didn’t realize he’d been observing me in a critical sense, until the last day of his visit, when he cleared his throat and, in German-inflected formal English, told me I had turned out quite well “for the child of a mixed marriage.”
Chalk up one more thing I didn’t understand at the time, although it was odd enough that I remembered his exact words.
When I met Dave and found my heart’s home, my grandfather’s words took on more meaning. Dave’s background and heritage were so thoroughly Jewish, from a childhood attending…
