My Linguistic Artifact By Harriett Meyer
Mensch (Yiddish): a person who does the right thing, even when it is hard.
I hear this word in my father’s voice. I see it in the deep lines of his face, the question mark of his nose, the spark and flash of his eyes. To be a mensch is to be a good citizen, self-sacrificing. To me, it speaks a code of ethics that I received in place of religion—to me, being Jewish is less about a vengeful god (“why,” I ask my short-haired aunt, “why no shellfish?” “A vengeful god!” she answers, halfway through a spluttering laugh, her small, ringed hands dancing upward in a shrug between bites of crab) and more about the certainty that this world is all there is, and that how you live in it matters. It is about a diasporic history, Said’s expatriate, strangers in a strange land. To be Jewish for me means never being sure that your currency in the dominant culture isn’t counterfeit. It means: that you can see the edge. I grew up in a small town in Western New York state, where everyone I knew was Catholic. I was doubly odd for my Jewish heritage and for my family’s lack of religious sentiment—it was hard for my peers to wrap their heads around the fact that no, I didn’t go to a church, and no, I didn’t go to a synagogue either. Having inherited white-blonde hair from my dad’s eastern European ancestors and blue eyes from the pilgrims who became my mother’s great-greats, I passed. I still do. My dad grew up in Miami, where his family was white enough that he went to a segregated white high school, but not white enough to belong to the country club (they did not allow Jews until, as my dad loves to tell it, a group of Jewish businessmen bought the country club, a capitalist middle finger to the old order of capitalism). He was active in anti-war protests through college, and, when he became a professor himself, he was vocal on campus, advocating for people who were more vulnerable than him. Every night of my childhood, he sat in a pool of light at his desk, grading his students’ work with care. This is the lesson that I learned from him: that life should be lived for others. This is what it meant to be a mensch . I think of Toni Morrison’s commandment, “if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you
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