My mom would always say, ‘Oh, I don’t speak any Yiddish.’ But if you asked her what something means, she knows.’
RR: Not a ton. I do have a friend who actual- ly speaks Yiddish quite well, so I can talk to her. But I’m often too embarrassed. PMB: You also write about antisemitism. There’s a patio encounter with Doug Ford staffers, who call someone they’re talking about “so Jewish-looking,” and it doesn’t sound like it’s to praise their ability to wear a mask correctly. Then you discuss seeing images of swastikas at the convoy rallies in Ottawa, and the way people told you not to care about this. Do you see antisemitism as a growing concern in Canada, or is it something you’ve come across your whole life? RR: That last thing really startled me. The Ford staffer thing, you kind of expect that. But the people saying, Don’t worry about those swastikas, they don’t matter, you have to read them in context.
we’d get the menorah and celebrate. There was not a religious aspect to it. It was a very secular upbringing. There were two other Jewish families in our town, and I didn’t know them very well. We were very free to do whatever. There was nothing else to judge by. Every now and then, another kid would want to come for Hanuk- kah or something. My dad would always say, You can’t go by this. As in, If you ever meet other Jews, you can’t assume that they’re going to do this, because this is just what we do. PMB: Do you think it was strange for them to be somewhere without a lot of Jews around if they were both from New York? I ask as a New York Jew myself. RR: I don’t think they knew how strange it was, because they had such a strong Jewish culture—and secular Jewish culture —where they were from. They were very confident in that. Then they would send me to school and I would talk to other kids who would ask Where’s your church? I would say, I don’t go to church. I’m Jewish and they’re like, What’s Jewish?
PMB: Who were these people? Friends?
RR: People you wouldn’t expect it from. People who care about me. If I’m saying to you, I am upset, this scares me about where our society is headed, and you’re saying, Oh, these are benign… I felt not just that they had hurt me, but that something is different in our culture than I imagined it to be. That people feel more OK about certain Nazi sym- bols, that they can be used for other things now, that this is just a clumsy way of saying something else. PMB: Were the people who defended use of Nazi symbols supporters of the convoy protests, or were they more say- ing that you were being oversensitive to mind them? RR: It was a few different people. Some thought the convoys had a good point and were being melodramatic, but others thought that I was being too sensitive. Either way, I’m just like, no swastikas . They meant one thing, and that was genocide, and no thank you. PMB: That’s what I really liked about the Yiddish part of your book, because sometimes, Jewish identity can become too much about anti-antisemitism, rather than the more positive things, like Yid- dish-learning and babka-shopping.
PMB: How would you answer that?
RR: A few times I would go home and ask, and then I would try to go back to school and say We, you know how Jesus is your savior, whereas we’re still waiting for our guy. That did not go over well in Grade 2.
PMB: Were the questions hostile or just sort of ignorant?
RR: I had always wanted to learn. My father, who’s dead, spoke it, so it wasn’t actually great timing. But I always wanted to learn and I had time and Duolingo made it avail- able to me. It turned out that Duolingo is like a great video game, but actually, you need to talk to other human beings. So I took the class at the JCC, which was much better. Then I got a little bit less locked down and didn’t pursue it as ardently. In my family, Yiddish was the lingua franca. My grandfather was Polish, my grandmother spoke Russian. But everybody spoke Yid- dish. Nobody spoke Hebrew. So that’s what I was able to connect with. I mean, every- body’s dead. But even my mom, she would always say, Oh, I don’t speak any Yiddish. But if you asked her what something means, she knows.
RR: Almost never hostile. Every once in a while, there would be a problem. But by and large kids just didn’t know. Sometimes the parents didn’t know. But they were pretty nice about it. They just had questions that I was not equipped to answer.
PMB: What role does Jewishness play in your life now?
RR: I joined a congregation, Shir Libeynu, for the first time, during the pandemic. That’s been pretty interesting. But I’m still trying that out. PMB: Many people spent the pandemic baking sourdough or regrowing scallions from the root. You chose to learn Yiddish on Duolingo then and on Zoom. Why Yiddish?
PMB: Have you gotten opportunities to use it in real life?
RR: I mean that’s most of my Jewish experi- ence. It’s very food oriented. n
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