Life Among the Jews

As promised, I present my paper on the Jewish people I have met in my life. I was asked to read it at a meeting associated with one of the Jewish holidays at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center. I worked there when I wrote this piece, circa 1990s.

Life Among the Jews

(A stranger in a strange land)

By Sandra Sylvester

You shall treat the stranger as one born among you.

You shall love the stranger as yourself,

For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

(adapted from the Ten Commandments—Deuteronomy 5:14)

(This story is a Christian answer to the anti-Semitics of the world. I wish they could have walked in my shoes.)

My mother wrote me a letter and asked, “How’s your new life among your Jewish friends?” I wrote back and used words like stimulating, educational, and hectic. As a non-Jew suddenly thrust into a working world of all Jewish people, these words summed up my first impression of a totally Jewish environment (at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center, where I worked in the Publications Dept.)

The people I met were always striving to improve that environment, setting higher and higher goals for themselves. I found high levels of dedication, education, and stimulation among my fellow workers. The hectic atmosphere I soon found out was the result of a constant flow of new ideas and the almost frenetic desire to carry them out as soon as possible. I myself was soon caught up in their world, making their goals my goals, their dedication mine.

As I look back in reflection, I can see the above qualities in all the Jewish people I have met in my life.

In my small New England town there were many active Jewish people. They owned many businesses along Main Street: the Segals, the Savitts, the Goldsteins, the Smalls, the Gordons, the Dondis’, the Marcuses, the Rubensteins. Nate Berliawsky owned a hotel on Main Street (the brother of the famous sculptor, Louise Nevelson). The Jewish people in town were involved in countless community causes and sat on many charitable boards and committees. They were active in politics and in the school system.

My first involvement with Jewish people was with the Segal family. They owned the State News Company, a small news, magazine, paperback book and stationery store. The store also served as the Greyhound bus station. I took that bus to Boston and points beyond many times. My sister-in-law, Nat, worked for Mr. Segal, or Sid as we called him, for many years. Sid always had a smile for visitors to his store. He’d always ask me how the folks were (in a small town everyone knows everyone else) and how I was doing in school.

Later on, I babysat for his two girls. I also remember when he moved his store across the street. I worked part-time for the local newspaper, The Courier Gazette, which was nearby; and we used some space in his old store to collate books, etc. He had left behind some shelves full of old paperback books with the covers torn off. He let us take what we wanted and to me, a bookworm, those old shelves were like walking through a special kind of heaven. I’m afraid I sometimes spent more time picking out books than I did collating.

The Jewish people in my hometown were in a minority, which isn’t unusual; but it was different in the respect that the majority of the population was Christian and Protestant, some with family histories going back to the beginning of Colonial history, including mine. Traditions ran deep and were many times unbending.

Few non-Jews in town understood what being a Jew really was; what they stood for; what their traditions were; what or who they worshipped; what holidays they celebrated and why. Through my school years, the Lord’s Prayer was said every morning and only Christian holidays were celebrated within the school system. Those of the Jewish faith didn’t even have a synagogue, temple or shul to call their own, but rather rented a Protestant church for their services.

I grew up as ignorant as the rest of the majority of that small town. When I first entered the Segal home to babysit, I thought the Mezuzzah on the door was to keep away evil spirits. When I saw their dishes separated, some wrapped in plastic, I thought Mrs. Segal was just an eccentric housewife who was afraid of germs. It was all the more difficult for me to understand such cleanliness as I had a mother who was herself known as an immaculate housekeeper. As I think back, I realize that Mrs. Segal’s dishes probably became tref (non-Kosher) through my misuse of them.

True, there were the Christian Sunday School stories of the persecutions of the Jews, the stories of Rachael and Ruth, of Moses, of David, and of Abraham and Isaac. But they were only stories to me then. Their persecution was my own, as a Christian, as we see Jesus as a Jew and a Christian alike.

It was only later when I got out into the larger world and met more Jewish people; asked questions; and read and studied of their more recent history; that I began to understand what a Jewish person really is.

As a young person in Connecticut, I rented a house with some other friends from a woman who was a survivor of the Holocaust. She left some books in the house describing that horrible era in detail, with equally horrifying pictures to illustrate it. Never had I seen such books. As I read them I began to understand the reason for the Jewish zest for life—why they really believe in L’Chaim (to life). Those books left an impression on me that influenced all my future relationships with Jewish people.

I met a Jewish teacher at that time who was a World War II widow. Mrs. Sadie Sachs never had children and dedicated her life to teaching other people’s children. She loved those children as her own and always referred to them as “my kids.” She treated us like her children also, always ready to listen to our troubles as young teachers and as young people just starting out in the world. Many times we met at her house to talk; to have ice cream and cookies; to laugh. It was from her I finally learned what the words kosher and Mezzuzah mean.

(As I reread this story, I realized that I also knew a Sadie Sachs at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center. She was the one who brought me a poinsettia one Christmas. I mentioned her in my December blog, “Christmas among the Jews.)

There was also a time in my life in Connecticut when I felt a need to meet new people in a stimulating atmosphere. I found such a group in an amateur theatre group. The Mark Twain Masquers was located in a mostly Jewish community near where I lived. I didn’t know that the group was made up mostly of Jewish people until I joined them; but it made no difference. I was treated as one of their own from the very beginning. That group was my first exposure to a dedicated, stimulating Jewish environment, similar to the one I am now a part of.

The president of the group at that time was Mrs. Eleanor Feinstein, a beautiful, lithe, dynamic woman. She had acted professionally and belonged to a family of artists. Our monthly meetings were like none I ever attended before or since. Everyone looked forward to them. She would set the scene as if the meeting were a play itself. It was her sense of humor that struck me most, another attribute I have often found in Jewish people. Her camaraderie with us was even reflected in the secretary’s report, which was always a well-scripted bit of humor in itself. When it came time to form committees for the newest production, the atmosphere Eleanor had set resulted in hands eagerly raised to volunteer.

The Jewish people I met in the Mark Twain Masquers were my friends as well (including Eleanor, who knew everybody she ever met by name). They inspired me; stimulated me; were concerned about my private struggles. They boosted my sense of self-confidence and helped me develop my own personal goals. They entrusted me, at one point, with a demanding role as head of set dressing for an involved musical production of “A Most Happy Fellow”. Up until that point, I didn’t even know what a set dresser was. The successful accomplishment of that task led to a new motivation to pursue my own creative endeavors as a writer.

Jews and non-Jews alike have been inspired to follow up on their own private goals and dreams as a result of membership in the Mark Twain Masquers. One member made local T.V. commercials. Another member, Dayson DeCourcey, has been the M.C. for an annual festival in my hometown for years. Peter Falk came out of that group. I came away with a very positive image of myself and of Jewish people.

As to my writing endeavors, another Jewish friend must be mentioned, Mrs. Ruby Zagoren Silverstein. A children’s author and a writer of Jewish histories, I belonged to her creative writing group. Again I found in her, a Jew, a person who cares about other people. She inspired all those around her, including her own son, a professional artist and poet, whose art work adorned the walls of her home. Ruby not only loved people, she was a bird watcher and lover of nature. I not only learned how to write professionally from her; I also learned to love birds and to take notice of the environmental factors that were destroying the life around us. To her L’Chaim meant all the creatures of this earth.

Her home in the country was a natural preserve. Wild ducks strode across her lawn to the stream behind the house. Every window in her house was made to push out so she could fill the bird feeders attached to the house outside. As a guest in her home, she would identify the birds that came to feed and would talk enthusiastically about the bird-watching expedition she had just returned from.

Ruby taught me most of all to reach beyond myself. Because of her, I eventually went back to school and received an advanced degree.

Obviously, those people who were the greatest inspiration in my life were many times Jewish people. There’s not a doubt in my mind that there will be many more inspirational, motivational, stimulating Jewish people in my life. I have already met at least a dozen in my new life “among the Jews” at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

It saddened me deeply when I learned of the deaths of Ruby Zagoren, Eleanor Feinstein, and Mrs. Sachs of Connecticut. I received another letter from my mother recently in which she told me that the Segals had been killed in an airplane crash in Dallas, Texas. They had retired to Florida years ago; but they had been well known in my hometown. Everyone was shocked to hear of the tragedy. I dedicate these words to them, especially, and also to Mrs. Sachs, Eleanor Feinstein, and to dear Ruby. L’Chaim