The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page B

suppose that was true. I thought about my invitation to Lauren’s party. I thought about walking behind my grandmother just so I could pretend to be older. What if I had never talked about either of those things, to anyone?
    â€œCome, let’s sit down for a minute,” Aunt Gert said. She gesturedtoward a sitting room off the living room. A room that actually looked like someone had used it. There were books and newspapers, a coffee table with a pair of glasses on top. Comfortable-looking, sat-in-looking upholstered chairs in which I sat, and as soon as I did, my back ached and I needed to lean back. My head plopped back on the cushions without asking my permission.
    â€œYou’re tired,” Aunt Gert said. “Would you like to see where you are going to sleep? There is a bathroom in there as well. I laid out towels and an extra brand-new toothbrush.”
    â€œNo, I’m fine,” I said. I wanted to know what she knew. I put the photo down on the coffee table and my aunt Gert picked it up.
    â€œOur father was a very severe man, Caroline.” She ran her fingers across the glass in the frame. “He had worked hard his whole life. He was especially hard on his son, your grandfather. He was not a very loving father. He demanded respect.”
    I thought about my mother. She was hard on me, all the time. But I knew she loved me. I never doubted that.
    â€œI should have been married by then, I was older, but, well…I was not particularly pretty. It’s hard to explain. My father let me know this almost daily. Men made money and women were pretty. I was never going to get married, so he put all his efforts into his seventeen-year-old son, your grandfather. He wanted his son to marry this young woman, Rita Gordon, I remember, the daughter of one of his business associates.”
    As I watched my aunt Gert talking I could see something in her face, almost a version of her younger self. Not beautiful, but strong. What she must have looked like without the wrinkles and the spots. Handsome, the kind of woman they call handsome. Which, I hope, is never me.
    She went on. “But my brother was in love. He wasn’t going to marry so young, but, well, his father forced his hand. When your grandparents ran off and got married at town hall in Brooklyn, my father was furious. He cut off your grandfather in every way. He threatened to make my mother sit shivah. I had never seen a woman cry so much.”
    â€œShivah? Isn’t that when someone dies?”
    â€œYes, the mourning period,” Aunt Gert told me. “Mourners sit on boxes so they can’t be too comfortable. They cover their mirrors so they won’t be vain.”
    I remembered the mirrors at my grandparent’s apartment draped in sheets. I couldn’t imagine doing that just because your son didn’t do what you wanted him to do.
    â€œBut I thought your family wasn’t religious. I thought they hated my grandmother because she was too Jewish?”
    Aunt Gert took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That was partly it. Not the religion but the class, maybe. Your grandmother—Nana, right? You called her Nana?”
    I nodded.
    â€œYour nana was an eastern European Jew, from Russia. Her mother was born there, in Lbov, I believe. My family had been in the country for three generations already, from Germany. My family didn’t speak with an accent. We never spoke Yiddish. We even had a Christmas tree. We had done pretty much everything we could not to look Jewish.”
    Looking Jewish? Like the little boy I saw at the Bronx Zoo with the black hat and the curls of hair? Like getting to mail out bat mitzvah invitations? Like me wearing my Star of David necklace? Being Jewish but not sure I wanted anyone to know?
    â€œIt was hard,” Aunt Gert went on. “I don’t blame them really. A Jew couldn’t make it in the business world. Door were shut to us. Clubs, organizations.