Free Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) by Delia Ephron Page B

that time, the last few pages of the Arts and Leisure section, which my family called the theater section, were devoted toflowers, bulbs, and soil. Calling the theater section the gardening section? I knew from that alone I was in the wrong family.
    At the JBC tryouts, there were no authors pitching books about intermarriage, but there were several about leaving orthodoxy. The woman who left, the gay who left, the transsexual who left.
    And I must say, while sitting there in the auditorium alphabetized between, I believe, Eisenberg and Feldman, I felt the oppression of religion. Of any organization that gathers us together because we’re one religion and not another. Because what I really think is that there is too much religion these days. Too much “I’m this and you’re that.” Fanatics are everywhere. I read a
New York Times
opinion piece by Frank Bruni about a cadet who left West Point in protest because he was pressured to participate in born-again religious services. Boy, that’s who I want defending my free country, religious zealots. At orthodox Jewish temples, women must sit separately from men, upstairs or on the other side of the room, separated by a partition. That offends me.
    While it is great to be part of a Jewish culture that reveres books enough to hold festivals, religion has nothing to do with why or how I choose friends, selectbooks to read, or decide where to live or whom to vote for or love.
    My mother, however, has everything to do with it.
    •  •  •  •
    My grandmother, a Russian immigrant, was a dumpling of a woman with a doleful face and long gray hair that she twisted into a bun. She always entered our house by the back door. Perhaps she was intimidated by her assimilated daughter’s glamorous Beverly Hills life. She didn’t hear very well, which must have increased her isolation. I remember saying, “Hi, Grandma, how are you?” and her replying, “Bacon and eggs, as usual.” She spent most of her time in the kitchen making chopped liver and the most delicious cinnamon cookies, although one of her best concoctions had a distinctly Gentile ring to it: spaghetti with a sauce of Campbell’s tomato soup (made with milk, not water). I’ve always suspected that, for immigrant Jews, Campbell’s symbolized America. More than religious freedom. More than Chinese food. Waiting to greet them after months of seasickness, tuberculosis, death in steerage, were the original five: the tomato, the vegetable, the chicken, the consommé, and the oxtail(although I can’t believe my grandma was interested in the consommé or the oxtail). Lady Liberty, her arm raised, could have been carrying not a torch but a can of Campbell’s.
    In any event, I digress, because the memory I was summoning is this: When I was about twelve, my parents bought a painting, and when my grandmother and I were checking it out, newly hung in the den, she asked me if the painter was Jewish. I thought that was so funny. It was such an irrelevant question.
    The oppression of organized religion is a theme in the novel I have written, the novel that I am at the JBC tryouts to talk about, although I leave that out of the two-minute pitch. For one thing, one of my heroines is a Southern Baptist who leaves her preacher husband. So not Jewish. Not-Jewish does not seem the way to go here.
    In fact, after the pitch session, when we were all mingling, a representative from one of the Jewish book festivals asked if I had any Jewish characters in my novel, and I was forced to confess, no.
    Forced to confess, I say, because what trumps everything for an author is wanting to sell books. I knew I had just sold one less.
    A month or so after the group pitch, I was notified that I had received several invitations and I began thatfall to travel to Jewish book festivals. As a result, I found myself not exactly deep in questions of Jewish identity, but peripherally circling them, sort of on the level of Woody Allen’s character in the