Free Back Then by Anne Bernays

parched chicken salad made from Friday night’s soup fowl. Meanwhile I went to my room, closed the door, and in secret conducted a black service of my own devising: switched the lights on and off, handled money (my coin collection), lighted matches, scribbled in my school notebook, drew pictures, laid out cards for solitaire, and tried to think up other ways to violate and desecrate the Orthodox Sabbath. I went away to college in an unforgiving mood—the next time I entered a synagogue after my father’s funeral was to attend the funeral of an uncle, and even then I couldn’t help giggling.
    I was not altogether irreligious, and despite my attempts at desecration, I didn’t abhor the Sabbath. In its softer, observances—the lighting of candles at sundown on Friday, the blessings over bread and wine—the Sabbath had a sacramental sweetness and purity. But it was hard to ignore the angry old men at Ohab Zedek shushing and glaring at the young. “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat” (I had been reading the New Testament on the sly) and defiled a religion that despite my intolerance I revered—at least for its fervor and the literary splendors of its Bible. But for me Orthodox Judaism seemed to have no place for joy, spontaneity, celebration, youth; its windows were nailed shut.
    As for the women: they were segregated both in daily life and on the synagogue balcony, hidden behind a Jewish purdah (I imagined their white thighs). By tradition and inclination they were ignorant of Torah and content to serve as acolytes and handmaidens. Both my mother and her sister knew Latin and Greek. Educated in Massachusetts schools at a time when women were fighting for the vote, they were suffragists with a touch of socialist radicalism and outraged memories of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. But they never questioned what the rabbis told them was their organic inferiority and an uncleanness that had to be washed away once a month in ritual baths. My mother went to the opera, loved Puccini, Caruso, and lilacs, and introduced me to Gulliver’s Travels . But she had an intransigent mind-set. Nothing in her religion mattered so much as the strictest letter of the domestic observances she learned from her mother: the relentless koshering of chickens and the voodoo purging, with boiling water and red hot stones, of tableware contaminated by accidental contact with food products of an opposite dietary gender.
    I lusted after forbidden foods: ball-park hot dogs, supposedly composed of ground-up rodents and slaughterhouse sweepings; glorious, super-American Jell-O, taboo because its gelatin came from the hooves and bones of unkosher animals; pork sausages and bacon. (Despite a few unattractive qualities, including an appetitefor garbage and occasional carnivore ferocity, pigs are delectable creatures, as I recall reading somewhere, “walking butcher shops of hams, chops, roasts, and ribs, with twice as many drumsticks as turkeys.”) I lusted after these forbidden delights, partly because I believed millions of Americans couldn’t be altogether wrong about such simple (and apparently delicious) sources of gratification, but mainly because they were forbidden. I had my first bacon at a summer camp breakfast cookout at Fort Ticonderoga, New York, a month before I went off to college. I had my first lobster and steamers at the Union Oyster House, Boston, on D day, June 6, 1944. Later that evening, with too much whiskey in me, I broke my wrist and passed out on the sidewalk after a failed attempt to scale the fence of the Harvard Botanical Gardens.

    J.K. with father, Tobias Kaplan, summer 1938.
    My parents never acknowledged the historical existence of Jesus or the New Testament (the term “New” being in itself an affront to Mosaic law). They dated their letters and checks by the Gregorian calendar, but insisted on B.C.E. and C.E. instead of B.C. and A.D. when it came to