Meat and Potatoes

It’s the 1990’s and I’ve been asked to be the guest speaker at a dinner for the Multicultural Association of Nova Scotia as the new Director of Cultural Affairs for the Province and to speak on my personal experience with racism. I know the audience will be diverse, including members of the Black, Muslim and Asian communities. The dinner is set up buffet style in a local hotel. After finding my seat and speaking to the Master of Ceremonies, I survey the food. I’m shocked to realize there are no options; the meal is a slice of ham, unappetizing boiled potatoes, boring cooked carrots. I put a potato and some carrots and a dinner roll on my plate and head back to the head table. I see several Muslim men, standing in horror behind their chairs at our table, eyes to the floor, not speaking.

The MC asks me, “Don’t you like the food?” I’m trying not to ruffle feathers, want to make a good impression. I tell him that I don’t eat pork. “Why not?” the 80-something Tartan-wearing gentleman chuckles, eyebrows raised. I smile and say I’m Jewish and does he know there are several Muslim guests who also cannot eat the meal…at the Multicultural Association of Nova Scotia dinner, I think to myself. He laughs, tells me he’s Irish, slaps me on the back and says, “Eat that, girl, it’s good for ya!”

My speech had to do with something from childhood. I had been struggling with it: how do I as a privileged white person talk about my personal experiences with racism? Not that long ago, I had become Jewish, but I didn’t personally experience anti-Semitism, not having grown up Jewish. A long-forgotten memory popped into my head.

Growing up in the wasp-burbs of Dartmouth, just down the road from the historic Black community of Preston, I always thought that racism was out there somewhere, but not in my house. Until many years later, I didn’t realize that my friends’ parents didn’t party hearty every weekend like mine did with folk music and food and their dearest Caribbean and African American friends. We kids nodded off on piles of coats in spare rooms, laughter and the harmonies of Pete Seger, Harry Belafonte and Burl Ives wafting into our dreams along with the delicious aromas of rice and peas, curries and Jerk Chicken.

One summer day I went to the cottage of my neighbours whose kids I babysat as a young teenager. On the drive home the truck bumped to a halt. It was night, it was dark, and somewhere in the vicinity of the Prestons, we had a flat tire. The father of the family, a well-respected local businessman, made me and his two daughters lie down in the back of his truck on the side of the highway, covering us with blankets. “Don’t make a sound and stay here,” he warned, “if those (racial slur) find you, they’ll kill you.” I lay in the back of the truck with the two little girls, by now crying, clinging to me and shaking with fear. My heart pounded; my mind reeled. It couldn’t be true, right? Our family friends would never hurt me or anyone else. Why did he say it? This memory came back to me after many years and I reflected on at the Multicultural dinner, where there was nothing to eat but ham.

I told my daughter a while ago that when I was very small I asked Mum when could I become Black. Such a confused kid. But that’s what I thought: if you grew up white, at some point you got to choose. Where did I get that idea? I laughed with my daughter, but secretly worried: did I always want to become someone else?

I didn’t grow up Jewish either. I was raised in the Anglican church. I went to Sunday school, wore white frilly gloves and socks on Easter with patent leather shoes, had my confirmation ceremony at age thirteen, and sang in the church choir, just like most of friends in the 1960’s and early 70’s. I didn’t know anyone who was Jewish, and aside from having read The Diary of Anne Frank, I could not have told you much about Judaism at all. The only kids different from me were the Catholics.

Fast forward. I fell in love with a Jewish man, had an Orthodox conversion, developed a love/hate relationship with our synagogue, volunteered at Jewish film festivals, marched for Israel, and read names of Holocaust survivors outdoors in the freezing cold. I rode a camel in the West Bank and cried at the Kottel, the holiest place in all of Judaism. I’ve been on a journey with Judaism for 30 years.

But I’m also a 7th generation Nova Scotian with German, Irish, Scottish and English roots. One of my great-grandmothers was a British Home Child, sent as a child labourer from London, England to a farm in rural Nova Scotia. You can live here for more than 40 years, and still be referred only semi-jokingly as a “CFA” – “Come From Away.” Who are your people? What did your father do? Which high school did you go to? These are the things people ask you in Nova Scotia, every day.

Changing the narrative, becoming something that you were not born as is still regarded with curiosity. “Oh you celebrate Hanukkah, right? It’s the Jewish Christmas!” Try explaining to your boss that you won’t be attending the conference because this year, it falls on Yom Kippur – “what’s that again?” Your daughter is only six months old, but already her daycare is asking if it’s OK if she gets a gift from Santa.

Being homebound, while peculiar, has opened doors and windows onto so many worlds (if we have the stamina for yet another hour plopped in our most comfortable Zoom position). Here’s one coming up, that looks fascinating, a window into a beautiful family’s creative life in music, art and food: https://www.facebook.com/events/282748916278284/

Shabbat shalom. Enjoy life beyond the meat and potatoes.