A mixture of Jewish worlds

CASSANDRA FREEMAN

Jungly wallah means savage in Hindi. This was the language my mother had to contend with, as my grandmother, Kamal, got to know her future son-in-law, my future father.

To understand the reverse discrimination, you have to know, literally, where my grandmother was coming from. An Iraqi Jew, who had raised 11 children in India, with the help of her husband and many servants, she was a religious woman who was used to getting her way. And now, my mother had brought home a man who knew very little about Judaism, and certainly didn't understand that Sephardi women are always right. The fact that he was Ashkenazi, or Ashkan, as my mother still affectionately calls him, likely didn't help. Under these conditions, I feel lucky to have been born at all 46 years ago.

In the end, my father's love for my mother won out. It was blatant and to this day overwhelming. They were married, by my grandfather, in my grandmother's house.

When I came along, I quickly decided that I was Spanish. My father had begun to take Spanish lessons and would bring home children's books for his five-year-old daughter.

I still remember Pablo y su Burro (Pablo and his Donkey) and how I made my poor father read it to me every single night, until he had to throw it out in frustration.

Only later did I learn that my father's grandmother had told him that her family was Sephardi. We have one picture of her. She does look Spanish and it just so happens that I look a lot like her.

As I grew up, there were dinners at my grandmother's house, where Arabic, Hindi and English were spoken. The evenings were lively and colorful, with at least 20 people, and dishes like hashwah (rice sewed into chicken and cooked) that I loved.

This was lucky because, at Kamal's house, if you didn't finish everything on your plate, she would hover above you and exclaim in Arabic and English, "Whee, machlel, it's a sin!"

Even though my grandmother passed away six years ago, I still feel guilty when I throw away food.

Back in our house, my mother cooked a kind of international cuisine, which occasionally included gefilte fish, pickled herring and chopped liver – especially when my father's side of the family came over. I wouldn't go near it. As far as I was concerned, this food was for the Jewish white people. The people who didn't even know there was a small but lively Sephardi community in Vancouver, Canada.

We were invisible. We never appeared in the Jewish newspaper and, to add insult to injury, when we went to an Ashkenazi shul or event, the rabbi would often talk on and on about Yiddishkeit. Now, I recognize the term as being important to Jews who speak Yiddish. Back then, I wanted to inform them that Moses wasn't born in Poland.

I tanned quite dark in the summers and had long braids down to my waist, so when I think back to the largely Protestant school I was attending, it was obvious that I looked different. I searched for a role model and found one – Cher.

At the time, she was fully clothed on her show and, most importantly, she was half and half, too. She even sang songs about the half of her that came from the Cherokee nation.

I figured she was a better role model than the Barbie I had in my dollhouse. I was definitely never going to look like that. I had olive skin. I had olive skin because, like the rest of my mother's family, if we ever wore the color beige, we looked like we had just passed away.

The first time I ate gefilte fish, I was 21 – a guest eating lunch in a very religious home in Jerusalem, where I pretty much had to eat it or risk insulting the family in the way I would have insulted my grandmother.

I was studying at Yeshivah Machon Pardes at the time. Besides Rashi, we heard about what the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria) and Maimonides had to say about things. I felt empowered studying in a yeshivah of mostly Ashkenazi Jews who emphasized these Sephardi scholars' fundamental contributions to Judaism.

I remember hearing a story about the Ari, which I didn't doubt for a moment, since, among many other things, he was the leading spokesperson on Jewish mysticism at the time. The story was, that the Ari moved to Safed because it was an intensely spiritual place. But after a while he had to leave, because the angels were singing too loudly and he could not fall asleep at night.

But the best part of yeshivah was translating Genesis from the original biblical Hebrew. The first paragraph still sends shivers down my spine. The writer in me saw it as an incredible feat to write about the creation of the earth in so few, but powerful, words. In fact, it seemed to me that a writer like that might just reside in the heavens. Both the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi side of me agreed that Genesis united the Jewish people and suggested that perhaps I should embrace both sides as being very special.

On the way back from Israel, I dropped into the south of Spain for a few days. People approached me time and time again, expecting me to respond in fluent Spanish. I took a look around and realized that this was because I looked like the people there, whose heritage was partly Arab, Jewish and Roma (Gypsy). My speaking in broken Spanish caused a great deal of curiosity.

Some time after I got home, my father's family made a family tree, which traced their roots back to Spain. In fact, they felt that they had traced their roots right backs to the famous scholar Maimonides, as have many other Jews. My father's grandmother had been right, her family was most certainly Sephardi.

I felt triumphant. There were concrete reasons why I looked Spanish and loved almost every aspect of Spanish and Sephardi culture.

When my grandmother died, I felt the Iraqi part of me slipping away, but I still have memories of my grandmother and me, sitting in her living room, watching Arabic videos and playing taped prayers in the Arabic dialect of Hebrew. Also, I have finally convinced my husband that Sephardi women are always right – most of the time!

Cassandra Freeman is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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