On a drive away from Miami—the city my mom and her family
moved to in the 40s—I spot a cumulus tableau, a long thin
cloud that looks exactly like Santa Claus on a sled—
even his reindeer are in cloud-form mushing ahead—
and so from the rental car window I snap a cell picture of it
and at that moment I can hear my now-dead
mom cackling at my excitement. Not very Jewish, she laughs
at me. Not very Jewish. I keep hearing.
Mom never liked going to synagogue or studying Torah
or Talmud, but she enjoyed laughing when she heard
of other Jewish families who had Christmas trees and whose kids
believed in Santa. Like she’d joke about Jews with tattoos
even though she loved eating buttered lobster.
Our people, she’d say. We don’t do that, our people.
My father was the one who would try to find our family
a synagogue somewhere that would be comfortable
for us non-Hebrew speaking quasi-atheist Jews. He was the one
who dragged us to the Zen Buddhist house for Rosh Hashanah
or the havurah in Albuquerque where a white-robed rabbi chanted
in Aramaic with a Navaho drum. Still, my father would have
loved for us to have a Christmas tree, like he had in his own
childhood home, like all the other Jewish families he grew up
with had, in what was then called Midwood, but now has other
fancier names like Kensington or Fiske Terrace.
Secretly, I think Mom might have loved Santa too. What’s not to love
about round bellies, long, white beards and endless plates
of homemade cookies? Who doesn’t love the laughter that follows
one’s own dumb jokes? That laughter itself is very Jewish, isn’t it?
If Santa had visited us, I bet Mom would have given him pieces
of her famous overstuffed raison-walnut apricot jam rugelach
(called “mock strudel” in the early 60s cookbook), and I am certain
that she would have been awake when Santa arrived —
because 3 A.M.—that was her favorite time to be alive—
her time away from me and Dad and everyone who wanted her
to listen to them or have her do stuff. When she was alone at 3 A.M.,
in the amber-stained reading-glass-lit half dark,
in her wood-paneled den, in our Bronx split-level, would Mom
have poured Santa a glass of Dr. Brown’s diet cherry soda?
Together, would they have relished the snap of a thick sour dill?
