So this morning I’m reading my book on the train because I’m a New Yorker and that’s what we do. I am reading Black and White and Jewish by Rebecca Walker (who is Alice Walker’s daughter).

And there are two things in there that just about kill me. For the first one, I want to bring the book to therapy and just say “LOOK. HERE. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN.”

She’s talking about wanting to be in a play but there are bully girls who are controlling the whole scene and she says:

"I don’t understand that to be in this play I have to make myself smaller, tiny even, so that I won’t threaten anyone else, so that I won’t make the one in charge feel pain that she will turn into anger."

"There is a pain in my chest as I watch the girls. I think, there must be something wrong with me, I am too clunky, too big, not graceful. Not black enough. When I think these thoughts I think them quickly, so fast I do not even know they are there, so fast that they do not register in my mind but take hold somewhere in my body, somewhere in my soul. Instead of saying, I hate those girls and I want to kill them, I say, I am not good at acting."

And I burst into tears on the train. That is it. She got it. She captured, in those two paragraphs, how it is that I lost myself. How it is that I started constantly feeling bad, wrong, ugly, lazy, fat. How I got so small that I don’t feel okay about wanting to be big. About not only wanting to dance and laugh and be big, but to enjoy myself while I do it, regardless of how people may see me.

Because I always filter myself through other eyes. And I always think things would be better for me if I could only get that voice to stop. If I could only become okay. Instead of blaming and hating a world that teaches the regular kids to be small, I blame myself for not being strong enough to be big on my own.

I didn’t have the specific problem she had of not fitting into two distinct cultures. I had the problem of NEVER feeling like I fit into ANY culture. Not the ones I sort of belonged to, not the ones I wanted to belong to, not the ones that would have me. I always felt not Jewish enough for the Jewish kids, not Irish enough to be a Boston Irish kid, not nerdy enough to be a geek, not pretty enough to be popular, not naturally athletic enough to be an athlete. Nothing. I, essentially, felt I was nothing because I didn’t fit into some pre-fabricated package deal.

And reading this book. She knows. I want to fly to California and throw myself on her doorstep and cry. I want to tell her I know too. I know and I don’t have a visible mix. I know.

The second thing is so interesting to me. She says how she read The Diary of Anne Frank. She doesn’t say how old she was but she says she felt like Anne and she connected to her. Trying to be smaller and quieter. And how, in the end, when she found out that the Gestapo came and took Anne away, and that she died in Auschwitz, that she was terrified that the Gestapo would come for her and her father. And she would have nightmares. She would dream every night about the Gestapo coming for her.

And I realized. That was the very first time I remember feeling Jewish. When I realized that the Gestapo would come for me. And I would sleep under my bed, hiding from the Nazis. I didn’t tell my mother about it for a long time because I was scared. I was scared that the Nazis would come back and my mother and I would get sent to Europe where we would be offered showers and I would die along with the other Jews. And I knew that it was true. I would have. I was Jewish. And no one cared that I never went to synagogue. Or that my mother hadn’t been since she was 8. Just that for Hitler, it would have been enough. And I would have been dead.

When I finally told my mother, she cried. Because she had the same experience when she was 8. She hugged me to her chest and told me it was all over and everything would be okay. That it would never happen again because no one would ever forget. Later she told me that she hid under the stairs, that she kept clothing and food there for when the Nazis came back. For when she would have to provide food for herself while the Nazis killed her parents.

Rebecca Walker said "I don’t believe him when he says that they can’t get us, that the war is over, that we are safe. I don’t believe my father when he tells me that he will protect me. I know that the bad people are stronger than him just like they were stronger than Anne’s father and that, just like her father couldn’t save her, my father wouldn’t be able to save me."

And that, my friends, is how I understood the Holocaust. At age 5. I knew that Adir was tattooed because he was Jewish and he was a big strong man and no one would save me. No one could.

I often wonder how non-Jewish kids feel when they read about the Holocaust. Do they think they could be dead? Do they think how horrible that it happened to other people? Do they make plans for when the Nazis come? Somehow I think it is like when I learned about slavery when I was 8 and I watched Roots. I understood that it would never have been me. That it happened to other people. And that no one would ever come and sell me. They might gas me to death, but they would never enslave me.

Oy. Too much for such a day. I need to stop.

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