Oy! What fun! What joy! Yes, I am the chosen one that gets to celebrate yet another festive “Buwish” season with my family — when my Buddhist mother and Jewish father quarrel over what makes for the best main course: lox from the local Jewish deli or wild salmon from the Japanese market.
“Mom! Dad!” I chime in. “Dr. Schwartz says both are filled with omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for your heart.”
“Oy vey,” I mutter to myself as I walk into the kitchen holding a platter of matzah sushi while wearing a kimono and my uncle’s embroidered yarmulke, as required by my parents on Christmas Day.
As a kid, celebrating the holidays in a Jewish-Russian, Japanese-Buddhist household was spiritually enlightening as well as intriguing. Let’s just say that I grew up thinking that: (a) Jesus was a suffering member of our tribe I was not allowed to worship and (b) Buddha taught that “Life as we know it ultimately leads to suffering.”
When I asked my parents what their relatives thought about their marriage, my father quoted actress Anne Bancroft, who was married to director Mel Brooks for 41 years. Anne had said, “When Mel told his Jewish mother he was marrying an Italian girl, she said, ‘Bring her over. I’ll be in the kitchen — with my head in the oven.’ ”
Ironically, I did not have a cultural identity crisis as a child. On the contrary, other families seemed bland and mundane by comparison — most only had the opportunity to experience one cultural theme. It wasn’t until I was a teen that I first got ostracized for my interfaith and multicultural background. My adolescent years are best summed up by the Woody Allen quote “My only regret is that I am not somebody else.”
As a child, I visited neither a synagogue nor a Japanese temple, as my parents both were artists in 1970s Southern California, and extremely liberal. They decided to compromise on their entirely diverse backgrounds, and thought it best for their four children to explore their own religious paths.
This saying, from an anonymous writer, helps explain my spiritual and cultural dilemmas: “To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are 10,000 flowers. Each flower blossoms 10,000 times. Each blossom has 10,000 petals. You might want to see a specialist.”
As a child, I remember shopping for the holidays with a list given to my father by my mother that was longer and more complicated than the Talmud. The first trip
was to choose our annual secular Christmas tree, one that rivaled Charlie Brown’s in skimpiness. We’d always buy the non–burning bush at our local Jewish market, with store owner Stein Goldfarb always giving me some free gefilte fish (hoping the delicacy would inspire me to convert fully to Judaism). Maybe a free knish would have worked better.
Next we’d venture to Hollywood’s famous Canter’s Deli — pretty much the extent of our Chanukah celebration. We’d wish our fellow patrons a wonderful holiday and enjoy star sightings of Mel Brooks and Henny Youngman. My father and I would share a platter of lox, bagels and whitefish, and we’d bring home borscht, challah and mandelbrot for our holiday feast. If we bumped into any Jewish friends, they’d tell us what Chinese restaurant and matinee they were planning to attend on Christmas.
Afterward, we would head to the grocery store to pick up a pork roast that my mother would serve alongside brisket. Well, at least it wasn’t bacon!
One year, my mother told us to go out and buy the freshest piece of salmon possible. “Get it,” she ordered, “no matter what you have to do.” Just imagine my father as Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” fighting with a customer at a Japanese market as they each pull at opposite ends of a salmon the size of a Buick.
All of this is not to say that I never had a spiritually awakening moment. Even though we didn’t engage in an organized religion or rigid rites of passage, my siblings and I were exposed to an exotically rich appreciation for food, art, music and history.
No, we didn’t have Buddha throw blankets or Star of David oven mitts or Jesus nightlights. But we did grow up in a home with kabuki masks on the walls, and with tales of my dad’s childhood in the 1940s that rivaled the comedy of Groucho Marx and Jack Benny.
We lit our abstract Picasso-esque menorah (made by one of my father’s art students) and decorated our Christmas tree with homemade and makeshift ornaments (origami angels, chachkas found in Japantown, Jewish stars made out of aluminum foil and “snowflakes” that were broken pieces of matzah).
To this day, gift-giving at “Chanu-mas” has never been the focus or center of our celebration; rather, it’s a cultural bonding experience. For example, my mother leaves bowls of candied mochi balls beneath stockings and gives gifts that are wrapped in scraps of antique kimono fabric passed down from my grandmother; and my father wrap his gifts (usually books by Chaim Potok, Saul Bellow or Arthur Miller) in sheets of the New York Times.
I can either kvetch “Vey iz mir,” or rejoice in the fact that I am one of the luckiest half-shiksa goddesses on the West Coast — one who is able to partake in such a blessed simcha with my family each year.
I’ll choose the latter. It is beshert. Or as my Japanese tribe says, “It is shukumei.”
Francesca Biller-Safran resides in Benicia. She is an investigative journalist and author currently writing a novel about the Japanese-American experience during World War II.