380 kensington way

I can honestly say that I was raised in the church. When I was four years old you and Mom purchased a big white church prominently situated on a slope overlooking a large intersection in San Francisco where five streets converged and circled around a cement fountain. High above the house loomed the giant cross on Mt. Davidson. Back in 1960 people were not so creative with their living spaces as they are today. At the time, the idea of raising a family in a converted church took some creativity and some chutzpah.

When the pews were taken out of the main hall of the church we had a full eighty feet of living room space, with plenty of good walls. Once the cross was stripped from the front picture window we had a view that looked out past the circle toward the Pacific Ocean.

A lot of art was made at 380 Kensington Way, and a spirit of inventiveness, fun and creativity abounded. I loved to run the length of the living room, sing in the closets, pore over art books and examine the antique art treasures you collected, including your prize piece: a 17th century Florentine triptych picturing scenes from the life of Jesus.

As I remember it, you built a black fence across the front of the property and crafted a disturbing metal sculpture that you hung on the fence. It was an effigy-like figure, larger than life, with thrashing arms and a vulnerability to the weather. Like a scarecrow, it swayed and screeched as the wind dragged it across the wooden fence-boards. In my mind, the sculpture served to reinforce that our house was not a church anymore - it was your territory and you would decide for yourself what was and was not worthy of worship there.

My grammar school was across the street from our home. In school I was seen as the child of the family that lived in the church, and as such I was isolated, though this was not a problem for me. As your representative in the schoolyard, I defended you to my peers. I was proud of you.

You enjoyed watching me grow, and led me to believe that I was capable of becoming anything I wanted to be. I believed in you and wanted nothing more than to bring you pleasure. You used to tell me that you were God. So, oddly, we had a church, and we had a God, and we had creation in abundance. We worshipped the art making process and we sang praises to great art. We had our own commandments as well, the first of which was this: Thou shalt replace the commandments that Moses delivered with thine own commandments, preferably goofy ones.

modern jews

You and Mom were the products of families that turned away from Orthodox Judaism to embrace “modern” culture. Your parents immigrated to New York at the turn of the century and were deeply involved in their cultural heritage, if not their religious heritage. You and your sisters were and are fonts of wonderful Jewish humor and eating, you color your stories and conversations with splashes of Yiddish, tell great Jewish jokes and have a strong social activist bent.

Mom was raised in Vienna until her late teens. Her mother may have wished to keep a kosher household as her own mother had done, but Grandfather Bernard couldn’t be bothered with such old fashioned ideas. He had left rabbinical school to become a businessman. The family was forced to leave Vienna with the Nazis’ arrival in 1939, and escaped to an ally internment camp for enemy aliens on the island of Trinidad, where they lived for many years. You were stationed in Trinidad doing submarine intelligence for the American army, met and fell in love with Mom, and assisted in bringing her family to New York.

You considered yourself Jewish by culture and history, not by religion. We didn’t practice or discuss Jewish religious traditions much at home, but we attended Passover and Chanukah at the home of a family friend. This family created a solemn sense of awe with their Passover seder, and I could see that there was more to these holidays than I had access to.

Mom’s holocaust experiences were never mentioned when I was growing up. Wishing to protect her children from the horrors of the war, she spoke only of a kind of adventure vacation she had had in Trinidad, making it sound like summer camp, and kindling a great desire in me to visit that exotic island.

When my high school history class began to study World War II, we all attended a screening of Alain Resnais’ documentary on the subject entitled Night and Fog. During the viewing of this frank collection of the most horrifying documentary footage of concentration camp life and death, a veil seemed to be lifted from my eyes. I saw for the first time that this horror was related to my own family history. I was in shock.

The wounds of the war were bred in my bones even though they were never discussed. Watching that horrific film brought me to a new understanding of my heritage as a Jew, and gave a spark of life to my spirituality, as I came to regard the very existence of my sister and myself as a miracle. In my self-centered young mind, I was able to see that I would not be here if it had not been for the holocaust. I was graced with my first glimmer of the presence of a divine force that creates opportunities out of tragedies.

a blank canvas

My teen years were like those of many other under-supervised children of divorce of that time – I took drugs, was sexually promiscuous and began to wander through my life, grateful that college provided some structure on which to hang an identity. One night when I was 20 I looked up at the sky and realized that you were not God - you were just a man. All at once my childish invention ruptured and I saw with new eyes how I had always imagined you there like a God, ever present and ever watchful over me. How foolish I suddenly felt for thinking that! You were not there. No one was watching over me. I was on my own in this life, lost in a wilderness without a companion or a compass. The devastating quiet threw me to the ground, empty and utterly alone.

I can’t say why some people are possessed with a hunger for the divine and others are not. Maybe I realized that no mortal or material thing would fill the emptiness that I felt at that turning point moment. Maybe I suspected that a life of making art from my own ideas and for my own self-fulfillment was not enough. I only know that as I grew older I began to seek God.

I did not turn to the Jewish faith for instruction, in part because I had never known a Jew who believed in God. I did not turn to the Christian faith of my husband, in part because the need for a savior was never a natural way of thinking for me, and in part because I was busy fighting Jerry and resisting his influence, as a way of preserving my own identity. What I did do was endeavor to discover from my own life experience what God was and is, and what I could do to be closer to him. Like the child of my father’s studio, I refused to be told how to believe, preferring to stumble and grope for my own discoveries of the divine.