This is my Roumanian cousin; her name and story, both lost, though I believe she died in the Holocaust.
A Jew Girl, like me.
Upstate New York, at puppy class, I stood next to the corpulent, ruddy man, each of us with our dogs--his an improbable yappy "morkie." He told me with an eye roll that his wife had picked it at the puppy shop, lest, I suppose, I should believe he'd emasculated himself deliberately. I had the manly hunting dog, handsome hound Remus. I know he wished we could swap dogs.
He asked me "where in Brooklyn you from?" and told me he had been a truck driver, often delivering to Flushing, Queens. He hated, he said, to make deliveries there. Because, you know,
those people ran the warehouse there, "
those people of the
Jewish persuasion," his lip lifted in a wet sneer, his face too close to mine.
I looked at him.
"You know," I said mildly. "
I'm Jewish."
He flushed a dark, ugly red.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean anything by it. You've gotta understand, I didn't mean you anyway. I meant those
ones,
you know, the ones with the weird beards. But not
you."
I was tempted to stomp on his foot, tempted to pull my blonde hair back from my forehead and show him my horns, tempted to curse him with a very evil Yiddish curse and spit on the ground in front of him.
But I did none of those things, thinking of Ella, and myself, and then for a moment, in an unexpectedly clear memory-flash, of the beautiful nameless Roumanian cousin...
...horned, hook-nosed, sheydl-wearing, stingy money-horder, smelling of pickles and the Old Country, praying in a language that no one understands, that keeps me separate and strange...
Jew Girl.
