Sense and Sensibility

The Double-edges Sword of Identity

 A Jewish friend of mine is a worried.

Her daughter has fallen for a man who would be considered a “catch” by almost any measure: Tall, dark, handsome, erudite and considerate [Dash] he is a young man in a lucrative profession with an auspicious career ahead of him. But there’s a catch to this “catch.” The young man is not Jewish. He’s Hindu.

For my friend, this presents a problem. If the romance proceeds apace, will her daughter’s Jewish identity erode? This is a prickly issue for Jews, who have endured the Inquisition, pogroms and the Holocaust. To lose another Jew to the fancy of romance can seem a little capricious. This is far more portentous than my marriage to Protestant [Dash] an occasion for excommunication in my grandfather’s day that merited a shrug from my father.

I thought about my friend’s conflict in relation to two recent events that have underscored the difficulty in preserving one’s cultural identity in the face of a rising tide of homogenization. The first was the release of “Unaccustomed Earth,” by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who writes about the chasm between expatriate Bengali parents and their American-raised children. The second was last year’s Irish rejection of the monumental Lisbon Treaty, which the European Union is promoting to reconstitute its cumbersome bureaucracy.

The events may appear unrelated. What, after all does a wistful Bengali immigrant have in common with an Irish electorate mucking up the clunky works of the European Union? More than you might expect.

The Irish, who have benefited from millions in EU subsidies, remain peevish about all this “European” business, worrying that Ireland has struck a Faustian bargain that will dilute not only Ireland’s political voice, but its identity. They’re not the only ones. Nobody but the poorer European countries seem aflutter about their “European” identity. As my Irish cousin says, “Who’s Irish anymore?”

A similar question might be asked of the characters in Lahiri’s novel “Unaccustomed Earth.” As she did in her debut collection of stories,”Interpreter of Maladies,” Lahiri wrestles with melancholy of the Bengali immigrants, struggling to inculcate their culture in the hearts of their defiantly Americanized children. It is a battle that leaves them with a longing for an identity they had taken for granted.

The Indian father of the title story is baffled by his tow-headed grandson, who has yet to see India and seems more comfortable in an L.A. mall. “The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent-they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way,” Lahiri writes.

This, I think, is what we fear most when we talk about an erosion of cultural identity [Dash] that the people who come out of us will have nothing in common with us. We will have no points of communion, no exceptionality of experiences that we use as a shorthand to communicate. Something of our cultural essence will slip away.

Because her faith is important to her, I suspect my friend’s daughter will cling to her religious identity, regardless of whom she marries. But I suspect she grew up in a household that was less redolent of the Jewish heritage than that of her mother, just as my own Irish-Catholic girlhood was less dogmatic and definitive than my grandmother’s. Inexorably, we distance ourselves from the particularity of our culture, to an agreeable indistinctness.

What that means is that today I am free to be enriched by my friendships with Jews [Dash] friendships my grandparents would never have considered. But a certain intensity of identity is gone, and we cannot be surprised by those who continue to mourn it.