narrative - a first crack

In 1999, I took video histories of my mother's family’s experiences before, during and after World War II. This was a chance for me to learn more about my grandfather (Zayde in Yiddish), who died in 1990.

When I interviewed my grandmother about Zayde’s life as an immigrant in the 50’s, she told me about their first home in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Traditional Jews like him walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath. After settling in, my Zayde discovered that the nearest synagogue was several miles away.

“How do people get there?” he asked the better settled immigrants. “We drive,” they told him.

“Drive,” he said, “What kind of Jews are these?” So for weeks, he stayed home, determined not to drive on the Sabbath. Finally, after missing what he missed about synagogue too many times, he got in his car one Saturday morning to pray.

By the time I was born about two decades later, we always drove to his synagogue.


In a way I'm just starting to explain, his story tells me a lot about narrative and the ways in which it shapes our religious traditions. In the Old Country, his narrative - his personal story, if you will - was that Jews didn't drive on the Sabbath. In the New World, the story had changed. Same Zayde, same Judaism, same God, but the story had shifted and with it, his actions and the way he saw himself. Even the story of being Jewish had changed.