Kiss Me, I'm Nothing
by Barbara Ehrenreich
©1992
An acquaintance was telling me about the joys of rediscovering her ethnic and religious heritage. "I know exactly what my ancestors were doing 2,000 years ago," she said with enthusiasm, "and I can do the same things now."
Then she leaned forward and inquired politely, "And what is your ethnic background, if I may ask?"
"None," I said, that being the first word out of my mouth. Well, not "none," I backtracked. Scottish, English, Irish-that was something, I supposed.
Too much Irish to qualify as a WASP; too much of the hated English to warrant a "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" button; plus there are a number of dead ends in the family tree due to adoptions, missing records, failing memories and the like. I was blushing by this time.
Did "none" mean I was rejecting my heritage out of Anglo-Celtic self-hate? Or was I revealing a hidden ethnic chauvinism in which the Britannically derived serve as a kind of neutral standard compared with the ethnic "others?"
Throughout the '60's and '70's, I watched one group after another-African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans-stand up and proudly reclaim their roots while I just sank back ever deeper into my seat.
All this excitement over ethnicity stemmed, I uneasily sensed, from a past in which their ancestors had been trampled on my ancestors, or at least people who looked very much like them.
In addition, it seemed almost un-American not to have some sort of hyphen at hand, linking one to more venerable times and locales.
But the truth is, I was raised with none. We'd eaten ethnic foods in my childhood home, but these were all borrowed, like the pasties, or Cornish meat pies, my father had picked up from his fellow miners in Butte, Montana.
If my mother had one rule it was militant ecumenism in all matters of food and experience. "Try new things," she would say, meaning anything from sweetbreads to clams, with an emphasis on the "new."
As a child, I briefly nourished a craving for tradition and roots. I immersed myself in the works of Sir Walter Scott. I pretended to believe that the bagpipe was a musical instrument. I was fascinated to learn from a grandmother that we were descended from certain Highland clans and longed for a pleated skirt in one of their distinctive tartans.
But in "Ivanhoe," it was the dark-eyed "Jewess" Rebecca I identified with, not the flaxen-haired bimbo Rowena.
As for clans: Why not call them tribes-those bands of half-clad peasants and warriors whose idea of cuisine was stuffed sheep gut washed down with whisky?
And then there was the sting of Disraeli's remark-which I came across in my early teens-to the effect that his ancestors had been leading orderly, literate lives when my ancestors were still rampaging through the Highlands daubed in blue paint.
Motherhood put the screws on me, ethnicity-wise.
I had hoped that by marrying a man of Eastern European Jewish ancestry I would acquire for my descendants the ethnic genes that my own forebears so sadly lacked.
At one point I even subjected my children to a Seder of my own design, including a little talk about the flight from Egypt and its relevance to modern social issues.
But the kids insisted on buttering their matzos and snickering through my talk. "Give me a break, Mom," the older one said, "you don't even believe in God."
After the tiny pagans had been put to bed, I sat down to brood over Elijah's wine. What had I been thinking?
The kids knew that their Jewish grandparents were secular folks who didn't hold Seders themselves. And if ethnicity eluded me, how could I expect it to take root in my children, who are not only Scottish English Irish, but Hungarian Polish Russian to boot?
But then, on the fumes of Manischewitz, a great insight took form in my mind. It was true, as the kids said, that I didn't "believe in God."
But this could be taken as something very different from an accusation-a reminder of a genuine heritage. My parents had not believed in God either nor had my grandparents or any other progenitors going back to the great-great level.
They had become disillusioned with Christianity generations ago-just as, on the in-law side, my children's other ancestors had shaken off their Orthodox Judaism.
This insight did not exactly furnish me with an "identity," but it was at least something to work with: We are the kind of people, I realized-whatever our distant ancestors religions-who do not believe, who do not carry on traditions, who do not do things just because someone has done them before.
The epiphany went on: I recalled that my mother never introduced a procedure for cooking or cleaning by telling me, "Grandma did it this way." What did Grandma know, living in the days before vacuum cleaners and disposable toilet mops?
In my parents' general view, new things were better than old and the very fact that some ritual had been performed in the past was a good reason for abandoning it now.
Because what was the past as our forebears knew it? Nothing but poverty, superstition, and grief. "Think for yourself, Dad used to say. "Always ask why."
In fact, this may have been the ideal cultural heritage for my particular ethnic strain-bounced as it was from the Highlands of Scotland across the sea, out to the Rockies, down into the mines and finally spewed out into high-tech, suburban America.
The more tradition-minded, the newly enthusiastic celebrants of Purim and Kwanzaa and Solstice, may see little point to survival if the survivors carry no cultural freight-religion, for example, or ethnic tradition.
To which I would say that skepticism, curiosity, and wide-eyed ecumenical tolerance are also worthy elements of the human tradition and are at least as old as such notions as "Serbian," or "Croatian," "Scottish," or "Jewish."
I make no claims for my personal line of progenitors except that they remained loyal to the values that may have induced all of our ancestors, long, long ago, to climb down from the trees and make their way into the open plains.
A few weeks ago I cleared my throat and asked the children, now grown and fearsomely smart, whether they felt any stirrings of ethnic or religious identity, which might have been, ahem, insufficiently nourished at home.
"None," they said, adding firmly, "and the world would be a better place if nobody else did, either." My chest swelled with pride, as would my mother's, to know that the race of "none" marches on.