D R A M A++Q U E E N

Ever had a lover who reminded you of a humpy miniature poodle? Send your lame lover tale to Drama Queen for a Day

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T A B L E++T A L K

What do you do when you hate your obstetrician? Advise and comfort in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

The high priestess of free love
By Suzette Lalime
Victoria Woodhull, prostitute and presidential candidate
(03/12/98)

Fat chance
By Leora Tanenbaum
A teen-book author talks about obese girls, binge-and-barf clubs and why well-meaning mothers often make things worse
(03/11/98)

Sound and sexuality
By Ros Davidson
Is lesbianism physiological?
(03/10/98)

Vanity, thy name is pukestain
By Carol Snow
There's nothing like a (fleetingly) sick kid to highlight the humiliating flexibility of your maternal code
(03/09/98)

Time for One Thing
By the Salon staff
A guide to fast-forwarding to the most sensuous moments on film
(03/06/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Win
Sign up for our newsletter and win a free copy of "Birthday Letters," by Ted Hughes.

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MY JEWISH MOTHER-IN-LAW WENT
INTO SHOCK WHEN HER SON
MARRIED A WASP. IT TOOK A
TRIP TO ISRAEL TO CLOSE THE
GAP BETWEEN US.

BY JENNIFER NEW | "Pull back the curtain. Go ahead." My mother-in-law reaches over me and lifts a thin synthetic curtain that looks as though it were sewn by a newlywed, circa 1952. Below, the men in the synagogue are supposedly praying and observing the beginning of Shabbat, though it looks to me as though they're catching up on the week's gossip. But what do I know, a shiksa from Iowa standing in the women's balcony of an Israeli synagogue. With my straight blond hair and jet-lagged blue eyes, I don't belong here. And yet I do. I am with my mother-in-law. We whisper in each other's ears, lock arms and, days later, dance together. We are here in Israel to learn each other, to move irrevocably beyond our past.

Behind us is a rocky place filled with misunderstandings. On her part, there was a blind desire for her son to marry a Jew, an inability to view me whole. My own movement to forgiveness and understanding has been slowed by an assumption that I know what I need to know about Judaism. Littered between these two stubborn positions lies the residual guilt of the Holocaust, coupled with a murky, groping understanding on both of our parts of what it means to be a good mother, a good daughter. I'm not sure whether the stark and horrifying tragedy of the Holocaust or the centuries-old wounds between mothers and daughters is the larger gap.

Before our engagement, Andrew's mother had been neutral to me, simply telling him to be careful "not to fall in love" when we announced our plans to move in together. But things grew progressively nastier after our engagement, after I was no longer a phase. The months prior to our wedding, three years before the trip to Israel, was the period of the Phone War. Many ugly, tearful words were volleyed across late night, cross-country phone connections -- "You fucking Jew!" being the most outlandish of all. This is the phrase with which Andrew's mother predicted I would one day degrade him. How or why these words would come to fall from my mouth she did not foretell.

So stunned were we by her prediction that we needed to make the words our own. "Oy, you fucking Jew," I say to my husband now with a Woody Allen-delivery. Imbued with the silly sweetness of our prenuptial bliss, with our retreat from maternal fury, the phrase makes him giggle. I have, with great practice and, finally, habit, achieved just the right breathiness to my oy, just the right exasperation, as though I've walked six miles to the butcher and Mrs. Kline bought the last chicken.

She said other things as well, all cruel and absurd, all spewing forth from a deep shock that her only son -- a son who led the entire service of his Bar Mitzvah in near-perfect Hebrew -- was marrying a WASP. With the grace of hindsight, I realize that none of this was about me. At the time, however, I was deeply hurt that she didn't like me, that she was uninterested in getting to know me. I wanted her to like me for the qualities it seemed we shared: interests in feminist health, travel and good books. This was all much more relevant than my ties -- illegitimate at that -- to the last kaiser of Germany. For me, the books piled next to one's bed, the articles cut from the paper, speak legions; where or if one worships says relatively little. But my world spins on a different axis than hers.

So I shifted my attention to a more superficial, yet still winning, list of traits for which I might gain her approval: a balanced checkbook, respectable culinary skills, post-collegiate degrees and child-bearing hips all ranked high. Besides, I argued, it wasn't as though Andrew had been dating a long line of nice Jewish girls and then I'd come along to sully matters. His mother seemed oblivious to the fact that many of her Deadhead, old-time-musician son's recent dalliances had been saturated in patchouli oil, ensconced in beads and toting a mountain dulcimer on their way to a square dance. They would have turned many heads at the local shul -- and not because they weren't God's chosen. But me? My hair was too blond, my forefathers too German (we didn't even tell her about the kaiser), and I didn't know gefilte fish from lutefisk.

I didn't want to be suckered into all the hype about in-laws and Jewish mothers. Mother-in-law. The word itself is such a stereotype, not at all nice. It's legal, clinical. Like a prenuptial agreement, it bespeaks an arrangement of necessity, not love. Besides, I thought, who needed such terminology. This wedding was about Andrew and me, not our families. For some time, I had been imagining our lives unfurled and intertwined with all the good stuff there, like some peopled version of a Pottery Barn catalog. To be fair, I'd throw in some late-night tax preparation or a colicky baby. But never did I envision a mother-in-law, certainly not one so formidable.

N E X T+P A G E: Could this be the same woman?