Chapter 2
Rai’s life had become so tangled over the last year and a half that even even her sharp mind could make little sense of it. Fortunately, she had been able to construct a coherent narrative out of the years before she found herself on the street.
Rai always knew she was adopted. Even if her parents had not been honest enough to say it, her hair, nose, and skin would have shown anyone that she did not belong in the small Pennsylvania town Rai would always call Vanillaville. Rai’s adoptive parents didn’t want to burden her with too much detail too young, so they just explained that even though she had been born in Africa, they loved her just as much as “a baby that grew inside Mommy.” For many years, anytime childhood anxiety struck Rai (or Helen, as her adoptive parents had named her), she dreamed of Africa. She thought of it as a place where everyone was like her, everyone would like her, and elephants ate coconuts straight from the trees. She suffered more from these anxieties than most kids, but she could hide from them in this fantasy of a promised land, a perfectly happy, lost home.
Helen was a precocious girl, but somehow she managed to get to age 14 without actually learning anything about Africa. Maybe she knew, deep down inside, that fantasy was much more pleasant than reality, so she didn’t feel ready to challenge it, but regardless of her motives, her ignorance ended in the ninth grade.
She had gone over to her first boyfriend’s house to watch television, but only after her parents had assured themselves that the boy’s parents would offer careful supervision. Television had been limited to educational and religious programs in the Miller household, and Rai’s parents did not want interference with their careful childrearing.
“Hey, Helen,” the boy said, paging through TV Guide. “There’s a documentary on Kenya on. That’s in Africa, right? Where you’re from?” Hard as it was for him to admit it in a town where conformity was the greatest value, the boy had been attracted to Rai for her strangeness. Africa was definitely different. He flipped to the Discovery Channel.
The elephants were there, but no coconuts. Pretty soon, Rai and her friend (almost four years later, she was ashamed to admit that she had forgotten his name) could see that the Masai and the Kikuyu didn’t look anything like Rai. Different nose, different face, different body shape.
Rai got up and walked home without a word. She cried all night.
With the exception of the five minutes at school the next day when she broke up with the boy, Rai spent most of the next two weeks crying. She was a sensitive girl and, even before the Africa documentary, had felt more lonely than most adolescents. Now, her mythical homeland had disappeared, and with it, the fantasy that had so long comforted her.
Before this moment, Rai had always been able to talk over her insecurities with her mother, but she couldn’t bring up this one. It would hurt her mother’s feelings too much, she knew. What was she to say? “Mom, I’ve coped with this life by pretending this isn’t my house and you aren’t my mom, but now I can’t pretend anymore.”? She could never say that. Her mother’s heart would break. She kept silent, and each day the tears welled up from somewhere deeper.
The public library brought Rai out of her funk. Her mom had taken her there, hoping that one of the fantasy books she loved would distract her from whatever demon had possessed her. But instead of turning to Tolkein or Jordan, Rai began to page through the old copies of National Geographic she found in the library basement, and then to look through maps and books. At first, she desperately wanted to find the people in Africa who looked like her, but after she found a couple of photos of Moroccans, that quest seemed less exciting, and she became far more interested in the rest of the continent. She read about the Boer War, the struggles to end imperialism, the suffering of Nelson Mandela.
Her mother was so happy to see her hale again that she asked the owner of the local bookstore about Africa. For Christmas, Rai got five novels: by Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mafouz, Wole Soyinka, and Alan Paton. Heavy reading for a fourteen year old, but Rai became lost in the books in the same way that she had lost herself in Middle Earth the year before. By her sixteenth birthday, she knew as much about Africa as anyone in the county. She felt alienated from Vanillaville, had few friends, and was lonely. Even so, she had a purpose; she would not have called herself unhappy.
When Rai was young, her parents had decided that her 16th birthday would be the time to tell her everything. On a rainy fall day, just before taking her out for a dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant that had just opened in Harrisburg, they sat Rai down at the kitchen table.
Her dad began, a little stiffly. “We’ve decided, um, honey, that at sixteen you know enough about yourself and Africa to know how they fit together.” He stopped, hoping his wife would pick up the ball. She did not. Instead, she put her arm around her daughter. “Now, they didn’t tell us much fifteen years ago, but this is what we know. You were born in a small town in Algeria, and your parents last name was Ben-Ari. I think. That’s right, isn’t it, dear?”
Rai’s mom nodded quickly. “Yes. Rebecca and Benjamin Ben-Ari.”
“They said your parents were killed at the start of some war. I’ve tried to find out more, but there are so many wars in that part of the world…”
Rai had been most focused on Africa south of the Sahara, but she also knew something about North Africa. She knew, for instance, that Ben-Ari was not an Arab name.
“Not Ibn-Ari or something, Mom? And Benjamin and Rebecca? That seems so American.”
“That’s what it says on the birth certificate.” She pulled out a piece of paper with sprawling, illegible characters, and then an English translation. “And your name was Rachel. That’s why we kept it for you as a middle name.”
Even in Vanillaville, USA, names like Rebecca, Benjamin, and Rachel should set off bells. For Rai’s parents — kind, conservative people who wanted to keep the outside world exactly that, outside — the alarms stayed quiet. Rai, however, had become a bit of a petite cosmopolitan in her eighteen months in the library, so she knew something about those names.
Rai tried to act engaged during dinner, and she did authentically enjoy the Ethiopian food, but her mind was on Sunday school lessons. Old Testament Sunday school lessons.
The next afternoon, when she took her daily trip to the library after school, her agenda had changed. Carrying the translation of her birth certificate in a clear plastic folder, she walked up to the senior librarian — who had come to see Rai as a fellow traveler in the world of books — and explained her new project: “I want books about Jews.”
Vanillaville did not have a synagogue. No, more: Vanillaville did not have a Jew. Rai tracked down a rumor that a Jewish family had lived across from the elementary school back in the ‘70s, but they were long gone. When she asked the pastor at her church — an old, old man whom Rai had always thought kindly, if rather set in his ways — he would only say that the Jews were God’s chosen people, but that they had killed Christ. A favorite teacher gave Rai a copy of Schindler’s List and a couple of books by Elie Wiesel, but Rai already knew something about the holocaust. She had researched it when someone called slavery the “African Holocaust.”
At first, the librarian was completely lost. She suggested some Phillip Roth, and dug through her own collection for a couple of videotapes of Northern Exposure. (She thought that the story of an intellectual Jew in the wilderness would appeal to Rai.) Soon, she found some books on Jewish history, a couple of instructions for Passover Seders, and I and Thou by Martin Buber. A pastor at the liberal church on the other side of town loaned them his copy of the Talmud — abridged and in English, but the Talmud nonetheless.
Rai was fascinated. As was the librarian, truth be told, who had begun to neglect her other patrons to order obscure Judaica on inter-library loan. But even after months of reading, Rai was unable to find the answer to her real question: what were Jews doing in Algeria in the 1980s?
Several years later, the answer was still unclear. Rai had learned about the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain. She’d learned that many of the Sephardim had fled to North Africa, where Muslim rulers were much more tolerant of Jews than were their Christian counterparts. She learned about the tension between the Sephardim by the Ashkenazim in modern Israel, and how it confused politics there. She’d learned that Muslim countries had begun to persecute Jews after the foundation of Israel, and that many Algerian Jews had fled to France or Israel in the 1960s.
But somehow, her family had stayed, only to be killed in the first throes of a civil war that was still going on.
Had this learning been the only thing happening, the story contained here might never have come to pass. Rai’s parents were proud of her studies — confused, but proud — and they thought that Rai might be the first in the family to go to college. The guidance counselor was certainly pushing it, and Rai’s grades were almost too high to fit on her report card.
The problem was not learning, but ritual. Like the Jews themselves, who have seldom gotten worked up over the most unorthodox beliefs but scream “heresy” if anyone lights a candle a minute after Friday sundown, the struggle began when Rai decided not to eat pork. Her mom got annoyed when she turned her nose up at the Christmas ham, but she set her anger aside in the interests of family harmony. Then, Rai insisted on going to synagogue instead of church; Dad drove her to Harrisburg for a Sabbath or two, but soon insisted she drive herself. He needed a day of rest, too, he said. So she drove the half hour there and back for several Saturdays and began to find some people in the community she liked, but then a classmate joked that driving on the Sabbath might be a form of labor, and wondered if she was willing to test God like that. She stayed at home and read the Torah instead. She taught herself a bit of Hebrew, which was fine until she said the Sh’ma as grace at dinnertime.
Even if tensions were high in the Miller household, it wasn’t too much worse than any other family with a teenage daughter. Rai’s parents even joked with their friends that they were glad she had chosen religion instead of drugs or sex for her mandatory adolescent rebellion. Rai mixed dreams of Africa with dreams of Israel, and she got angry at her parents, but she kept it under wraps. When her parents talked to the guidance counselor at school, he told them to worry most about the fact that she was losing many of her friends. They tried to convince themselves that it was just a phase.
Until Easter.
Rai’s parents had held a council of war with the librarian to discuss a strategy to deal with their increasingly rebellious daughter. After hearing the details of the situation, the librarian couldn’t help but hide a smile. “I feel like I’m in the movie of the week,” she quipped, “about parents who discover their daughter is a lesbian or something.”
“She’s not, is she?” Rai’s father had always been a bit concerned about her relationship with this spinster who liked books more than men.
“Of course not! But imagine: ‘My daughter, the Jewish lesbian.’ Fox would go for it, don’t you think?” Rai’s parents were not exactly comfortable with this teasing.
In the end, the war council decided that they should support the reasonable part of Rai’s newfound identity. She’d been going overboard as a form of rebellion, they concluded, so they had to embrace what she thought she was. Without resistance from her parents, Rai might not put so much effort into rejecting them.
The three adults offered to cook Rai a Passover Seder, an idea the librarian had gotten from her Northern Exposure tapes. In exchange, Rai would join her parents for Easter morning service. They had hoped to invite several of Rai’s friends to the Seder, but they discovered quickly that she had alienated most of them. The few who still liked her were discouraged from attending by their parents, who feared Rai’s rebellion might be contagious. In the end, it was just the Millers, the librarian, and an empty chair for Elijah.
The seder went quite well. Rai complained about the lack of a minion, but not too vocally, and noted that the water for the parsley was supposed to be salted, but she suffered it better than the average sixteen year old. She even seemed a bit grateful.
The problem came on Sunday, when Rai went to church with her parents.
Rai’s adoption and her intellect had provided her whatever fame is available in small town USA. Since she had come to Vanillaville, every person in the church had known her name, and they had gone out of their way to welcome her to each Sunday morning service. When she passed into the next grade, teachers anticipated September eagerly. When she walked down Market Street, people knew who she was. Over the past year, that fame had turned to notoriety. The elderly Presbyterian minister had taken Rai’s conversion personally; many teachers declared that being “too smart” demanded a price.
As for every Easter in this northern annex of the Bible Belt, the church was packed, but even in the crowd, the ancient minister saw Rai’s black dress in a field of Easter pastels. She hadn’t been in the pews for a long time.
The gospel reading came from John, whose take on the crucifixion is not sympathetic to Jews. The pastor had been known for decades as a man who knew how to improvise on a text, and that Sunday did no harm to his reputation. In the reading he gave that morning, Rai heard Mr. and Mrs. Miller stand in for Jesus, the noble figures who would do anything for their people. Except that that people — the Jews, Rai — had betrayed their savior, abandoned God, and turned to ancient ritual. (Rai knew that the story of the seder had made its way through the town’s efficient gossip mill.)
From the day she came to America, Rai had been a quiet girl. She participated in class — that’s why her teachers liked her — but in a humble, self-sacrificing sort of way — that’s why they had loved her. The last eighteen months in the library had done little to change the volume of her voice, even if her temperament had become more rebellious. While she heard no direct reference to her family, Rai remained silent.
But then: “But see! Here Judas” (“Jew-das,” Rai heard) “betrays God and his people, just like Helen of Troy betrayed…”
The tension had already been high, and when Rai heard that name — intentionally uttered or not — she broke. She stood quietly, then stepped up onto the pew. Everyone in church turned to look at her. Even the minister paused at her lack of decorum.
Rai spoke as loudly as she ever had. “ ‘Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them. For you will have no reward from your father who is in heaven.’ That’s in your New Testament. ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’”
With that, she stepped along the pew, over the collected navy and pastel laps of the congregation, and walked out the front door of the church. “My head was higher and my back was straighter than it ever had been in my life!” she would crow later, with a little laugh for the melodrama in the moment.
When Rai insulted the minister and blasphemed the temple, her parents quickly forgot the vow of tolerance they had taken so few days before. As the reverend awkwardly finished his sermon, then as the ushers passed the collection plates and the congregation sang the closing hymn, her father stewed in an impotent fury while her mother fought off shamed tears. When they arrived home, about half an hour after their daughter, they found Rai sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor playing with the cat.
“Please sit at the table, dear,” her mother asked, trying to head off the explosion she felt brewing in her husbands entrails. Rai brushed the cat hairs off her skirt, stood silently, and pulled out a chair.
Her father began, his anger carefully in check. “Helen, you know we have always treated you like our own daughter.” Though adoption self-help manuals had instructed him never to talk this way, it had been a stressful morning, and Harold Miller had spent a lot of time thinking just how different Rai was from him. “I want you to know that you hurt your mother and me very much by what you did in church this morning.”
“Very much.” Her mother’s voice trembled and her eye makeup showed signs of tears.
“We have been very tolerant of you in the last year.” Rai could see in his jaw and his neck how difficult it was for her father to control his fury. She had seldom seen him in a rage, but she knew that she did not want to stand in front of it. “But now there are going to be some rules in this house. You will attend church with us every Sunday, and you will be civil. You will apologize to the Reverend. And you will eat our Easter ham this afternoon.” Rai’s refusal to eat pork had particularly rankled her father — he took it as an insult to his wife’s cooking — so he tacked the unplanned condition onto the end.
For the last several weeks, Rai had been reading the books of the Macabees in the Apocrypha. These books celebrate the Jews martyred for refusing to bow to the Greek tyrants’ attacks on the daily practices of their religion. King Antiochos Epiphanes had tortured and executed Jews who refused to pray to heathen gods, bow to the Emperor, or eat pork. Rai had admired Judas Macabee’s strength to stand firm in the face of torture. “Jew-das!” she thought.
“And if I say no?”
“Those are the conditions for living under this roof, young lady.” He looked her straight in the eye and set his hard, German jaw.
“Fine.” Rai got up and walked to her room. Neither of her parents could read the inflection in her voice, so they thought she had agreed. Her mom set the Easter table for three, and her dad cut three slabs of steaming ham.
Rai wore a winter jacket and a small backpack when she walked into the dining room. Her parents had already sat down; they had looked forward to welcoming the prodigal daughter. The backpack did not play a role in that parable.
“Well, then. Goodbye. Shalom.” Rai turned her back swiftly and walked out the front door so they couldn’t see her cry. Her parents sat stunned at the table.
By the time her mother had found the energy to run after her, Rai was not to be seen from the front door.
Rai had seen several of her classmates run away. Those from comfortable, non-abusive families like hers always ran to a friend’s house. They stayed until they thought they’d taught their parents a lesson, then they reconciled with them and went home.
Rai’s situation was more complicated. Her conversion to Judaism and her solitary temperament had lost her exactly the friends to whose houses she might have run; she couldn’t just flee across the street or across town. Between her natural tendency toward drama and too much reading of the books of the Macabees, she found herself on highway 283 with her thumb out before she had even developed a real plan.
A family headed to Washington, DC on vacation picked her up, so Washington quickly became Rai’s destination. She claimed that her class trip had been going to the Air and Space Museum when they forgot her at a lunch stop; the family commiserated with her kindly and agreed to drop her off there.
In the first days she spent in Washington, as she slept in Rock Creek Park or in the little forest across from the Lincoln Memorial, she couldn’t believe how much she wanted to go home. The thought of a clean sheet, of her mom’s pancakes, of a teddy bear she gave up when she was ten — each of these made her cry. Yes, she loved the days she spent in the National Gallery of Art or the Library of Congress, but she cried herself to sleep each night. She kept herself going by telling more and more powerful stories of her own heroism — identifying with Judas Macabee — and by exaggerating the religious abuse she had suffered at the hands of her adopted parents and town. Soon, this stubbornness had become central to the identity she had constructed for herself: “Like all the Jews,” she told herself, “I have overcome religious oppression!” Sometimes, that story helped her to forget the cold and the rain and the hunger.
And other times, she wanted nothing more than to return to the fleshpots of Egypt.
