How not to be afraid

When I was in elementary school, I had recurring nightmares about the Holocaust. A certainty hung around me like heavy, dust-filmed drapes – a conviction that it not only could happen again but would. I couldn’t focus on multiplication problems or long division. I was too busy figuring out where I might hide when they came for me.

This would seem like psychopathology were it not for several factors.

My dad, a history buff fascinated by my mother’s Eastern European Jewish ancestry, had been overzealous in educating me about the Holocaust. I visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, as a 7-year-old. I knew about the yellow stars, broken glass, the children torn screaming from their mothers.

I was not raised Jewish, but as an evangelical Christian. My mom converted to Christianity when she was 16; my dad, a Catholic, became a Baptist in his early 20s and eventually a Baptist pastor.

Still, it was important to my father that I knew I was Jewish; he spent his lunch hours at the Brooklyn Public Library learning Yiddish folk songs, which he taught me to sing. He taught me to say the Shema – the prayer that’s at the center of Jewish daily worship – in Hebrew. All highly unusual for an evangelical child, I need hardly say.

My fearful outlook was also influenced by my parents’ evangelicalism, which leaned apocalyptic. I learned at a young age, from the Book of Revelation, that things might get pretty ugly sometime soon. Literature to this effect was delivered with regularity to our house, along with the rest of the church mail.