Finding the Luminous in a Safe Deposit Box
King David wrote in Psalms (147:4): “He counts the numbers of the stars; He gives a name to each of them.”
A torn piece of yellowed paper with a pink border, and English and Hebrew lettering, It bears signatures from my parents and Rabbi Barras, and the stamp of Temple Israel. For all the years I’ve had this document — at least 35 — it’s been in a safe deposit box inventoried as a birth certificate. Along with other miscellanea that people put in those boxes like jewelry appraisals, car titles, deeds etc. Oh yes, and old passports and mom’s jewelry.
Yesterday, my husband emptied the box to prepare for our bank branch closing. “Take a look at this stuff and let me know if it needs to be in a vault or not,” he remarked. I did and realized that the paper with the pink border wasn’t a birth certificate. It was a precious piece of family history — my naming certificate given to my parents after a ritual marking my entrance into Jewish life.
It wasn’t imposing enough to imprint on my brain earlier, but now that my sister, Ina, and I are getting up in years, and our family’s health has diminished instead of flourished, it is part of a time capsule linking me to my Jewishness. The naming ceremony places me in the particular Jewish community of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania’s Temple Israel on South River Street, right next to the Victorian building where we lived for 20 years. (My father was a conveniently located minyan member if the count needed of ten men ran short.) When a Jewish baby girl is named in the synagogue, the first blessing is for the mother’s health, and the second is that the baby will grow to be a wise and understanding Jewish woman of goodness and greatness.
The ceremony was probably the first at this new temple centered on one of my parents’ occasions. I know that my mom must have been dressed in her almost-Dior suit, sewed by my grandfather after he came home from work as a Dior tailor. Her appearance was critical to her since going to Temple Israel was torturous for her. A newcomer to this old community, she never felt that she fit in with the other women. The wives of the community, who populated the Temple Sisterhood, the local Hadassah chapter, and the county club, would look her up and down as she walked into the sanctuary. It didn’t make a difference that they assessed anybody new who came down the aisle – she was too insecure and shy to dismiss their appraisal.
Ma was a former piano teacher married to a psychologist in a community where their generation of Jews owned factories or shops — just one or two generations up from the peddlers who came from Ellis Island. Temple Israel was comprised of businesspeople who had been left their businesses by relatives. Often the original store or factory was a small retail shop or even a peddler’s wagon. My parents’ generation had made good on their inheritance by expanding sales outside of the area and marketing outside of the Jewish community. The other professionals — the doctors, lawyers, and accountants – were cliquish since they were mostly the sons and daughters of the town’s earliest Jewish settlers who had the means to send them to university. Ma was acutely aware that my father’s income wasn’t enough to buy their way into the temple hierarchy or clubs. In addition, since my father was the only therapist in town, he knew all the town’s secrets and private suffering. He, and my mom, were kept at arm’s length.
Unlike me, my sisters weren’t born in Wilkes-Barre. The family moved there once my father completed his Ph.D., a Veteran’s Administration (VA) internship, and was offered a job at the local Northeast Pennsylvania VA hospital. My parents were thrilled to be sent to a community only a few hours from their New York and New Jersey families, and one that boasted a large Jewish community. How were they to know that it would be like an exile for them both, particularly my mother?
On that day at the end of May 1956, in Temple Israel, I officially became Miriam Rachel, a name that honored two deceased great aunts. In Hebrew it had several derogatory translations — rebel, bitter — showing the unease the patriarchs felt about Miriam’s scandalous behavior in the desert. The Bible asserts she organized dancing and other worship of a golden calf when her brother, Moses, went off to get the Ten Commandments. The patriarchs remind us that she was stricken with leprosy for this transgression. Other Hebrew translations of my name, however, include more positive definitions: wished for child, star of the sea, and beautiful. That wasn’t the preferred take in my family. My sisters would tell me frequently that when they found out the newborn wasn’t a boy, they told my parents to give me back. As my life unfolded, the rebel appellation seemed fitting. Bitter — not really, sad, maybe; rebel, yes.
I liked my name, except for the fact that no one where I lived had ever heard of it. This led to all kinds of uncomfortable interactions, beginning when I arrived in my first-grade class. Teachers called me Mimi, Marion, or Mary Ann. My mother had to intervene when one of the grade school teachers insisted on calling me Mimi despite my letting her know that it wasn’t my name. Ma called the teacher, irate, telling her that my name was Miriam and that she was not to call me Mimi. That worked and I have never warmed up to that nickname. Through the school years, I got used to spelling my name for my teachers, and mostly accepting it when people called me Mary Ann.
By the time I got to college I “found” my people and stopped having trouble with my name being misspelled and mispronounced. I cruised through life with fewer corrections needed on critical documents or butchered introductions. That is, until I moved to the southern states in my late fifties.
In the South is where it got bad again, and so finding my Jewish naming certificate was so comforting for me. Everywhere I went — especially in my workplaces — my name was mispronounced and the spelling became even more creative than up north. I worked in health care settings as a psychotherapist and people needed to know my name. Patients would be told variations of my name that I couldn’t even spell. I started to wonder if I had a speech impediment, which could explain why my new bosses and colleagues introduced me with these odd appellations. I tested that theory with family and was told I was nuts and taking it too personally. “No, you haven’t developed a speech issue with old age. People are just ignorant,” Ina “reassured” me. That proved to be true. It wasn’t just the sound of my name — it was the entire package. Pale, red-headed northerner in mostly black and grey fancy clothes who didn’t celebrate Christmas. Yep, the Jewish piece. For most of the people I met, especially at work, I was the first Jew they had ever encountered. I heard antisemitic slurs that I hadn’t heard since high school. When I complained to our billing person that her billing numbers, recorded in our official medical record, didn’t correspond with my tally, she responded: “I’m not trying to Jew you.” When I complained about her comment, I was investigated for having a racist attitude by questioning her work. HR informed me that I should be more careful about telling someone that their work was wrong, even though her numbers were wrong and resulted in shorting my fees. When they concluded that she would not also be reprimanded, I felt humiliated and deep in my brain surfaced another incident where I was embarrassed because of my Jewishness. Post-traumatic stress (PTSD) had been triggered.
I flashed back to a day in adolescence that I hadn’t thought about in 45 years. All those years later, I reexperienced a day in the high school cafeteria when a boy in my senior class threw a pocketful of change at me and exclaimed, “Pick it up kike.” What I can’t remember is how I responded — I was cheeky enough, like my namesake, Miriam, to imagine I told him to ‘fuck off’, but I don’t think that’s what I did. I think I ran out of the room, distraught with shame, so intense only a teenager could experience it. I was shocked. Never had I encountered anything like this from a peer. Someone who actually knew my name felt the need to single me out for embarrassment. I don’t, however, remember the aftermath; it’s as if my brain froze as the coins hit the linoleum and his words : pierced the air. I can clearly see where he was in the room and where I was. The room was packed. Experts say when you experience trauma the brain erases the memory through a biochemical reaction. For me, all that came back was the event – the rest is lost in PTSD.
Unlike now, there was no social media to support me and no well-meaning club to put on a diversity event to undo the incident. I cannot remember if he got into trouble, if I cried, if friends tried to make me feel better, if my parents even knew. It was the worst of the anti-Jewish incidents I experienced in my school years, but certainly not the only one.
Mr. Boyle, my eighth-grade science teacher, intentionally scheduled exams on the High Holidays when the five Jews in the school (all in my grade) would be in synagogue instead of school. Did he identify us by our Jewish-sounding names. In a school full of Italian and Polish kids both our first and last names stood out, I’m sure. When challenged on the schedule, first by the students and then by our parents, he became belligerent and refused to change his mind. Again, I still feel the anger and outrage, but I don’t remember the result. I’m sure that if he gave the tests, there were no consequences for us or him. We weren’t transferred to another teacher and, since the holidays are at the beginning of the year, the five of us suffered through the year with him. I can still see him — tall, thin, white haired and almost spitting with anger when he found out we had told our parents. The spittle of an old man’s outrage marks the visual I have of the incident.
All of this comes back to me when I hold that pink-bordered piece of paper. My Jewish self, buried by the acts of others, now rises to comfort me from the page. The Hebrew letters of my parents’ names dominate the sheet; their English names recede. A deeper, ancient calendar, belonging to my people, notes my entry into life. I have too often in the last few years been alerted to the yahrzeit of my beloveds by these lunar-based dates. I convert the Hebrew months and days to the calendar I must use in this life, so I can honor their memories every year on the anniversary of their deaths. Otherwise, I rarely think of that link of my soul to the moon’s cycles, which the Jewish calendar marks.
This year I am lucky: I’ve unearthed a document heralding my entry into Judaism, that, hopefully was, hopefully, a kind of rebirth of joy for my parents. I say a silent prayer as I study the paper: “May I discover many more of these sacred pages as my one good life endures.”
Miriam Krasno is a retired social worker/psychotherapist. Currently working on a book of creative nonfiction about intergenerational transmission of trauma. Her poem, “Separation”, was published in the anthology, Her Soul Beneath the Bone, University of Illinois Press. Her essay, “The Joke People” was published in the Winter 2024 issue of River and South Review and her poems, “Runs in the Family” and “Why Brides Wear Blue” appeared in the Spring, 2024 issue of HerWords. Mud Season Review chose her poem, “When the Strat A Stat Ride Broke Loose” for inclusion in their section ‘The Take’ in Fall of 2024.
Amethyst Review 