In my neighborhood the Scots started the party at 10:30am. Every day.
The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up.
The Scotts so clearly love their country and their team and each other, and they were having the time of their lives. I watched them wave their flag and wear their flag. And every day they wore kilts that encoded their Scottish family lineage — except for the drinking kilts, which are the ones it’s okay to spill on.
I was in my own city, enjoying their bagpipes, and drinking songs, and endless energy for fun.
But I felt like an outsider watching people who knew exactly where they were from, and I don’t feel that myself, even in my own city.
In the US you’re expected to say where your family is from. It’s a national pastime — everyone is from somewhere else and proud to name it. I remember when my kids first ran into this. I told them we’re Jewish, that after the Spanish Inquisition my family went to Eastern Europe and their dad’s family went to South America. “But what country?” they kept asking. “You have to say a country!”
There isn’t one. I can trace my DNA almost entirely to a small area where Poland and Latvia and Ukraine meet, and my family moved from shtetl to shtetl across it for generations. But those are all places that hated Jews. You can’t say you’re from a place that spent centuries trying to be rid of you.
And I’ll never feel from the US either. Every Jewish person I know has a passport and knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the people who didn’t get out of Germany in time were the ones who assumed they were safe. Every Jewish person I know is also exhausted and stressed by what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, which means the one place that was supposed to be the answer to all of this is its own source of dread. It is hard to feel part of something when belonging in one direction makes you precarious in every other.
So I watched the Scots and understood, with more force than I expected, that I could never be that, but also that I don’t actually want to be. The Scottish joy is the joy of the class clown: this will be fine, everyone will laugh, nothing bad happens to me. You can only move through the world that way if the world has agreed in advance to find you charming. If those same men had been Black, drunk in the street at 10:30 in the morning, they would have been arrested.
Their ease is not available to everyone, and I am not built for it. Jews can barely manage a party on Purim, when getting drunk is the instruction. It’s not our style. We are restrained where the Scots are gregarious, careful where they are careless. But I think it’s okay. What I was actually feeling amidst the fun, was how strongly I belong to something after all.
Not a country. A diaspora. I belong to a people defined precisely by not being from anywhere — held together not by a flag or a hillside but by the shared knowledge of having been moved along, over and over, and having carried the thing with us anyway. I feel it every time I can tell someone is Jewish: a small click of recognition, a guess at the family behind them, a culture I already know the shape of.
I didn’t know how much I felt this until I stood next to people who are not from the US — where everyone is displaced – but from Scotland where their tie to their place is everything.
Belonging means saying who you’re with and who you’re not. The Scots draw that line around a country. I draw it around a people scattered across all of them. I loved watching the Scots but I would not trade. One of the best things I did with two decades of raising my kids was try to give them this — not a country to be from, but a people to be of, so that wherever they end up standing, a few feet from someone else’s flag, they’ll know exactly who they are.
My, such a nice and thoughtful piece.
Someone in my writers group is writing of a mother in a 20th century shtetl in Poland and her daughter in 21st century America, dreaming of her mother.
I guess belonging is between the ears. It’s needed. It’s why some orphans join gangs or the navy.
My regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, had plenty of Poles and others. During WWII, our longest serving colonel had a German name. That war came in September with the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia (they split the country in two) and my regiment landed in Britain by Christmas, as part of the First Canadian Division. Sometime between those two events the Regimental Sergeant Major stood in front of the assembled troops and said, “You all have two countries: Your own and Scotland.” It all worked out.
When a friend was a Commonwealth police officer in Hong Kong, and when I was briefly stationed in Scotland (then I went to the Republic of West Germany) we were both disgusted at being called colonials. But we wouldn’t lose our sense of membership, because that was our choice. (Also, I considered the source)
While I guess some Scots could afford to fly to Boston to see the game, I daresay the majority there, including the pipers, are born and raised in the good old US of A, Complete with a North American (Yankee) accent.
I am still chuckling at a novel where a Starship’s chief engineer claimed to be Scottish. But everyone secretly knew better, because he would lose his Scottish accent whenever he became excited.
Drat, I’ve lost a bit of denial about my neighbours being anti-Jewish.
This after viewing Bill Mar’s latest comic “new rule” piece, something about Jews and News. He normally pokes fun at conservatives but in this piece he points out that the democrats, sad to say, are just as bad.
His Youtube has over 14,000 comments many of whom noted that the audience was not laughing nearly as loudly as they normally do, and that Bill was talking quieter. On paper Bill was joking in his usual style, but I guess the truth hit too close to home. Here’s the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHOJCbRJu28&list=PLAF22812129BFCD50&index=6