The Trauma Heirloom

Words by Bella Maresca (they/them)

CW: Anti-Semitic Violence.

On the coffee table, nestled between two of Mum’s green velvet armchairs, sits a gold Menorah. It's the first time it’s been taken off the bookshelf in years. There's a Christmas tree in the corner behind it. On 13 December 2020, the Menorah is finally serving a purpose in our home other than looking beautiful. Mum and I melt all nine candles into their holders on the seventh day of Hanukkah. This isn’t how you’re supposed to do it.

Step One: On night one, starting from the right holder, place one candle into your Menorah. Also add your shamash, or ‘helper’ candle. Your shamash is placed in the centre of your Menorah, and is used each night to light the remaining candles.

Step Two: Each night, another candle is added and lit. Though you place the candles from right to left, you must light them each night from left to right.

Step Three: By the eighth and final night you will have all nine candles lit.

You need 44 candles to complete this ritual. We only had nine. Nevertheless, we make do. Despite having to do so in an unconventional way, we are determined to complete this together. We wait until it’s dark and then light all but one of the candles. We let them burn for half an hour. Then we blow them out. We need to save what’s left of the candles for tomorrow night. The next night, we light them again, letting them burn all the way down. I go to bed wondering why we have never done this before.

I was 20 the first time we celebrated Hanukkah. When I moved out of Mum’s place the following year, the Menorah was handed down to me. Jule, my grandma, bought the Menorah for Mum in 1984 when she visited the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. And now, it's mine.

Looking at the Menorah sitting on the mantlepiece of one of my first flats, I realised I knew almost nothing about my family history, nor our Jewish cultural identity.

‘Jewish’ wasn’t a term I would’ve chosen to identify myself with as a child.

But it’s not really a question of choice, is it? Not for me, nor anyone in my family. It’s cultural inheritance. It’s in our blood.

So why did I, for the majority of my life, feel incredibly disconnected from a part of me that is so significant and rich in culture?

Grandma has always felt like the glue that keeps my family connected, and food is our familial love language. When I was a kid, she had a house out by Waikanae Beach. We would drive up every couple of months for family gatherings. One of my warmest memories is of being 6-years-old, stepping out of the hot car, and smelling the salty sea and Grandma’s famous Christmas ham wafting out from her front door.

Grandma got her love for food, and her witty personality, from her mother and my great-grandmother, Ester.

Ester and her husband Helmut escaped Nazi Germany right before World War II began, coming to Aotearoa as refugees in 1939. The persecution of Jews didn’t start with the war. As children and young adults, my greatgrandparents lived through the rise of Nazism and Hitler coming into power. According to Grandma, her parents believed that Hitler’s influence would be short-lived. This was until 1938, when they lived through Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, where all the Jewish premises throughout Berlin had their windows smashed and shops ransacked by Nazi supporters. My great-grandparents then realised the severity of what was happening and escaped.

Ester and Helmut both had very relaxed, liberal, and mostly secular Jewish upbringings. The difference with Ester was that her mother was non-Jewish. When I asked Grandma about this, she told me, “This was very radical for her father to have married 'out' of the faith, despite his own father withholding his permission for a long time.” Many religious Jews believed, and still do believe, that you can only be Jewish if it is passed down to you through your mother’s bloodline. This meant that to many, Ester would not have been considered Jewish. But that meant nothing to the Nazi regime.

Ester went to Schul (religious studies), and there she learnt Hebrew. Her first job in Berlin as a young woman was reading the Hebrew newspapers to a rabbi who was going blind, and she assisted him in preparing his sermons. While Ester’s family didn’t often participate in religious aspects of Jewish culture, they attended a synagogue, and celebrated the rituals of holidays such as Passover and Hanukkah with food and family gatherings.

It makes sense then that food has become such an important part of my family. It has always been something that brings us together, perhaps even well before Ester’s time. We still cut the crusts off Ester’s classic egg sandwiches, long after she has passed away.

Unlike Ester, Helmut grew up with religious Jewish traditions, but came to believe that religion had been the cause of conflict and persecution over the ages. Eventually, both Helmut and Ester became committed socialists and atheists. Because of this, Grandma didn’t go to a synagogue or grow up with any of the religious aspects of Jewish culture.

That is not to say that they were disconnected from their Jewish heritage, Grandma explained to me.“I feel that our background is deeply embedded in me. While one might think it is perhaps a European or German heritage, I believe that it is definitely a Jewish heritage that connects our parents to us and them to their forebears. It is the flavour of language, humour, food, rhythm of living, the emotional and the physicality of our lives, and our background of the arts, design, music, and literature.”

As a child and teen, I found it hard to disconnect the religious side of Jewish culture from everything else. I didn’t recognise that my family’s traditions were intrinsically connected to an ‘essense’ of Jewishness, not religion.

When I was around 6-years-old, my parents started getting into the Bahá'í faith. I was too young to know what that meant. As part of it, Mum ran a children’s group, where I hung out with friends and did crafts. I remember it with that sense of innocent childhood fun.

However, I saw my big sister Toby struggle with this new religious phase. With 8 years between us and different dads, she never talked to me about it. I was her annoying younger sibling, trying to be a ray of sunshine in her teenage angst. For the longest time, all I did was observe from a distance.

In recent years, my sister and I have been making up for lost time. Whether we’re just hanging out in her living room going through her extensive vinyl collection, or laying on the floor psychoanalysing our parents and unpacking our upbringings together—we’ve found that closeness I missed in childhood.

It was over a cup of tea on the couch that we began talking about Mum’s Bahá'í phase. Like our great-grandparents, Toby is an atheist, and felt deeply uncomfortable having to participate in Mum’s exploration of religion. Toby’s main issue with it was the fact that, as far as she understood it, Bahá'í was an openly homophobic religion. She couldn’t understand why Mum would want to be part of a religion that seemingly supported something so wrong, and went against the morals we were raised with. We had always been taught to be highly empathetic, and to care deeply about equality and social issues. It just didn’t make sense.

Mum eventually left the Bahá'í faith. After seeing how deeply it affected my sister, she questioned the community's homophobic beliefs and was only met with rigidity.

Toby told me this was a generally miserable time in her life, and she felt isolated. Her angst was caused by more than just teenage hormones, more than the sudden religious phase. It was the instability she experienced throughout her upbringing.

Despite our age gap, instability is something my sister and I had in common. We moved around a lot, constantly uprooting our lives and starting again. Going from one school to the next, over and over again, always being the ‘new kid’, and building friendships while knowing that a year later we’d probably never see them again. I never really understood why my parents would do this. Just as it started to feel like things were settling and we were building a stable home, we would pack up and leave. We were living a nomadic lifestyle, and I hated it.

I’ve come to understand the decisions Mum made through conversations with her about my childhood, and her own upbringing. Mum had a fractured, complicated childhood more so than me. I remember the first time she told me she had four fathers. I didn’t understand, and I still don’t entirely. I won’t get into it. You get the point. But I do enjoy telling people Mum is like Sophie from Mamma Mia (with a lot more trauma and an extra father).

“There were always these seemingly obvious ‘here and now’ reasons for why we needed to move. I also think that there's something about when things are difficult or threatening —in an unconscious way, my solution was to move and make a better life,” Mum told me. “It’s a thing in my mind that I associate with survival, in that sort of transgenerational way. A lot of the time Jews were chased away, forced away, but for us it’s so much in our bones that it becomes a coping mechanism.”

What she was describing was the effects of transgenerational trauma.

I wanted to see if I could trace this back further, so I asked Grandma what she thought. She agreed with Mum, saying her feelings were evidence that trauma is transferred through the generations by 'osmosis’. “It is not just the previous generation or two that passes it on—it has been generation upon generation throughout history where Jewish peoples have been persecuted and displaced time and again, and I believe that we have this inheritance instilled within.”

On the surface it may seem like our parents pass trauma onto us through the decisions they make that directly impact us. But often, especially for families who have experienced extreme discrimination and persecution, these decisions are rooted in transgenerational trauma. It is not as simple as saying that we repeat the exact same mistakes our parents make, because the way we respond to trauma changes with each individual.

Something everyone in my family shares is an incredibly strong survival instinct and need to rise above adversity.

For Grandma, this manifests in the way she cares for her health and relationships, adapting and embracing change in a way others may not be able to. She cares deeply about creating a loving and caring environment for our family.

Mum has a desire to help others understand their own trauma, and is incredibly empathetic. She’s said that because of the trauma she experienced and saw in our family, grieving became her superpower. This partly led her on the path of becoming a therapist.

My sister and I both prioritise stability and security, putting more effort into creating comfortable lives for ourselves. We have mastered adapting to change, even when it’s out of our control.

So why did I feel disconnected from my Jewish background for most of my childhood? I simply didn’t see the way it was innately woven into the fabric of my family, and therefore, me.

It’s the end of 2022. I’ve just moved into a new flat with my friend Niamh. I’ve been in and out of hospital for the past couple of months. It’s been a rough year. Niamh and her boyfriend Sol are at his parents’ house. They’re celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. I’m home alone, laying on the couch. My Menorah is sitting on a yellow metal bookshelf behind me. It’s 11 p.m. I miss Mum.

Earlier that day, I overheard Sol on the phone talking to his mum in Hebrew. I was hit with a wave of jealousy. Why didn’t I understand what he was saying? As I watched them leave for their Hanukkah celebration, a second wave of jealousy hit.

I Google how to say ‘Happy Hanukkah’ in Hebrew.

Chag sameach!

I look at my Menorah. I forgot to light it last year. Shit Better try that again, I guess. I get up, put a candle in the left holder, and one in the center. I light the shamesh, and then use it to light the other candle. Wait… I was meant to start from the right, wasn’t I? Ugh. Regardless, I let them burn for 30 minutes, then blow them out.

Niamh and Sol come home. “Chag sameach!” Sol says. I awkwardly smile, I can’t say it back. I don’t know how to pronounce it. Probably should’ve looked that up too.

I forget to light it again until the fourth night of Hanukkah. Sol comes over and helps me do it. He says a blessing in Hebrew. I don’t understand, but it’s nice to feel included. It makes me realise that just because my experience is different from Sol’s, doesnt make me any less Jewish. I’m still ‘part of the tribe’, as he would say.

I don’t need to tick boxes or complete rituals. My Jewishness is in my blood, my bones and the essense of my being. It’s an inheritance, a fingerprint, passed down to me through generations.

So, my Menorah can just sit on my bookcase. A simple reminder of the beautiful, tragic, wonderful, and traumatic history of my family—my Jewish family.