The synagogue always smelled of old books and musky carpet, an olfactory relic of a dying world. The perfume would greet us as we entered the great wooden doors at the top of the entrance steps. Every Friday Shabbat service where children ran races in the sanctuary aisles. Every other Saturday morning when at least ten men would trudge across the county to make a minion for pre-pubescents to practice for their bar and bat mitzvahs. Every Sunday morning extending into the afternoon, first learning Hebrew, then learning the tales of defeat (and triumph in fewer cases) that plagued the Jews for centuries, all outlined in the Torah and taught through worksheets and skits. My weekends emanated the dusky smell of tradition and decay. All except monthly Shabbat potlucks when the smells of roast chicken intermingled with the sweet cheese kugel and the bloodiness of Manischewitz wine. These smells mingled with the laughter of children and the kvetching of adults, dampening the dusk and promising future.
The library was the most pungent. Perhaps because of the aged books in aged bookshelves, being tended to by an aged woman. The frail old lady, Eileen or Ellen or Agnes, with carrot red hair would read to us as we sat cross-legged waiting for the hours to pass. Excited to educate the next generation of Jews, her passion never knew the wave of secularism fated for society, the dawn of a changing world. I don’t remember when she died, I only carry assumptions that she did.
One bar mitzvah, my family arrived polished and patient for the Saturday morning service that would last half a day. We arrived to find the father holding a bucket of white paint and perspiring. “Just finished painting over a Swastika.” He didn’t make eye contact. I didn’t think to look at my parents to see their reaction. I’d never experienced anti-Semitism before and, seeing nothing, the smell of wet paint on the synagogue wall didn’t penetrate my nasal passage or my psyche as much as it probably should have. I’m not sure if I knew what the Swastika was or the lives lost by the credo it served.
In Autumn and winter, blistering wind shakes branches against worn windows; and if the wood door wasn’t shut tight enough, the wind’s worship would greet pious prayers–G-d joining the service with her own gust.
Stained glass windows changed through the seasons. Yellow and green streaks stood heavy against the florid carpet during Spring and Autumn. Blue would shine too but only when we stood. Red refracted in the winter. In the spring, we observed Sukkot–a holiday meant to celebrate the harvest but which held no meaning for a modern suburban child. Traditional Jews slept under the hut-like Sukkah with its exposed rooftop; we observed the holiday by trudging outside in the brisk Pacific Northwest air to stand under the slatted roof and play with fruit imported from Israel. I daydreamed of seeing stars between slats, wondering if they would protect me from the heavy blackness of night. Lion King told me those stars were my relatives.
For Tu B’shvat, we planted trees.
We had so many holidays. My Christian and secular classmates would pout that I’d miss two school days a year. I reveled in their envy but hid the reality of a day sitting on hardened pews listening to a language I didn’t understand; the clock never seemed to keep pace. Yom Kippur was the day we couldn’t eat, so our sins would be expunged and we could start sinning again with a fresh slate. As a child, I didn’t know anyone who sinned. Rosh Hashanah followed, celebrating the new year, reveling in the traditional apples and honey to prophesize a sweet year. Apologize for your transgressions, then leave them to evaporate as the future focuses.
The synagogue was where I first met death. My greatest exposure to the elderly, I would learn of a passing and wonder why there was sadness over someone so gray-haired and grizzly who’s face creased like the Talmud’s pages. Between passings, we still mourned. Every week, the aura of death would visit as the walls echoed. Ringing like the Mourner’s Kaddish, the only psalm without melody to remind that loss isn’t joyous, the only psalm to oblige a standing ovation when the Torah’s not out. We applauded and we mourned for those who were here and then not.
Cheryl Owens recounted her Texan childhood where racist kids threw pennies at her, daring her to pick them up and prove her Jewishness. Brian Parker always teased me, saying I could smell fallen change with my large nose. We were friends, and we both knew my nose was smaller than his. We teased Emily Martin for being half-Chinese. And Abigail Heringer for relying on a cochlear implant to hear. Of course it was my place to be teased as a Jew. Of course it was that identity that plagued me as different.
My great grandmother died at the age of 91 when I was eight years old. She was the first death I cried for. I was putting stickers on my bedroom door–a legacy that has remained to the annoyance of my parents–when my sister broke my the news to me. The stickers fell as I ran to my mother. We embraced as we wept.
For the whole of that next year, we were of the first to stand during the Mourner’s Kaddish. As the rabbi would scan the room, congregation members would share their deceased and my mother would always add Ann Collins to the list for whom the congregation mourned, the cocktail of the elderly or ill who’s physicality had ceased, all representing our collective future. For whom we mourned, for which we mourned.
My relatives came from Ukraine and Belarus. My direct antecedents eluded the Nazis as they fled the Bolsheviks–neither were admirers of the Jews. My mother’s great grandfather hid in a hay bale cart to cross the border; the border patrol’s lazy stabbing of the hay with a pitchfork caught the other fleeing Jews but not him. My father’s grandfather bribed the Bolshevik guards to free him from prison so he could join his family who fled to Canada.
They took us to the home of a Holocaust survivor when I was 10. He showed us the blackened number on his forearm that had wrinkled with his years. He spoke of the tragedy through resilience and awe as a new generation of the kind that Hitler sought to erase sat on his rug, not only alive but thriving with the lavishness that American consumerism brings. He died before my younger brother could hear his story.
When I was 11, the synagogue changed locations from North Salem–near the train tracks and in the neighborhood where mothers couldn’t leave their purses in the car–to South Salem near the Roth’s grocery store and the boutique pet shop. We were outgrowing our roots and the congregation of the old Episcopal Church we moved into was outgrowing theirs. I used to have piano recitals in the old Church as my piano teacher was a prominent church member. I bragged to my peers that I was well-acquainted with the building we would all come to know. One Saturday, we made local news headlines as the congregation carried the torah by foot across town. My older sister worried she would drop it during her appointed time and would have to fast for 40 days and nights like the great scroll dictates.
It was several years before the new building attracted a backwards swastika spread across the Southern side in Sharpie. The negligence masked any severity.
My grandma died in January 2021 due to complications from COVID-19. Her death was timely and brought relief knowing that the sufferings of a demented old age would end. We said the Mourner’s Kaddish over computer screens, standing to expose our crotches to Zoom. We couldn’t stand from the pews to announce our mourning, to see the streaks from stained glass fall alone. The building had changed, the rabbi had changed, the families had changed as the years claimed and welcomed more. But we weren’t there, and we weren’t going to be there.
The old building is now a dance studio. I went in once to pick up a girl I babysat for. While it has transformed, it will forever be standing as a Salem historical site, paying homage to the first synagogue in Salem, the result of pooled savings from our founding elders. Waxed floors and talcum powder greeted me as I entered the great wooden doors at the top of the entrance steps. But the longer I stayed, waiting for the dance class to conclude, the more the perfume of old books crept out from their hiding place, announcing their resilience despite a changing world.
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