adminDon’t be a JAP. That was the clear message I had been given my entire childhood. It seemed like the most important thing NOT to be – not someone snobby, materialistic, or concerned about outward appearances. Or as my father, in his colorful parlance put it, someone who thinks their shit don’t stink. My father let it be known that he was a hippie. He wore dungarees and cowboy boots to the office. He smoked pot (or at least he loved to regale us with stories of his glory days on the college newspaper). He had marched for civil rights. He loved Dylan and The Band. Our family were not the elite; we were outsiders, weirdos, we stood up for the little guy, the freaks, poor people. We were a people who came from the Bronx, from Yonkers, from potato pickers in Russia and Poland and we were not ashamed of that history. So why, at 12 years old, were my parents suddenly insisting I put on a preppy dress and accompany them to the Woodcrest Country Club?
I remember that dinner vividly. I pouted through the whole thing, wearing the required dress but insisting on my tie-dyed one. My parents announced that we would be taking tennis and golf lessons. I could not imagine anything more anathema to my budding identity as a writer and rebel than golf lessons. My father, always the center of the show, had already befriended the entire waitstaff, talking large and tipping even larger. A poor kid from the Bronx, he was thrilled to have “made it” and to give us kids what he never had. Meanwhile, I – who was beginning to read Beat poetry and listen to punk rock- slid gradually under the table, wishing I could run off to squat in an East Village loft.
It’s not that I had never been to a fancy restaurant, certainly for anniversaries and my grandparents’ birthdays. I grew up in Cherry Hill, a Jewish mecca in South Jersey, but I had received conflicting messages about money. On the one hand, my parents were upwardly mobile, moving toward rich. We had a new, larger home that my parents were in the midst of gutting. They were trading in their Oldsmobiles for Lexuses. They installed sod and bought art. We had a housekeeper who came several times a week. We lived in the land of over the top Bar Mitzvahs, teen tours, a children’s boutique called Kamikaze Kids.
At the same time, my mother hated wasting money. For a time, she bought all my clothes from Artie’s is for Smarties, where everything had slight factory defects. For years, all of my tights had seams that ran cockeyed up my hip. She would take us kids to the circus but would never buy the sparkly flashlights hawked in the parking lot; she would take us to the movies but we would sneak in snacks in her purse; she’d buy us each hamburgers at McDonald’s but we always bought one large soda to split. This just seemed wise to me (except the tights!). However, when I begged to play Ms. Packman at the grocery store checkout, Mom told me I didn’t need quarters because the game was already playing, indicating the continuous sample loop. No wonder I thought I was bad at video games – Ms. Packman always died!
Society’s messages were also mixed. It was the era of Madonna’s “Material Girl” but also of the easily mocked Valley Girl. Movies like The Breakfast Club taught me that rich girls are snobs. Meanwhile, I glorified the working-class lives of characters in books like The Outsiders. I did not want to be Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” but I feared that I was. My 4th grade teacher lectured our wealthy class that we all had too many pairs of jeans and that we didn’t appreciate how easily our parents could afford the latest technology: VCR’s. She and her husband had had to save up. That year I drew a picture of a girl with giant tears that read, rich girls cry, too.
I didn’t want to be seen as materialistic, stuck on labels, or demanding. I didn’t want to seem “too Jewish.” And I worried that my parents’ money made me all of those things, made me Baby from Dirty Dancing – or worse, her sister. My rebellion was grunge, then punk, flannel shirts from Village Thrift in dangerous Camden, New Jersey, friends who were largely not Jewish, mostly from far less wealthy families. We looked down on the tennis set, preferring to walk around Philadelphia’s South Street buying Manic Panic and writing poetry in coffee shops. I didn’t want anyone to see me as entitled or like the other rich Jewish girls in our high school whose parents bought them cars and expensive perms.
My grandparents were among the biggest influences in my life. My Poppa Strenger, my mother’s father, a Holocaust survivor and Partisan, had plenty of money but never spent a dime. He bought gold jewelry for investment pieces. He hid cash and gold in the mattresses and the attic. He kept his wallet under the floorboards, even after he moved to a rented apartment. He could not countenance waste. Once when he was babysitting, my mother ordered pizza and soda for us. After we ate our fill, we still had half a pizza and half a liter of Coke. My grandfather urged my skinny little brother to push down more and more … until he puked.
Poppa was incredibly humble and always self-depricating. He himself never took a full plate, preferring our leftovers. At those fancy family dinners, he would get up to refill his own water, throwing the bus boys for a loop. He was the only other person who felt ill at ease at the Country Club and I loved him for it. With his fourth-grade education, his strong Yiddish accent, and his thrift store clothes from the 1970’s, Poppa always felt beneath other people. He never felt having money made him better than anyone else. Riddled with survivor’s guilt, he also never realized that he was enough, deserving. Two generations later, I inherited that guilt.
My father’s mother was also a survivor, leaving Berlin at 16. If Poppa Strenger’s motto was “just in case,” my Grandma Charlotte’s was “Enjoy yourself – it’s later than you think!” In America, she and my Poppa Joey had a much harder life economically than Poppa Strenger. Raising their two kids in a one-bedroom walk up in the Bronx, they nevertheless managed to spend summers in a modest Catskills bungalow colony. They held New Years’ parties and hosted Jewish Holidays. They took my aunt to see Broadway shows. My grandmother proudly showed off the mink stole and the fine jewelry her husband had struggled to buy her, always working two jobs. She never visited us kids without bringing boxes of goodies from the bakery where she worked, chocolate bells, almond horns, black and whites, Chinese cookies, always wrapped in yards of red and white string. She had fun candy for us hidden in her pocketbook, lollipops that whistled or looked like basketball hoops with real balls.
Most importantly, my grandmother had self-respect; she had not let the Nazis take that from her. She married my Poppa Joey at the end of his basic training, just before he shipped out to the South Pacific, all the way down in Biloxi, Mississippi. She was there for a week while he was on duty, so she wandered around on her own. Once she wanted to go inside a fancy restaurant to cool off, but she hardly had any money. She went in anyway and ordered the only thing she could afford, an iced tea. She sat proudly at the white tablecloth and enjoyed every drop. Always be a lady, she would tell me in her New York accent, don’t let no one tell you different. She didn’t mean I should be prissy or keep my legs crossed. She meant, don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not good enough.
As I entered adulthood, I carried these conflicting views of money inside me and they became tied up with my self-worth. I felt terribly guilty that my parents were able to pay my full college tuition, but it didn’t stop me from going to an elite private school. After graduating, I refused to accept money from my parents, afraid of being seen as a “trust fund baby” or like Rachel Green on friends about to marry a rich dentist and relying on her daddy’s credit cards to get by. I felt constantly chased by feeling I had to prove my own worth and prove how not JAP-py and entitled I was. I went so far in the other direction that I gave up opportunities that could have built my career, like taking money from my parents so that I could afford to do an unpaid internship after college. It would only have been a few months, but I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if they were helping me with the rent. I was trying not to need anything, never to be a burden, not to be difficult or entitled. In personal relationships this led to a lack of boundaries and I ended up with a partner who seemed to mainly value me for the fact that I did not demand things – including a big diamond ring – from him.
But Poppa’s influence also led me to positive life choices. I really have led a life that didn’t overvalue money. I made career choices based on work that was meaningful to me, that I felt contributed to the greater good, rather than high salaries. Poppa taught me to be a saver and I have done a lot with a little, living modestly but not ascetically – saving up for things like Bar Mitzvahs and vacations, a little bit of Grandma’s push to embrace life. I never needed or wanted a big house, fancy cars, luxurious vacations or high-end jewelry (though I do have a weakness for shoes!). I have made a nice life for me and my children that is simple and priotizes family togetherness, honoring our history, Jewish values and traditions, and tikkun olam.
It would also be disingenuous to suggest that I somehow bootstrapped my way to a stable life. I did not. Though I accepted it reluctantly, my parents bought me a car as a college graduation present. Not having student or car loans meant I had minimal expenses. My maternal grandmother left me some money when she passed that I put into a downpayment on a Philly rowhome whose mortgage at the bottom of the 2008 recession was less than $500 a month, allowing me, my husband, and our baby to live on my $20,000/year grad school stipend. Most of all, knowing that if I ever got into real financial trouble I could call my parents allowed me to take risks – lower salaries at meaningful jobs, going back to grad school as a new mom, divorcing my husband when I felt I had to. Plenty of people stay together because of money. That fearlessness is a product of privilege.
How I feel about the word JAP today is complicated. I have tried as an adult to embrace my grandmother’s attitude, but the guilt is hard to cast off. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I began to feel more comfortable in asking for what I needed and wanted – first for them, and eventually for myself. Looking back, I realize it was not just my parents’ money that embarrassed me, but that it was Jewish money – loud, big talking, big tipping Jewish money. I have developed my own Jewish identity in a community where you are not judged upon your High Holiday hat. Coming into my own as a Jew has allowed me to see how much I had been willing to buy into the stereotype of the JAP, how much I judged my own parents and my own community. Money still makes me uncomfortable. Where my sister and her husband feel free to plan around what they will eventually inherit from my parents, giving them a sense of security and ease, I like to pretend it doesn’t exist and my stomach churns to even acknowledge its existence on this page. And yet, I also feel like I have built a life for myself and my children that I am proud of, one that is far from over the top Bar Mitzvahs. I don’t have to prove myself so much anymore. I even let my parents take me out to dinner at a fancy restaurant the other day. My dad talked big and tipped even bigger. I didn’t slide under the table even once.
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Rachel Howe is a writer living in Philadelphia. Several years ago she won the Lilith fiction contest, and has been published in Philadelphia Stories, Mom Egg Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dark Matters, and more.