Kabi Hartman is a Teaching Professor in the English Department at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Her essays have appeared most recently in The Point Magazine, The Millions, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.
Kabi’s essay “Eighteen Takes on Being Jewish” appears in the Summer 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
Carve Questions & Answers
Kabi Hartman
One thing we really loved about this story is its honest look at what religion means to us personally, both as individuals and as a community. This piece wrestles with notions of religion in sometimes difficult, yet sometimes amusing ways, and at every point it feels like an honest inquiry into what it means to you personally. When did you first start seeing this as a conundrum worth exploring in essay form, and did you have any hesitations about working on a piece that inspects religion in this way?
I started “Eighteen Takes on Being Jewish” in 2015, in the wake of my encounter with a distant cousin, R., about whom I write in the essay. In that writing scrap, I asked the central question of “Eighteen Takes”: “How can it be that one of the truest things in my life is also one of the most questionable to me? Why does Jewishness feel foreign to me, as if I am lying every time I claim to be Jewish?” As I relate in “Eighteen Takes,” Cousin R. did a lot of genealogy work, and sent me a narrative about one branch of family on my father’s side. It was seeing the long list of Jewish names in our family that constellated my questions. Then, coming back from the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate conference in August 2015, I wrote a draft of “Eighteen Takes” on the train ride between Montpelier and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
I never have hesitation about writing until the possibility of publication emerges—and then I fret. Creative non-fiction is exposing. I write as honestly as I can so as to explore a question and turn it around for myself, and that process is engaging (if no one is looking over my shoulder), but becomes terrifying once others begin to look and to judge. So, no, I had no hesitation about working on a piece that inspects religion in a personal way, but now I feel hesitation about letting the essay go into the world. What I’m primarily worried about is that my own experience of being a secular Jew in a Jewish family that had a complicated relationship with Judaism will seem irreverent or distasteful to Jews whose relationship to Judaism is more secure.
Happily, though, I have received some positive responses to this essay from friends and family. Some of my Jewish friends even identified with a lot of it!
At one point in the piece, you state, “Even if I were not Jewish, I would still sometimes pray.” I think a lot of people would identify with this statement, regardless of religious leanings. The statement feels like a universal one, as if the human need for prayer, or something resembling it, is inherent, and I am wondering if working through this essay provided a resolution to some of the religious questions you had, or if it produced more questions?
This is a great question, but I think it could be the basis for a dissertation! Is the impulse to pray inherent in humans? And what is prayer?
When I think of praying, I think of Etty Hillesum, the Jewish woman from Holland, about whom I have written. Etty was nourished by prayer during the Holocaust, but, as a secular Jewish woman and a graduate student, she was very surprised by this. She wrote in her diary, “When I pray, I hold a silly, naive or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for convenience’s sake I call God.” Her idea of God is congruent with mine, and I think she made me less inhibited about accepting that prayer can unlock “what is deepest inside” oneself in a good way. What is interesting about Hillesum is that although she was liberated sexually, she was timid about revealing the fact that she prayed. She felt that prayer was more intimate for her than sex.
Writing “Eighteen Takes on Being Jewish” has made me a bit more comfortable with being the kind of Jewish person that I am—but I still struggle with the question of belonging to a Jewish institution such a synagogue. I have come to love what I’ve learned about Jewish ritual and tradition, but I also have trouble maintaining my connection to it.
Since you are an English professor at Franklin & Marshall College, I would love to know what some of your favorite writings are, or what works you feel have influenced you as a writer (or what you believe every aspiring writer would benefit from)?
This question is both an English professor’s dream and torture! I love to discuss writing, but I also love so much of it, for so many different reasons, that it is hard to narrow into a pithy list. But, OK: starting with Angela Banner’s Ant & Bee books, which galvanized me as a child for some reason, I’ll try to list a few of the writings that marked me and acted as turning points. Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov was the first book I read that made me really think (my senior year of high school). I didn’t know it then, but now I look back and realize that it was the beginning of my wanting to become an intellectual. Then, my sophomore year in college, I discovered Virginia Woolf. I read everything by her—novels, essays, diaries, letters—and learned a lot about the Bloomsbury Group as well, so this was formative. I still think that To the Lighthouse is one of the best representations of human subjectivity that exists. Woolf’s fluid point of view is, to me, virtuosic, and her rhythm of writing—the long sentences with all the semicolons, and then the short, staccato, repeated phrases—influenced me, but not so much in “Eighteen Takes.”
I read more women writers than men these days. Some contemporary women writers I love: Claudia Rankine (Citizen), Zadie Smith, my best friend, Julie Otsuka. Julie’s The Buddha in the Attic is groundbreaking in terms of its collective “we” point of view, and I also love the lists and the precise details she uses. I love women who write about the body: Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, and, more recently Emilie Pine. Annie Ernaux’s short memoir about her illegal abortion in 1960s France is something I aspire to in writing—short, honest, transgressive and searing, with these great parenthetical remarks that are meta meditations on her writing process. And where would I be without the great 19th Century English women writers I grew up reading?—Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontes? And, Jewish writers? I’ve practically memorized Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life. Also, I must admit that I like J.D. Salinger. Some people hate Holden Caulfield, but his voice gets me every time.