I wish I could look back on my days in Greek school as happy. I wish I could look back and say that those years were, at the very least, pleasant. But I canât. This is why.
The church basement was always cold, even in the springtime. The classes were harshly lit under fluorescent lighting and the sharp yet luminous eyes of Greek women. Rusted desks and chairs stood on broken floor tiles in rooms with holes in the drywall. This is where I spent my Saturdays. From the time I was old enough to understand that being Greek Orthodox means lighting candles, kissing icons, and drinking wine from a spoon in a priestâs hand, I attended St. Nicholas Greek school.
It wasnât so bad in those first few years. I made friends with the other girls with long hair and even longer last names. I learned my alphabet. I learned how to say words like orange and mountain and fatherland. I learned how to sing the national anthem. I learned to dance around the room in a semicircle, although holding hands with the boys was uncomfortable. At that age, I could ignore the way my teachers mispronounced and misspelled my last name. I didnât understand why at the time, but it didnât matter. They adored me anyway.
It got worse as I got older. I began to notice things. Our class had outgrown the desks and our legs could no longer fit underneath them. Going upstairs for start-of-year mass in the church stopped being fun and became boring. I stopped putting silver quarters in the collection basket that got passed around. The price of tuition and books doubled for no reason in particular. No one ever came to repair the broken tiles or the holes in the drywall. I overheard my mother complaining about the shiny new Mercedes the priest parked in the parking lot. I resented waking up early on a Saturday to go to Greek school. All the girls in my class moved away and in their absence, some of the boys liked to tease me. The teachers never noticed this.
It wasnât a big deal, though. The mild bullying didnât bother me, as I was proud and refused to let it get to me. I recognized how lucky I was to be going to Greek school and I was grateful to be learning my language and culture. I soaked up every note of music and every new word I possibly could. I read any Greek book I could get my hands on and practiced verb conjugations for hours. Yes, I suppose I was unhappy with the Greek school environment and my horrible classmates and the way the Greek bishop talked about intermarriage, but my graduation was coming, and I had to prepare. It would all be over soon.
My very last day is what changed everything. The school liked to put on a concert in mid-June, where all the parents and grandparents would crowd into the tiny church banquet hall to watch their children perform songs, dances, poems, plays, and speeches. At the end, the teachers would present one child from each class with an academic award and give the graduates their certificates.
The festivities were in preparation. The parents hadnât arrived yet and the classes were taking turns rehearsing their performances. I was on stage with a couple of my classmates when it happened.
We had just finished practicing our dance and were gradually getting off stage. Iâm not sure how the topic came up, but my classmates asked me about my father. I didnât normally discuss him with that crowd, but by then I was fourteen, in grade nine, and proud of my Jewish heritage. I had outgrown the shame and secrecy that somehow came with having a Jew for a father, so I didnât see any reason not to tell them the truth.
When we sat back down at our table with the rest of our class, they started. Back and forth to each other but within earshot of me, so they knew I could hear them. A rain shower of anti-Jew jokes. Jokes about stereotypes and overused tropes, the kind that comedians and television shows love to emphasize. Big noses and hunger for money and such. Jokes about real historical events. Mass genocide. Death. Their cold words cut me like a knife. I saw real satisfaction in their eyes when they saw how much their comments upset me. They made cheap humour of my peopleâs suffering. They laughed loudly after each one, as if it was the funniest thing in the world, as if Iâm not four generations removed from Nazis rounding us up and putting us in gas chambers, as if Iâm not descended from victims of the Holocaust, as if the things they laugh about donât still bother me every day.
I didnât say anything to them. I sat there and tried to ignore them. In that moment, I felt like the drywall, peppered with holes and scratches and obscene words. In truth, my mind was reeling from shock. I had never experienced any kind of antisemitism before and I was not equipped to handle this kind of attack. I couldnât say anything, because I had just realized something. Even in the company of my peers, people who were part of the same ethnicity and religion as me, I was still seen as an other. My Jewish roots and last name meant that I could never truly fit in with the community I thought I belonged to. Shame reared its head after being buried for so long and anger followed. The anger was because I didnât tell them off or fight back. But then, the realization came. I didnât belong. It was a feeling I was used to by then, growing up in Catholic school, and one that I would come to get more acquainted with as time went on.
I ended up winning the academic award. I collected my certificate and left with my family, determined never to go back there for any reason. I never did. My memories of that place would forever be poisoned by that last day, however positive they were from the years before. I could never look back and remember anything other than that experience, where I was, for the first time in my life, the target of genuine hate. It took years before I was able to tell anyone about what happened that day because the shame of it felt like the lashes of a whip. Unpleasant as it was, I learned a valuable lesson. The sad reality of our society is that in order to be openly Jewish, you must develop thick skin. You cannot fall to pieces at every hateful word or offensive joke that comes your way. This may have been my first brush with antisemitism, but it certainly wasnât my last. In my case, I learned to take it in stride and not internalize it, because if I did, I would never be able to get out of bed in the morning.
Looking back, I saw how poor the school was in comparison to the church, how hateful the bishop was towards my parentsâ marriage, how the boys mistreated me, and the way my last name turned heads and not in a good way. It was a place of greed, guilt, and hatred. I didnât belong there and maybe I wasnât meant to. I would spend a long time searching for where I did.
