Our Town

Today we are flying back to America for the summer. I’m looking forward to my big American washing machine, bacon, cheddar cheese and buying all the cheap vitamins and melatonin I want. I’m looking forward to the ease of daily transactions in my native language. I’m not looking forward to the daily assault of antisemitism that I know will accompany our visit to the US.

During the pandemic, my husband and I satisfied a long-held dream: we wanted to own an ancestral vacation home in some cute New England town, like real Americans. Ever the good third-generation Jews, my husband and I tested into fancy Prep schools, and grew up adjacent to kids whose parents had ancestral family homes in places we’d never visited, like Block Island and Maine. Some Jews had second homes in the Jew-friendly section of the Berkshires, where Jews were tolerated unlike the WASPier sections of the Northeast. A cousin of mine had a ski condo at Hunter, so I knew having a vacation home was achievable, I just wasn’t sure how.

Initially our fantasy was about owning a ski condo so we could teach our kids to ski. Like many Northeasterners, we’d both learned to ski as teenagers on school trips. But we saw how much better we could be at skiing if we learned it earlier in life like our non-Jewish friends. This was a gift we wanted to give our children: the ability to ski like a WASP.

For years we wasted Vermont realtors’ time hunting for an affordable house in Vermont. But after a head-on collision on a rural road during a summer vacation in Stowe, followed by a month in and out of Burlington Hospital, we no longer harbored any Vermont fantasies. We tried going to back to the state where we’d gotten married, and spent every summer and winter, but the trauma was too present.

The summer after the car crash, in 2020, the kids’ summer camps were cancelled and a vast stretch of un-scheduled time lay before us — a summer when we both had full time jobs and I was working through final edits on a book for my think tank. I asked the kids to each pick one thing they wanted to do that summer, and I would do my best to make it happen.

My son chose sailing and my daughter wanted to ride her bike, so I had those two criteria in mind as I looked for a summer rental to get us out of the Brooklyn heat. To my surprise, I located an affordable house rental in a town in Maine that had a bike path and a sailing camp. I’d always hated Maine. It was far, cold, and full of Mainers who didn’t know from Jews. Whenever I’d been to Maine before I couldn’t wait to leave. But this town in Maine looked charming. Maybe Maine was different now. It was certainly warmer.

When we pulled into town and saw a Pride flag hanging outside a cupcake store on the edge of town, we breathed a sigh of relief. If you could be gay in Maine you could probably also be Jewish there. The next year, with help from the car crash settlement, plus the newfound understanding that our time on earth was finite, we finally realized our dream of owning an ancestral property — one our kids could pass down through the generations.

We decorated the house as though it was an old American family home, but make it Jewish. I scoured Maine flea markets for items that looked Jewish, rescuing a Hanukkiah and candlesticks that would do the work of ushering in Shabbat. I framed my grandfather’s high school diploma. He’d been the valedictorian of Mountaindale High School in the Catskills, in 1923. His diploma had been signed by a Jewish principal and a Jewish Superintendent, back when the Catskills were filled with Russian and Polish Jews trying to coax the ground to grow something, anything.

I framed old photos from family albums to decorate the walls - one of my husband’s great grandfather wearing a fur hat in Kyiv, and another of my great grandparents in Paris, looking stylish and happy before the war.

And finally, I ordered a historic name plate from the local historical society. According to town records, the last known location of a set of spoons made by Paul Revere was our house. We laughed at the ridiculousness of two Jews finding Paul Revere’s spoons in their house. The historic marker went up right away. It took another two years for me to get up the courage to nail a mezuzah to the door frame.

This will be our sixth summer in Maine, but we no longer know if we will pass this home down to our children. Turns out, you can be a Jew in Maine, but only the right kind of Jew. Our town, which we loved for being welcoming, artsy and liberal, is now all in on sending a Nazi to represent them in Congress.

I fear that in Maine, we will return to something like the state of near-hysteria we lived with in Brooklyn, when every day we woke up not knowing who was going to out themselves as a Jew hater, or worse, someone who sat in complicit silence. Would it be a nanny pushing a stroller while wearing a keffiyah calling for Jewish annihilation? A beloved musician demanding Jews stop starving Gaza? Our city councilor celebrating October 7th, then walking around Brooklyn in a watermelon jumpsuit calling for Intifada?

I’ve already been kicked out of the local Maine Facebook group for pointing out that what was happening in Gaza might be terrible, but it wasn’t Israel’s choice, could be ended as soon as Hamas returned the hostages, and was under no definition a genocide. Or maybe they kicked me out for saying that Zionism wasn’t an evil ideology, but the right to self determination for one of the most persecuted minorities on earth. It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is what I encounter on a daily basis in town that sends a spike of rage through my system. Will it be six people who show up to the Thursday free concert series on the town Green wearing watermelon sweatshirts? Will it be the local bookstore, where last summer I was invited to give a book talk, now kitted out with a display of Gazaology? Will it be the local coop, where organic wild blueberries come with a side of righteous Jew hatred? The town vote to divest from Israel while the homeless population grows and the local food pantry is shuttered? Graffiti calling to decolonize Maine from Zionists? Campaign signs plunged into our neighbors’ lawns, heralding the exciting possibility of electing a misogynist with a Nazi tattoo?

I saw where things went in Brooklyn, and I see where they’re going in Maine, which is gearing up for a clash of the Far Right and the Far Left. Fun local twist: everyone in Maine is armed. As a Jew, I know when the political landscape is this polarized, there’s only one place both sides will find common ground: blaming the Jews.

The US has been on an economic decline for a long time, and federal cuts have hit Maine hard. A sizeable population in the state lives at the poverty line. The Section 8 housing units down the block have fallen into decay. Shockingly, the Section 8 residents could care less about the faux-working class Hotchikiss grad running for Senate, with the food back shuttered and unemployment numbers climbing. Most Mainers live off the land, but the lobsters are moving north due to warming waters. There’s a homeless encampment in the woods behind the supermarket. But instead of helping the community, the townsfolk who go to the polls have chosen to take a stand on a conflict they don’t understand in a place they’ll never visit, and can’t locate on a map.

I hope we have a beautiful summer filled with blueberry ale and lobster pasta, kayaking the Passagassawakeag, stargazing, and the electric shock of plunging into the dark, frigid waters of the Gulf of Maine on a hot day.

But a year is a long time to be gone, and I fear our town will not have changed for the better. I’m afraid of what I might find, and what is yet to come. But most of all, I can’t stop thinking about the old saying about elections: as Maine goes, so goes the nation.