Ellen Lit­man is the author of Man­nequin Girl: A Nov­el and the sto­ry col­lec­tion The Last Chick­en in Amer­i­ca, a final­ist for the Los Ange­les Times First Fic­tion Award and for the Young Lions Fic­tion Award. She will be blog­ging here this week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

My first job out of col­lege was at a large insur­ance com­pa­ny in Bal­ti­more. I was a com­put­er pro­gram­mer there, and in addi­tion to my entry-lev­el salary, I was enti­tled for five days of vaca­tion, ten sick days, a hand­ful of stan­dard fed­er­al hol­i­days and on top of that, two float­ing ones. Those float­ing hol­i­days – they were just free­bies, real­ly. They could be picked at ran­dom, used for any­thing. At least that’s what I thought.

I start­ed the job in July and now it was autumn. Rosh Hashana was approach­ing, to be fol­lowed close­ly by Yom Kip­pur.

“You’re tak­ing the float­ing hol­i­days?” asked my co-work­er Ami. It was more of a state­ment than a ques­tion. Maybe even an order. Ami grew up in Israel, mar­ried an Amer­i­can, and now, in her fifties, had three daugh­ters close to my age. At the office she was famous for speak­ing her mind. Even the upper man­age­ment feared her sharp tongue.

But she was kind to me. I was a fel­low Jew, a fel­low immi­grant. Maybe she saw a bit of her­self in me. Maybe she saw one of her daugh­ters. My fam­i­ly and I came from Rus­sia three years before. They were in Pitts­burgh now, while I was here in Bal­ti­more, liv­ing on my own for the first time in my life. Ami must have felt sor­ry for me, a young girl, all alone. We were sup­posed to have things in com­mon, she and I. A world­view, a set of val­ues, a sense of shared his­to­ry. I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to dis­ap­point her in a dozen dif­fer­ent ways.

I shook my head and told her no. I wouldn’t be using my float­ing hol­i­days. Why should I? I thought. What would I do with myself – all alone in my small apart­ment? I’d nev­er observed Rosh Hashana and Yom Kip­pur before, and I wasn’t plan­ning to start now.

Ami stared at me for a moment. ​“You poor girl,” she said. ​“You don’t even know who you are.”

I should have felt chas­tened, I guess; but instead I was furi­ous. Hav­ing grown up in the Sovi­et Union, I had no reli­gion and didn’t feel a need for one. But that didn’t make me any less of a Jew. Back in Rus­sia, it was my eth­nic­i­ty, my nation­al­i­ty, a line in my Sovi­et pass­port, a way of life. It was in my last name (decid­ed­ly un-Russ­ian) and in my facial fea­tures. ​“Just so you know,” a col­lege class­mate once told me, unprompt­ed, ​“I have no prob­lem with Jew­ish peo­ple.” This was a vari­a­tion on the ​“some of my best friends are Jews” line and a dead give­away that some­thing was afoot. ​“He’s such a Jew,” anoth­er col­lege class­mate said in pass­ing, refer­ring to a par­tic­u­lar­ly unap­peal­ing professor.

So yes, I knew exact­ly who I was and where I stood, even if the only time I stepped into a syn­a­gogue in Rus­sia was to pur­chase a year’s sup­ply of matzha. (You couldn’t get it any­where else.) I had good friends, also Jew­ish, and we’d long ago learned what to expect: col­leges we couldn’t apply to, pro­fes­sions we couldn’t pur­sue. We shared a cer­tain sense of humor, a cer­tain kind of sad­ness. We’d learned to rec­og­nize oth­ers like our­selves. ​“Our peo­ple,” we called them.

Here in Amer­i­ca being Jew­ish meant some­thing else entire­ly. I didn’t quite know what it meant. Bar mitz­vahs and bat mitz­vahs? Hebrew schools? High hol­i­days? Days after arriv­ing in Pitts­burgh my fam­i­ly and I were tak­en to a syn­a­gogue for Yom Kip­pur. I remem­ber feel­ing jet-lagged, dis­ori­ent­ed, bereft of my old life, and des­per­ate for some­thing to believe in, some­where to belong. But the syn­a­gogue was huge, and inside there were rows upon rows of well-dressed peo­ple, who all seemed to know one anoth­er and who had no time for us. I sat up on the bal­cony lis­ten­ing to the Hebrew words I didn’t under­stand and I want­ed the whole thing to be mean­ing­ful. But noth­ing felt famil­iar. There were no mir­a­cles that day, no sud­den sense of com­ing home.

In the years to come, I would keep search­ing. Not for a new iden­ti­ty, but for that elu­sive feel­ing of belong­ing. Who were ​“my peo­ple” now? I’d find them in all sorts of like­ly and unlike­ly places. At soft­ware com­pa­nies where I worked. In writ­ing class­es I took at night and lat­er in grad school. Some of these peo­ple would be Jew­ish, but not all.

I still don’t attend a syn­a­gogue or observe hol­i­days, though. Does it make me a bad Jew? Per­haps. But it doesn’t mean I don’t know who I am. 

Ellen Lit­man has been the recip­i­ent of the Rona Jaffe Foun­da­tion Writ­ers’ Award, and her work has appeared in Best New Amer­i­can Voic­es, Best of Tin House, Amer­i­can Odysseys: Writ­ing by New Amer­i­cans, Dossier, Tri­quar­ter­ly, Ploughshares, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. Born in Moscow, she teach­es writ­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut and lives in Mansfield.

Relat­ed Con­tent: Essays: Hol­i­days, Cus­toms, and Observances