As a child growing up in Philadelphia, when adults would ask me about my religion, I would answer, with a smile, “I'm nothing!” This resulted in a polite smile mixed with pity and bafflement.
My Ukrainian Greek Catholic mother married a Jewish man, as did two of her four sisters. My mom may have married my Bronx-born, yeshiva-fleeing father to spite her parents. His mother wasn't pleased, either. The one thing that the two sides of my family shared was the fact that, at least, Hitler hated them all: After all, Mom's parents met on a slave labor farm in Germany.
My folks also both agreed on one thing: Religion was the opiate of the masses, and therefore religion was strictly forbidden to us as children. We were not allowed to learn the basics of either religion; I was told a bat mitzvah was “capitalistic,” and I was pulled out of Ukrainian Catholic language and culture school when I brought home drawings of Jesus Christ.
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