Made Flesh

A Lutheran seminary student wonders what it takes to become a Jew for his girlfriend, whose embrace is “not a preface to anything else.”

- Alit Karp

I met my wife, Maria Madeleine,” the pastor began, “on the last day of classes during my second year at Uppsala University. The two of us were in a course entitled ‘Flowers and Nature in the Work of August Strindberg.’” He said “Strindbari” the way it’s pronounced in Swedish. “The course was an elective open to students from various departments. My wife, who was an avid student of mathematics, came to the lectures in order to clear her head a bit, as she put it.” He paused for a moment and then sang, “Maria, Maria, Maria,” like the song from West Side Story. “She was Jewish like only a Maria Madeleine could be: slight, her hair a dark thicket, her cheeks sunken, her black eyes burning, raven-like. From the very beginning she sat in the front row of the classroom and engaged the professor in an impassioned debate about the haystacks in Fröken Julie and the hollyhocks in Ett drömspel with a fervor and fury that confounded me. ‘Maria Madeleine,’ he said at the end of the third class, when it seemed he couldn’t bear her any longer, ‘If you would, come to my office hours. There’s something I’d like to say to you.’ Much later, she told me that their meeting began with his attempt to persuade her to free up some room for others. Or, as she told me, her laughter tumbling forth while she ran ahead of me barefoot through the hay and the tall, greener-than-green grass, ‘He just wanted me to let someone else get a word in edgewise.’ But she persuaded him, too, that only he and she and she and he, the two of them together, could speak about nature in Strindberg’s plays and pursue its beauty, like a pair of bright butterflies drunk on heat and short on time.