Helping Hands

I sat on the bed with a handful of my mother’s drugs. Little white pills cupped in my 12-year-old hand.

- By Sandy S. Lish

This will end the pain, I thought, moving the tablets around with my thumb. My parents were out to dinner. I had raided their medicine cabinet for whatever I could find. I was pretty sure that if I took enough of everything, I could end it all. I was tired of feeling so alone and so misunderstood.

We were the only practicing Jewish family in my suburban town of Durham, North Carolina, in 1966. But it often felt as if we were the only ones in the whole South. My father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe, the son of a rabbi. My mother was from Brooklyn. They both spoke with thick accents at a time and in a place that didn’t look too kindly on anyone who stood out.

My father was a salesman who sold dry goods to service stations. We lived modestly, but sometimes his customers teased that we—as Jews—were hoarding money. Occasionally, when I helped my father deliver merchandise, a particular patron would greet him with “Hey, Jew Boy.” Those words embarrassed me, but they weren’t as bad as the day that one of his customers looked down at me and said, “You brought your little Jew girl.” That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was young when it happened but knew enough to realize his words weren’t kind. I felt unwelcome and painfully reminded of the weathered swastika that someone had painted on the back of our house several years before.

And then there was school. My classmates were all Christian. No one mistreated me, but no one made an effort to understand me or my faith. It was clear that I wasn’t one of them. I never would be.