An enduring legacy of my mixed heritage is that I’ve never felt Jewish enough. At my predominantly Jewish high school in New York, I never bonded with my classmates over having gone to Hebrew school, or fallen asleep in synagogue, or muddled through the Torah portion of my Bar Mitzvah. My own justification for such inexperience has come in the form of penance. It’s no wonder that the only Jewish holiday I make a habit of celebrating is Yom Kippur, where atonement for a year of ignorance comes in denying the pleasure of food. Or maybe every Jew secretly feels that they’re not Jewish enough? Perhaps that’s the true miracle of Jewish guilt.
Either way, the benefit of such penitence is that, when given the opportunity, I go out of my way to try and understand my Jewishness. Much like the Golem spray-painted on the Lennon Wall in Prague, I have a perpetual Star of David-shaped hole in my heart in need of filling. That’s why I was convinced that the Jewish Quarter—complete with museum, synagogues, and cemetery—would be my favorite part of Prague. The sobering historical occasion for a Jewish Quarter—expulsion, near extinction—seemed of no large consequence. After all, this was coming from someone who, when asked where he’d most like to spend his 30th birthday some years ago, chose unequivocally to visit the 9/11 Memorial.
Despite knowing the historical outcome, the experience was still wrenching. At the Pinkas Synagogue, there were photos and text of the teeming, horrifying death camps in Terezin, and wall after wall lined with the names of the individuals who perished. The cemetery was no less shocking; there were so many bodies and such little room to dig that new graves had to be built on top of the old, resulting in a deluge of stone and earth. For Jews in the 20th century, in death, as in life, it seemed almost impossible to escape the close quarters that so typified everyday life.
I retreated back to our hostel before lunch. It was as much a chance to settle my stomach as it was to clear my head. In a few hours, I would be undergoing my Fulbright Campus Committee Evaluation, the near-final step in a long litany of documents and correspondences to prepare as part of my application to China. Though I haven’t mentioned it at all until now, the Fulbright was, in many ways, the maddening third wheel on the honeymoon. I bored Courtney with details during the day and edited my essays by laptop-light after Courtney went to sleep.
How is a honeymoon like quarantine? For the first two weeks in Europe, Courtney and I were almost never out of earshot. In Taiwan, where I’m fortunate enough to be carrying out my Fulbright this February, Courtney and I will be quarantining for fourteen days, likely in the same hotel, but in separate rooms. Taiwan is taking every precaution to quell the rate of infection, and enormous fines are waged on anyone who so much as steps out of their door. After nine months spent entirely together, it’s almost impossible to imagine being apart for that long.
In preparation for the Fulbright interview, I took a shower, donned the only dress shirt I packed, and made sure the ratio of wallpaper to hair in my frame was just right. It was almost a novelty. Courtney took the opportunity to go on a run to the top of Letna Gardens, north of the Old Town on a bluff over the Vltava River, taking steep cobblestone streets the whole way back.
“How was it?” we asked each other, electrified, when the interview was finished and Courtney had returned, throwing open the door to our room. There was so much to catch up on. We had survived our first hour apart in two weeks. But only barely.