My grandfather's name was Bernard Berman, and I have his nose.
"You've got that Berman nose," my parents told me when I was a kid. "You're just our little Jewish girl."
Until recently, this nose was all I knew about Judaism and my link to it.
Growing up in rural northern Illinois, religion didn’t play much of a role in my upbringing. My mother and father were raised Catholic, so that’s what I was by default. Our family didn’t attend church regularly, and I had no real knowledge or thoughts about my faith, other than the fact that it placed me in a separate category from every other kid at my Lutheran school.
When I was 7 years old, my parents enrolled me in Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the Catholic equivalent of Sunday school. I attended just long enough to meet a couple of milestones and decide that church seemed solemn and scary. During my First Communion, a woman with a stern face and a 19th Century hairdo slapped my hand down when I reached for the “body of Christ” instead of placing out a cupped hand.
Without a spiritual foundation, I never quite fit in at the parochial school I attended. But that wasn’t the only reason for my alienation. My appearance, which my parents and peers suggested fell short of “the ideal,” was mocked mercilessly. There was my body, which was described as “chubby” for much of my childhood until I reached adolescence, and as my mother said, “grew out of it.” There was my dark, curly hair that my classmates deemed “exotic” and required copious amounts of hair products to tame. Then there was my nose; my Grandfather Berman’s nose. It wasn’t the petite button nose of Disney princesses. It was more akin to that of Goofy, or so male classmates often told me. (The anti-Semitic significance of them comparing my face to a dog was lost on me at the time.)
I associated being Jewish with looking like me, rather than following a faith. And since looking like me elicited nothing but negative comments, I didn’t want to claim Judaism as a part of me. I was ashamed of that part of me; ashamed of my grandfather’s nose that was not just the center of my face, but the center of my pain.
So, I cut it off.
At 19 years old, I took the savings I’d accumulated over two decades of babysitting and lifeguarding and got a nose job. I longed to look less like my Grandpa Bernie — a portly man with a genetically-damning schnoz — and more like Brittney Spears, Jessica Simpson, or Christina Aguilera — sexy blondes with discrete nasal appendages.
I swallowed the garbage fed to me by years of social and cultural indoctrination regarding “perfection,” closed my eyes, and let a doctor I didn’t know much about operate on me.
Afterwards, a relative said my post-procedure nose “looked the same.” I was devastated because I’d convinced myself I’d succeeded in my quest for a less pronounced nose. But she was right: my “new” nose wasn’t very different from my old one except that it caused me a lot more physical pain.
For years, I continued to disassociate myself from my Jewish heritage and appearance. I straightened my hair and covered my face in makeup in attempts to look less Jewish. And last year, at the age of 36, I thought I successfully completed the separation.
I was getting my makeup done before a black-tie gala when the aesthetician asked if she could contour my nose. I hesitated, but then agreed, thinking she couldn’t make it any worse. An hour of shading and highlighting later, she spun my chair around to face the mirror. My eyes widened, and my mouth dropped. Makeup had done what the plastic surgeon who performed my rhinoplasty couldn’t. The face reflected back at me was familiar (albeit more colorful), except my nose looked significantly smaller.
I rushed home to show my husband Aaron the “modified” me. Bursting through our bedroom door, I shouted “Surprise!” Aaron froze. After a few moments, he mustered a disingenuous “Nice!” His furrowed brow and forced smile signaled he was shocked, if not perplexed, by my presentation. “Who stole my wife’s nose,” he quipped.
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t not like it. It’s just...not you.”
As disappointed as I was by my husband’s reaction, he was right. It wasn’t me. I achieved what I’d been chasing for so long, and the person who loved me most hated it. When was I going to see what he saw — someone with nothing to hide and nothing to change? For nearly all of my life, I believed the “Jewish girl” my parents described wasn’t OK. So I tried to bury her beneath beauty products and procedures.
I couldn’t see that being a Jewish girl was something to flaunt; something to celebrate. And in that moment, I decided it was finally time to let that Jewish girl out.
The more I begin to explore Judaism through literature and conversations with friends in the faith, the more I discover the rich diversity that is a part of it. I realize that my Ashkenazi Jewish attributes are just a drop in the beauty that is my heritage. And at a time when two-thirds of young Americans are unaware that millions of Jews died in the Holocaust and record numbers of anti-Semitic acts are occuring, embracing my ethnicity and corresponding looks feels more important than ever. And not just for me. I own who I am for my children, all of whom are gifted with their mother's (and great-grandfather's) strong nose.
This year, I’m celebrating my first Hanukkah and looking forward to lighting the menorah with my family. I’m integrating Jewish customs and traditions into our household alongside non-Jewish ones because I want my kids to rejoice in all their component parts, seeing themselves in full, vibrant colors, rather than black and white; right and wrong; “ideal” and “other.”
I’m standing in the truth and traditions of my birthright not because of what I look like, but because it’s who I am. I want my children to honor every aspect of their identities. I hope they grow up feeling confident in their unique aesthetics, rather than demeaned by racist stereotypes and tropes like I was.
My grandfather's name was Bernard Berman. I have his nose. . . and I couldn’t be more proud of it.
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