The young man told me his name, which I immediately forgot. I told him my name was Tove (pronounced Tovah).
His face lit up. "You’re Jewish?" he asked excitedly.
In Hebrew Tovah is a relatively common female name. Tove is Danish. The Danes pronounce the letter ‘e’ as ‘a’.
I said, "Sort of."
He persisted. "Is it your mother or your father who is Jewish?"
At that instant I decided to prevaricate in order to simplify things. I did not feel like saying, my name is Danish and it just happens to also be a Hebrew name. My father named me after a friend of his because he loved the name. My mother thought he named me after an old girlfriend so she called me "hey you" for the first six months of my life. I have always wanted to change the spelling so it is easier to pronounce. I am married to a Jewish man which is where the "sort of Jewish" comes in. I have always wanted to be Jewish because I had no Gentile identity to call my own. My parents were socialists who did not believe in God. I wanted God and I liked the Jewish one. Unfortunately the Jew I married also did not believe in God and we were raising our son without religion or culture just as we were raised. Too much information for a chance meeting with an Israeli eye cream salesman at the mall, especially one who was so excited to meet one of his own.
"My father was Jewish," I said simply. My father would not have minded this--some of his best friends in his academic world were Jewish. He probably would have found it funny."That’s why I said sort of," I told him, "because the line goes through the mother."
The salesman dismissed this with a shrug. Blood was blood."Do you know what Tovah means?" he asked me.
"It's from tov - it means good." He beamed at me. I had passed the test.
He reached into a jar on the counter and put a dab of clear eye serum on his hand. He scooped a little onto his finger.
