My parents were people of faith, devout Catholics, while Larry’s parents, though nonobservant, were proudly Jewish. But what identity were we giving our children?
L
arry and I were the classic interfaith couple.
He had been bar mitzvah’ed and was proud of his Jewish identity, but had grown up eating pork and shrimp and had no problem marrying a non-Jewish girl. I had been raised Roman Catholic, attending Mass every Sunday, until, as a teenager, I found it difficult to accept the story of the Christian savior’s birth.
Larry and I married in 1981 in a secular ceremony and opted to live with no religion. We settled in a mostly Italian neighborhood on Long Island’s South Shore and had three children, whom we raised in a no-faith environment. This worked just fine — at least in the beginning.
One Saturday in 1997, we drove out from Long Island to New Jersey to attend the bar mitzvah of a son of one of Larry’s employees. We attended the kiddush and luncheon, and then got in the car to drive back home. As we were pulling away, the mother of the bar mitzvah boy waved us down and asked us if we had room in the car for another guest, a woman who had traveled from Manhattan by bus.
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