Hawaiian Songbird

Hawaiian Songbird, the Original Story

Pauahi Hall at Punahou School, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Here is my short story, “Hawaiian Songbird.” It was presented at The Braid Theatre for their May 2021 salon production, The Rest is History. Actor Cliff Weissman performed the role with sensitive perfection. The story was edited to suit their program. I hope you enjoy reading the original version as submitted for their consideration.

The choirmaster waded along the rows of benches, listening to sixty young voices. He cupped his ear in his palm, leaned in, paused, moved on to hear the next student sing. Up and down the rows he trooped as we repeated the verse of a song unfamiliar to me: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” As a Jewish eleven-year-old, I’d never heard it.

The choir class was in the third school I’d attended during sixth grade. My elementary education began with first grade in New Jersey at Parkway Elementary which I attended through the beginning of sixth. In October we traveled five thousand miles to Oahu, Hawaii, my parents fed up with East Coast blizzards.

My second sixth grade school nestled like a tropical ground bird in the lush hills above Honolulu, but I only stayed a few months. We moved again, from the rental house to one my parents bought in a suburb on the other side of Diamond Head.

My dad arranged through a colleague to have me tested for admission to Punahou School in the middle of the year, something that almost never happened. I got accepted and became a student in late December, my third sixth grade school.

Punahou means “new spring,” as in the rising of underground water, and the private Hawaiian academy is named for a beautiful natural spring-fed pond in the center of the campus. Pink water lilies floated on its surface and red crayfish scuttled along its muddy bottom. Founded in the eighteen hundreds by Christian missionaries, Punahou is the gold standard for Hawaiian schools and famous all over the islands. I’m not sure my parents knew about its Christian bedrock.

My entire family is Ashkenazi Jewish, all my grandparents born in Russia or Poland, immigrating to the United States in the early nineteen hundreds. My grandfathers attended the same tiny shul in Trenton. My grandmothers refused to serve a meal on the wrong dishes.

Our home was Jewish by identity, not by practice. Our Jewishness was an observance of what we didn’t do rather than what we did. We didn’t celebrate Christmas or eat ham but we also didn’t light Shabbos candles on Friday nights. My dad had memorized his Torah portion for his bar mitzvah. My mom couldn’t recite a single Hebrew blessing.

Yet they were Jewish at their core. They stood up for Jewish rights and Jewish values and wholeheartedly supported Israel. They saved pennies in the pushke. They railed about anti-Semitism, bristled at prejudice against Jews, and despised Jewish quotas that limited what events they could be part of.

Har Sinai Temple Religious School in Trenton taught me that Abraham broke idols to prove their feet of clay, that Jonah was sent to the belly of a whale to think about his mistakes. We learned about Noah gathering animals two by two and stabling them on a boat, tigers and mice bedding down in the same clump of hay. How those stories made me Jewish, I didn’t understand. I didn’t yet grasp metaphor or symbolism. The story I most remember was about Hannah and her seven sons. Martyrdom was incomprehensible and left me horrified.

While I attended Har Sinai School, my parents never made it for Friday night services. Not even for High Holy Days.

I’d studied music in New Jersey: piano lessons for four years, and three summer programs with a high school choirmaster. He taught us, a gaggle of kids from across the township, not only to master multi-part harmony, but to sing opera. We didn’t know we were too young to learn opera. Hell, we didn’t even know we were singing opera. We just followed his directions and sang a collection of songs in English, Latin, Italian, and French. The first two years, I was the youngest of the group. Eight, nine, ten years old, my voice was pretty, consistent, soprano. Music led me into a dimension of beauty and magic unlike my ordinary daily landscape. I loved the emotional lift choir added to my knee-scraped life.

When the Punahou choir director returned twice to listen to my voice, he thought he’d hit the musical jackpot. I was a child who’d had training and could carry a tune. He selected me and one lucky little boy to sing solos for the upcoming music recital. Our class would perform before the entire elementary school, over six hundred kids and teachers. He sent me home with orders to practice.

Friendship groups had long been established at Punahou, and entering in late December proved a social faux pas. I was the odd kid who wore saddle shoes and wide skirts over fluffy crinolines. Island girls wore sandals and slim dresses without a waistline. Their speech was flecked with colorful pidgin English while mine was heavily New Jersey accented and peppered with Yiddish. The other students welcomed me about as much as honey bees invite hungry bears to lunch. Chosen as the prima songbird didn’t endear me to the other sixth grade kids.

The hymn instructed us to trust in Jesus, our faithful friend, to bear our sorrows and grief. No way could I practice that song in my home. I was too terrified to even tell my mom what I’d been chosen to sing, but I did practice. I did everything my New Jersey choir teacher had taught us. I opened my mouth and shaped each sound, expanded my diaphragm, controlled my breathing, pronounced each syllable, articulated every consonant, rounded the vowels, and projected to reach the most distant audience.

I practiced silently, lest my Jewish mother hear me singing about Jesus and send me straight to hell with a few of her stiff punches and enough Yiddish curses to make the choir teacher blush deeper than a red hibiscus.

On the day of the performance, I stood in front of the entire choir next to the lucky little boy who’d been selected to sing solo. Punahou’s auditorium was massive as a cathedral, with a spacious balcony that belled over an enormous lower floor crammed with wooden pews. Students and staff filled every seat. We faced a rowdy audience. Though I knew from drama class and ballet recitals not to look directly at faces but at an imaginary spot on the far wall, I still saw a million pair of eyes glaring at me. Me, the new kid whom no one liked.

In the orchestra pit, the choirmaster lifted his arms to direct us. I did fine with the ensemble pieces. Individual voices submerged anonymously in the jumble of many kids singing. But when it came time for me and lucky little boy to sing our solos–well, I did as I had practiced. I opened my mouth and lifted my voice from my diaphragm. I rounded the vowels and articulated the consonants.

And I sang…silently.

Not one sound emitted from my throat. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how. The choirmaster’s eyes opened so wide I worried they’d fall from the sockets. He gestured with windmill spins, dropped his jaw in a gape, and raised his shoulders high enough to touch his ears. The veins in his neck pulsed. His skin sunburned in front of me. I did the best I could, but a Jewish kid cannot sing to Jesus, and so my voice simply did not function.

The choirmaster later demanded to know why I hadn’t performed. I stared at him, my answer struck dumb. It was not like me to ever refuse to obey a teacher but there was nothing I could explain. He never called on me again to sing a solo.

The next day the Punahou kids finally welcomed me to their school. They planted a cockroach the size of a dinner plate inside my homeroom desk. Did I tell you how terrified I’ve always been of bugs? Punahou remained a foreign country where I wasn’t welcome. I never made a single friend at that school.

I’d witnessed and suffered the shame of prejudice and humiliation, of being different in the tropical islands that my parents insisted were a melting pot of races, cultures, and faiths, with Hawaiians joyously celebrating differences and commonalities. Hula and luau and stories of Madame Pele bound the myths that draw tourists to the islands in droves of happiness-seekers.

The two years that I lived in Hawaii were torture for me.

It would be decades before I understood what it meant to be Jewish, to begin to immerse myself in Jewish religion, history, and lifestyle. But that moment of refusing to sing about Jesus was the moment I became a Jew.

Since my thirteenth birthday, the day my family left the islands, I have never returned to Hawaii. I would love to visit someday and see it without the painful imprint of my childhood. May God bless the islands and people of Hawaii.

O What a Life, Part V, Extraordinary Changes, C

My first grandson, two years old at the time, toddled at an indoor playground, climbing on giant cement lions and through red and blue walls pierced with cutouts meant to teach shapes. He loved every minute of play until he stood in front of a wavy mirror, one of those that you find at a funhouse. He looked at what he knew was supposed to be him. The twisted, misshapen little reflection that looked back made him shiver and turn away. Life is much the same. We don’t need funhouse mirrors to show us how much the rest of the world may see us as distorted. This is some of the story of the final two years I lived in Hawaii. From when I was 11 and in sixth grade until the end of seventh grade, Hawaii was my home.

The day my parents deceived me. I’d watched my dad dig out the driveway during a raging blizzard in New Jersey. Someone had called him to make a house call, and dedicated physician that he was, he would not say no. I stood at my window, crying as the snow and wind pummeled him. He couldn’t go to serve their needs until he could get the car out of the garage and down the driveway. My breath on the window, I pleaded for him to come inside where it was safe. He couldn’t hear me of course, and he would have ignored me if he had. Months later my parents announced we were going to move to Hawaii, to live there for only one year. Warm and tropical Hawaii was a melting pot where people of all races and religions lived in peace and harmony. My sister and brother were too young to understand the potential upheaval of their lives, but at 11, I had stakes in where I lived. Only a year? I could do that. A year was an adventure, and I told my friends and cousins we’d be back soon. I trusted my parents. I went without complaint.

But we didn’t go back to live. Ever. I only saw my friends and family a few times after that, each visit “home” awkward with newness and unsuited habits. I’d been deceived. We lived in Hawaii that second time for nearly two years, and when we returned to the mainland, it was to California, not New Jersey. No matter what is written or believed, you simply can never go back because what you left behind doesn’t exist anymore. The friendships melted like popsicles, the relationships with family thinned to gruel, and we, the transplanted members, were strangers all. I missed everything. I missed everything.

The first day of sixth grade in Honolulu. I’d left school in the middle of autumn so school was already in session in both states. There ends the similarity between those two schools. I started in a public school in the hills outside of Honolulu. We were renting a home in the heart of a tropical garden but my paradise ended at the school gates. The class was comprised entirely of Asian kids who sat in a divided room, girls on one side and boys on the other. Two sets of rows arranged the kids in partners of two, each desk butted up against the next. As in Trenton, I was one of the tiniest kids in this class but was still assigned the very back row next to a tall, big-boned girl. That was, I sat there for the first day. My second day of class, my desk had been pushed up against the teacher’s. It isolated me from the all the other kids. I wondered what deed had banned me to such far corner. Later I heard that the Chinese girl who’d been my one-day partner would not sit next to a Haole (white) girl, and her parents enforced the demand.

I dressed and looked different. I wore saddle shoes and bobby socks, crinolines under my skirts, and my blond curls obeyed no orders but their own. My fair skin burned quickly. My thick NJ accent made it difficult for the kids to determine meaning from what I said. The other girls wore slim, sleeveless shifts, their straight black hair sleekly tied in pony tails or held neatly by headbands. Nearly all the kids walked barefoot but that wasn’t even a discussion in my house. With no textbooks in the entire school, (there wasn’t at that time a single Hawaiian public high school accredited for college admission, making private schools mandatory for anyone hoping to attend college) the teacher taught by oral lecture, delivered in pidgin English. You’ve probably heard snippets of this dialect on TV shows. Da kine, lolo, and auwee are common and easy to translate. True pidgin is as hard to understand as Beowulf in its original dialect. Listening to an entire conversation confounded me as I tried to figure out what the teacher said on my first day in her class, the last day of that particular unit. They’d been studying Pennsylvanian coal mines in social studies, a subject I hadn’t studied in New Jersey. (Don’t ask me why a class of Chinese-Hawaiian kids were studying Pennsylvanian coal mines. It made no sense to me then or now.) I couldn’t understand anything she said and went home that night with nothing to study because there was no textbook, remember?

On my second day of school, the teacher passed out a 2-page test on Pennsylvanian coal mines. As I stared at dozens of questions on a topic about which I knew absolutely nothing, a pre-recorded voice came over the loud speaker, jabbering about bat-filled caves in New Mexico. Near panic about the test and now distracted by the noise over the PA system, I finally realized that if I could block out the New Mexico cave audio, I could concentrate on the test about which I knew nothing. What a great idea the Hawaiians had come up with! So I blocked the cave lecture, focused on coal mines, and turned in a test of wild guesses and made up responses. On my third day of school I sat at my desk, far enough that I would not contaminate the other kids (I guess) and watched in horror and shame as the teacher held up my coal mine test with the first “F” I’d ever received. Then she held up another “F” grade I’d earned – on the bat caves of New Mexico.

All through the school we could hear the screams of children being beaten by their teachers. Corporal punishment was permitted throughout the Hawaiian public school system, and this school exercised its rights regularly. Our teacher threatened often but I never witnessed her beating a kid. My little brother, only 6, was so terrified (his teacher did beat kids in his class, though never him) that he developed a stutter and no one could understand him. His smile disappeared behind a face pale with nerves.

Recess time required that you play. Simply wandering on the playground by yourself was not permitted, and refusal to join a game promised a kid a reason for a beating. Every recess proved a nightmare for me. No one would let me play in the games so I walked at the perimeter of activities, hoping that it looked to the supervisors as if I was engaged in playing on a team. It required careful placement of feet so I appeared to play without incursion onto the play courts where I was not welcome.

My life at Punahou School. Punahou means “new spring,” as in a surfacing of underground water, and the famous Hawaiian school is named for a beautiful natural spring in the center of the campus. My dad arranged through a colleague to have me tested for admission to Punahou in the middle of the year, something that almost never happened. But I got accepted and got out of the public school where I was hated to become a student at Punahou, a school founded in the 1800’s by Christian ministers. (We moved houses at about the same time, and my little brother also got transferred to another school where he eventually calmed and dropped his stutter as he learned to smile again.) Would love to say that they loved me at Punahou but they didn’t. I was the odd girl still, and I admit that I didn’t know how to make friends. Still, the choirmaster loved me. Well, he loved me the first day I attended his class.

He walked around the pews, listening to about 60 little voices, seeking two that could sing, a boy and a girl. I’d studied music in NJ, piano and singing, including a few summers with an instructor who taught us, a bunch of very young kids, not only how to sing in multi-part harmony, but to sing opera. We didn’t know we were too young to learn opera; hell, we didn’t even know we were singing opera. We just followed his directions and sang a bunch of songs in languages other than English. That young, my voice was pretty and dependable and very soprano. So when the Punahou choirmaster heard me sing, he thought he’d hit the musical jackpot. I was child who’d had training and could carry a tune. He selected me and one lucky little boy to sing the solo for the upcoming musical performance in front of the entire school. He sent me home with orders to practice.

Thing is, I am Jewish and the song was a Christian hymn about loving Jesus with all my soul. No way could I practice that song in my home. I was too terrified to even tell my mom what I’d been chosen to sing. So I did practice. I did everything my NJ opera teacher had taught us. I opened my mouth and shaped each sound, lifted from my diaphragm, controlled my breathing, pronounced each and every syllable succinctly, rounded the vowels, and projected to the back of the auditorium. Punahou’s auditorium was huge, with an enormous downstairs area crammed with wooden seats and a spacious balcony. I practiced soundlessly, lest my Jewish mother hear me singing about Jesus and send me straight to hell with a few of her famous punches and enough Yiddish curses to make Oahu blush.

On the day of the performance, I stood in the front of the entire choir next to the lucky little boy who had also been selected. We faced a packed auditorium and though I knew from theater and ballet recitals not to look directly at the audience but at an imaginary spot on the far wall, I still saw about a million pair of eyes staring at me. Me, the new little kid whom no one liked.

The choirmaster stood in the orchestra pit and lifted his arms to direct us. I did fine with the ensemble pieces – every individual voice got lost in the jumble of many kids singing. But when it came time for me and unlucky little boy to sing our solos – well, I did as I had practiced. I opened my mouth and lifted my voice from my diaphragm; I rounded the vowels and articulated the consonants. And I sang silently. Not one sound emitted from my throat. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how. Choirmaster’s eyes opened so wide I worried that they’d fall from his sockets. He gestured with windmill spins, opened his own mouth in a gape and pulled his shoulders high enough to touch his ears. The veins in his neck pulsed and his skin sunburned in front of me. I did the best I could, but a Jewish kid cannot sing to Jesus, and so my voice simply did not function.

Choirmaster never called on me again to sing though he demanded to know why I hadn’t performed. I stared at him, my voice struck dumb. It was not like me to ever refuse to obey a teacher but there was nothing I could explain.

The next day the Punahou kids finally welcomed me to their school. They planted a cockroach the size of a dinner plate inside my homeroom desk. Did I tell you how terrified I’ve always been of bugs?

I’d witnessed and suffered the shame of prejudice and humiliation of being different in the tropical islands that my parents insisted were a melting pot of races, cultures, and faiths, with Hawaiians joyously celebrating differences and commonalities. Hula and luau and stories of Madame Pele bound us in the myths that draw tourists to the islands in droves of happiness-seekers. I still have never returned though one day I would love to travel there and see it without the strange colors of my childhood to make it seem ugly. May God and all the gods bless the islands and people of Hawaii.

 

 

Image courtesy Pixabay.com, public domain

O What a Life, Part III Extraordinary Changes, A

The moment our father’s sperm pierces our mother’s egg and forms a zygote, we’re in for the lifetime of changes that will make us who we are. There is nothing so certain, transformative, or unpredictable as change. We might cast spells to resist it or attempt to chant it into essence more quickly, but we can almost never foretell the future until we reflect on the outcome many years later. Until we think about what might have happened had the change not taken place. History books swell with facts and theories about the big events that shaped the centuries and defined world cultures. The deaths of great men and women whose names and deeds everyone knows; the establishment of international organizations to promote peace; wars and revolutions that destroy generations of children for the future of others; the passing of federal acts, laws, and amendments to balance national justice; the pacts that create new nations out of old colonies – each of us knows these stories in personal ways. We know where we stood when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and our dreams exploded into space; when Hurricane Andrew landed in New Orleans and drowned so many innocents; when terrorists flew stolen planes into the Twin Towers and flouted American principles of freedom; and when a small town in Japan called Fukushima suffered a tsunami and threatened the safety of the world with leaking radiation.

Following are the intimate moments that took my breath away, that made me fall on my knees and forced my fist to my mouth, stifling huzzahs or shrieks. These are the extraordinary changes that marked and shaped my life.