Dear Ms. Walker:

Please think of this letter like those notes full of wishes that people fold and fold and fold to fit into a crevice in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I tell you this because I just re-read The Color Purple, in all of its epistolary glory, after I learned that you wouldn’t allow the book to be translated into Hebrew.

I tell you this because letters like Celie’s—thousands of letters like hers—live in the Wall until they are swept away by maintenance workers. But before that happens, I’d like to believe that those words reach heaven on the breath of all the prayers constantly hovering over Jerusalem. These multi-religious pleas and praises to God are what the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai described as “the ecology of Jerusalem.”

Celie and Shug have their own astonishing floating theology. Neither of them has ever found God in a church. God is genderless. God is nature. God is part of everything and so are we. Jews and Christians and Muslims. Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis. “God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t,” Shug tells Celie. God loves beauty for the sake of beauty. Nothing makes God angrier than walking by the color purple in a field and taking no notice of its glory.

There is so much color in Israel. Some of it invented though, like the Green Line. I imagine that kind of color is anathema to your politics, to your soul. I don’t like it either. But I must tell you that I am still a Zionist. I feel the same way about Israel that Celie’s missionary sister Nettie felt about Africa. The first time she set eyes on the African coast something like a large bell struck her soul. The first time I went to Jerusalem my friends made me get out of the car and physically walk into the city. I felt like a pilgrim. But the first time I truly saw Israel — the golden colors of Jerusalem stone, all shades of blue in the Armenian quarter, the glittery reds and pinks in the Arab market — was when I landed in Israel directly from visiting the ashes of Auschwitz.

Or more accurately the ashes of Majdanek, another camp in Poland. Auschwitz is a tourist attraction. You can buy a hot dog outside of the sanitized concentration camp. The piles of shoes and pots and pans that the Jews thought they needed when they were deported to concentration camps look more like sculptures—frozen by history and cliché. But Majdanek is black, charcoal black, and the bleakest place I’ve ever seen. The day after I visited, I was in Israel and it was the first time I shed personal tears for the Nazi genocide of my people. It was the first time I understood why Israel has always been and will always be the heart and soul of the Jewish people.

But life has never been a fairy tale in Israel. There are distinct geographic and class divisions. They exist as sharply among Jews as they do between the Palestinians and Israelis. But to call these social problems apartheid is a false historical equivalency, Ms. Walker. Israel is not an apartheid state. There is no official policy of discrimination of any one people as there was in South Africa. Yes, there is injustice and oppression. But there is also an entire society of Celies— Jewish women burdened by sexism, misogyny and wholesale ignorance. These women need Celie. I know that somehow The Color Purple will reach some of these women surreptitiously if the book is available in Israel in Hebrew. They’ll read that God’s will has nothing to do with their husbands’ ill wills. God is a savior. Their husbands are jailers.

If your book were translated into Hebrew, I would hand out copies in the streets of Me’ah Shearim in Jerusalem and B’nai Brak in Tel Aviv, where women are forced to cross the street in deference to men. I’d hand them out in the back of buses where women are corralled because of some twisted, sinful interpretation of Jewish religious law. I’d distribute them to Palestinian women, for many of whom Hebrew is also their first language.

But until I have your book to give them, these women are as mute as pillars of salt. That was Lot’s wife’s punishment when she was instructed not to look back at the ongoing destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah. But how could Lot’s wife, whose name was believed to be Judith, not turn around to make sure her children were safe. Celie looked back to locate her children too and for that she was also entombed in a metaphorical stony pillar of salt. But she didn’t stay trapped. When she broke out of her numb existence it was not so much a miracle, but an act of womanhood.

Don’t your Palestinian and Israeli sisters deserve to read Celie’s story? Don’t they need to know that noticing the color purple is their God-given right too?

Yours truly,

Judy Bolton-Fasman

Okay, Elizabeth Wurtzel, you’re incendiary, condescending, a bit heartless and inexperienced, but you’re not totally wrong. The premise of your screed in The Atlantic that motherhood is not a job is true. At the risk of engaging in some blustering semantics—motherhood is messy. It’s consuming. It’s a woman’s blood. A mother’s milk. Motherhood is a mind-blowing, body-altering experience and no one can come close to telling you how radically amazing, frightening, depressing, frustrating and exhausting it is until you become a mother. That’s just the way it is. And believe me, I hate to admit when my mother is right.

Wikicommons

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Just to be clear, I’m not the 1% stay-at-home mother you take to task, Ms. Wurtzel. I’m a writer. I work hard at it, but I don’t come close to paying the mortgage from my wages. I also devote a lot of my time to mothering my two teenagers and I don’t get a dime for that. My husband supports our family. He’s in a field that’s more lucrative than mine. That’s a fact.

I’m blessed to have the choice to work from home, but I’m not spoiled. I think multi-tasking is a myth perpetuated to drive women crazy. I decided to stay at home when my first child was born because I wanted to be the most important person in her life. That’s not egotistical, that’s love. Full-blown maternal love. I break my own glass ceilings each time my children choose me as their go-to-person. Sometimes I lose out to their friends, but I can live with that. At the end of the day, I’m the one that they confess their sins and their fears to. And to paraphrase you, if you tell me that anyone can do that for my kids, I swear I’m going to smack you. No one, but no one, could ever love my kids like I do because I am their mother. Period.

Just in case you’re wondering, I don’t shop at Chanel. (Once in a blue moon I buy makeup at Bloomingdale’s.) I don’t get facials unless I have a gift certificate. And I don’t wear Lululemon to some fancy shmancy gym. But you probably think I’m a slacker for grabbing an extra hour of sleep in the middle of the day after I’ve stayed up most of the night with my daughter to see her through a prolonged asthma attack. And ditto for staying up very late to support my kids when they’re studying. Once upon a time I slept late with my infant son in my arms after he stayed up all night with colic, which trust me is no fairytale.

I’m the best person to comfort my children when they are bullied, when someone breaks their hearts or when they’re preparing for a big test. Mothers are special that way. True, I don’t get a salary for supporting my kids through life. Accordingly, I’m not a real feminist in your book. But I’m a woman who knows what it’s like to love two human beings so much that I would die for them without a second thought. I daresay that’s past, present and post-feminism.

And by the way, I got married when I fell in love with someone who made me a better person than I was. He’s my best friend. I haven’t compromised my integrity or my independence one whit. I’m damned proud to be my husband’s wife. Grimace all you want, but I’m also damned lucky. And by the way, if you’re in a healthy marriage, by definition you’re a full-time wife whether or not you’re getting a paycheck. We can generalize forever about monogamy and the balance of power in a relationship. But I’ll lay it out in terms that you, as a paid working woman, can relate to. Think of monogamy as a career that you adore. Not always easy. Not always fun. But there are a lot of bonuses and that ultimate reward: fulfillment, As far as power goes, well sometimes, I have it in the relationship and sometimes he does. Domestic office politics. We deal with it.

Maybe wealthy women—the lunchers, the shoppers, and the gym rats—have betrayed feminism. But the last time I checked, feminism wasn’t autocratic or conformist. Feminists are discerning not judgmental. Just to complete the picture for you, I drive a Volvo because I hate driving in the snow and feel more secure in a steel-enforced car. The roads ice up faster in the suburbs. And if you notice me talking to myself while I’m driving, I’m either answering an editor’s questions or fielding a complaint from one of my mother’s caretakers on my Bluetooth. I won’t even get into my role as the daughter of a cantankerous, difficult woman. Suffice it to say, I don’t get paid for that either.

The other day I was reading a quirky grammar book with a chapter headed “Adopt a Favorite Letter.” (Yes, I sometimes read grammar books and dictionaries to relax). I was intrigued by the author’s notion that he detects a secret meaning in each letter of the alphabet. Yes, I thought, someone understands how I feel about the letter K.

K is for Kenneth. That’s my husband’s name and it was also my father’s first name. But Dad was never a Ken or a Kenny. He went by his middle name Harold. Kenneth was his phantom name. Unlike its phonetic counterpart C, K is unambiguously hard, ramrod straight on one side, making it the perfect letter to lean on. A letter from which to fly the flag that Dad revered, the Stars and Stripes he flew from his bedroom window on every national holiday. The flag that draped his coffin.

The K in my father’s name stood alone. My father’s luggage, chunky signet ring, and a check register as big as a ledger were all monogrammed with an indelible K. The signature that followed was a comet tail of script meant to read as Harold Bolton. I grew up in the shadow of Dad’s K—a patch of dusk in which good posture, impeccable manners, and fair outcomes were cultivated.

When I eulogized my father ten years ago, I talked about my father’s inimitable K and my brother said at that moment he knew that his son’s name—born two months to the day after Dad’s death—would lead off with the stalwart K. The family K now anchors my young nephew’s name. The K of my nephew’s name is not associated with a particular name. It is a stand-alone initial that perpetuates my father’s solid K-like presence in our lives.

I particularly love the Hebrew alphabet for its array of meaningful letters. I also like that the Aleph Bet occasionally doubles as numbers, forming a quirky numerology or gematria that engages the compulsive in me. A well-known word-number correlation is the Hebrew word for life—chai. The two Hebrew letters that make up the word correspond to the numbers eight and ten. In the realms of Jewish luck and superstition, eighteen is a powerful number and one that I am forever trying to extract by adding up street addresses and birth dates.

But my favorite Hebrew letter is ayin. Ayin is for Akiva—my father’s Hebrew name. Akiva is also Adam’s Hebrew name. My Dad was alive when Adam was born and I latched on to the Sephardic tradition of naming after the living. I’m all for dynamic continuity. Ayin is for Akiva and this time the hard K sound of the Hebrew letter kaph that follows the ayin is subordinate to it. Large, resonant kaph must make room for the almost inaudible “a” sound that ayin carries. But kaph is also for Kalman—my husband Ken’s Hebrew name. The sturdy chiseled sound of the kaph suits him. The shape of the letter kaph also reminds me of a shepherd’s staff, like the one I imagined Moses carried.

As for me, I can’t resist telling you about the tiny letter yud that leads off my Hebrew name Yehudit. Yud, is a smudge of a letter slipped into words to space out consonants or give vowels a new sound. Unobtrusive yet effective. I aim to be that kind of parent, do you?

Jewish mystics tapped into the otherworldly qualities they intuited from the Hebrew alphabet.  Ayin is for Akiva and in the dreamy, swirling, opaque world of the Kabbalah, the letter ayin is associated with the unique uncomprehending nothingness before the creation of the world, the windswept darkness of creation, the airy nothingness of God’s incorporeal existence.

A great Hasidic master once said that “nothing can change from one thing to another without first losing its own identity. Before an egg can grow into a chicken, it must completely cease to be an egg. Each thing must lose its original identity before it can become something else. Before a thing is transformed, it must come to the level of ayin.”

My son loses his little boy identity by shooting up 11 inches in two years. I listen to his deepening voice. I watch him fix my computer. I read his essays full of insights wholly his own. When he puts his hand on my shoulder he’s returning the reassurance and the protection that I hope his father and I have given him.

I think Jewish tradition has made Father’s Day, and for that matter Mother’s Day, a recurrent event. In Hebrew the names by which we are called to the Torah are as long and magical as the trailing comet of my father’s signature. We never forget that we are a son or a daughter. Or, for those of us so blessed, a parent.