Excerpt from In Jewish Texas Copyright © 1998 by Stanley E. Ely. No portion of this excerpt may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Texas Christian University Press.

"We're beginning our descent into D-FW," the pilot advises, "and the weather in Dallas is seventy-eight and severely sunny."

Traversing the skies from New York City, my six-foot frame has been confined to the side of a lady of pronounced dimensions, in the near-250-pound range. "Aah jus dun know how a fat person would eeever fit into one of these tiny chayurs!" announced the woman as she shimmied into the aisle seat. She settled in, I smiled and was sent hugging the window. Now, three-and-a-half hours later, debarking into a severely sunny Texas day sounds very nice.

I know what to expect: bluebonnets growing wild and lush along the sides of the road, bringing back that familiar refrain: "Beautiful, beautiful Texas, where the beautiful bluebonnets grow." Bumper stickers that caution enigmatically, "Don't Mess With Texas." Markers on the interstate that permit a return to sixty-five miles an hour travel sooner than any other state. Azaleas planted by the hedge instead of by the bush. A high-school stadium the size of that in many colleges, without an empty seat for most any Friday-night football game.

For me, it's a visit from my adopted state back to my birthplace, the land where almost a century ago, my mother's family, the Shapiros, emigrated from Russia, and my father's family, the Elys (more likely, Elyavitchs) arrived from Romania. They were two families who avoided Ellis Island and New York, the traditional destination for European Jews. Instead, they both headed to Houston, for a welcome from cousins already transplanted from the old country.

Years later, Jerome, my older brother, moved from Texas to Connecticut; my older sister, Florence, to Colorado. They both married and had children. I remained the unmarried, gay son, but soon followed their lead of breaking away from the South.

But not my parents. They gave no thought to deserting their new home. With the family name shortened, they built a Jewish nest, planting Texas roots, letting them spread.

Until I was seventeen, finished with high school and a year at Southern Methodist University, I was a full-time Texan, too. That makes more than forty years since I relocated north. Even so, when I return as I do this spring, I find myself telling friends that I'm going "home" for Passover.

A major effort over those years has gone into losing the Texas drawl. But on the plane I'm reminded by my neighbor's accent that, when I return below the Mason-Dixon line, things are bound to go smoother if I also return to the language and manners of the South. As the lady slowly unleashes herself from the seat, I practice with a slight bow of the head and a wish for her to "Have a good day, mayum."

#

Jewish Texans--more numerous than most non-Texas Jews realize--manage to create an unusual merger of the ambition and independence of Jews with the bravado of Texans. They build houses of worship and country clubs splashier than their northern Jewish cousins or southern gentile neighbors. They establish residences for their senior citizens that become models for the rest of the country--at the end of their lives, my mother and three aunts lived in the same one in Dallas. If they're Jewish girls and marry fellows from out of state, they often don't move to their husband's hometown. They bring the husband back to live "in the right place"--Texas.

My father, who had to cross nothing less than an ocean to become a Texan, demonstrated his ambition and independence by passing up a lucrative partnership with his brothers and going to work for himself. That self-determination never included leaving Texas, however. "Henry leaves New York to the New Yorkers," my mother stated often and accurately.

Or take Uncle Morris, Mother's baby brother, now in his late eighties. He showed his ambition and independent streak by marrying a wonderful but, shh, gentile lady and furthermore increasing his capital with long periods of gambling. Yet his devotion to Dallas sports teams and nature is total. Gleefully, he escorts me out to the small patio behind his apartment. "Look, Stanley," he says, "red roses--yellow roses! Roses in October! That's Texas for you."

Well, okay, that is Texas.

#

Rebecca, my mother, was the eldest of five children, and she and her little sisters Fannie and Pearl Shapiro fled with their mother from Minsk around the turn of the century. They went to catch up with my grandfather, who was among the priestly set and therefore had neither experience nor fondness for work. He had already left for Houston to join the cousin Leons, regrettably much poorer than he thought and hoped.

All of them were escaping the pogroms of eastern Europe where Jewish children and adults were systematically accused of and punished for crimes committed by others. Aunt Fannie, who died in the spring of 1996 at around age ninety-seven (they were never sure of exactly when they were born), remembered looking out the window of her grandparents' house in Minsk when she was five, seeing Russian soldiers at night moving trucks loaded with bodies of Jews they had murdered.

#

Mother died in 1987, a dozen years after the death of my father. Jerome died an early death at age thirty-eight, in 1963. And Florence passed away in 1992, just before her seventieth birthday. That has left me the sole living member of our immediate family and one of the few in an extended family. It has made the Shearith Israel Jewish cemetery an important destination when I go to Dallas.

During that spring visit following the airplane ride with the southern-sounding lady, I made my usual long drive back to the old part of town to visit my dead folks. It's a place I like, shady and solitary, where I can amble among the graves of my family and those of parents of friend after friend I knew when I was young. At the top of a marble tablet is the name of Solomon (Shlomo) Ely, my father's father, for whom I was named. Solomon is inscribed as a founder of a Romanian congregation that later merged with Shearith Israel and inaugurated that cemetery. He's buried there, alongside his wife Esther (Bubbe Ely), and not far from the Shapiros, my other grandparents, plus Aunt Pearl and Aunt Fannie's first and second husbands, Arthur and Dave, and, recently, Aunt Fannie, too. Plus my own parents. To imagine all those people being so neighborly is a stretch, much as it is to reach the Shearith Israel cemetery, located in what for Jews was their first Texas neighborhood but is now an old and shunned part of town.

I still see those people as I meander around the grounds. My mother's card-playing "girlfriends," my father's "shyster" competitors in the insurance business--they're there, too, more silent than it seems as if they should be. Until I left Dallas, I had only one non-Jewish friend, Tom Wilkinson, but of Jews there were plenty, and most of those at whose homes we gathered are now laid to rest in those grounds. Mr. and Mrs. J. looked like immigrants and never lost their Old World accents, but they made a fortune and presented their daughter Emily with a convertible for high-school graduation. There's Mr. T., my friend Jean's dad, who everyone thought was Mafia. Parties at Jean's were the only times we could rely on access to a liquor cabinet.

The decades between then and now have seen me go away and finish college, survive a couple of mandatory years in the army, gravitate to New York, take jobs in advertising and then teaching, reach six feet and replace trying to add pounds with trying not to. They've seen me hesitantly reverse the roles I played the first couple of decades of my life, emerging less Jewish and more gay.

As a 1940s adolescent, then teen-ager, I was a dependable if unenthusiastic bar mitzvah and confirmation student and then a fervent attendee at a parade of Jewish sweet-sixteen dances. To the world--and somehow, helplessly, even to myself--I played straight, even as, in the privacy of my bedroom, I sneaked looks at the muscle magazines I had wrapped up and brought home.

But if for me there was no internal gay liberation, there wasn't much external either. The 1940s were the all-time decade of conformity, when a teen-ager in my school risked being junked if seen in anything other than white socks and penny loafers. Life went better if you not only spoke like a Texan but thought and presented yourself like one.

In the selection of a hero, there was no competition between a high-school journalist and a football player whose masculine stance (and presumed heterosexuality) was a given. A boy who differed from others either tried faking the standard mold or courageously suffered the jabs that came his way. I was of the former. In that old crowd there must have been one or two others with the same affinities as me, but since I can't think of who they might have been, I conclude that they were fakers as well.

It wasn't total fakery, however. I clung to that Jewish group as a necessary prelude to the long process of shedding my denial and coming out as a gay man, an evolution that barely started until I was in my mid-twenties, and went on for years thereafter. Those teen-age parties worked for me because there was dancing but no sex--and there was acceptance.

But the process of change is about complete. As I walk around the cemetery and see the stone marking the graves of Mr. & Mrs. J, I remember that, growing up, my friends and I called them the older folks, or, as it's unflatteringly said in Yiddish, the alte kahkers (old shitters). Now-an unwelcome revelation--a young person could say the same about me. I approach the cemetery knowing I must delay no longer to make peace.

Armed with flowers, I give a brief greeting to Aunt Pearl and Aunt Fannie, women I greatly loved. But at the graves of my mother and father, the central players in my life, I schedule a long stop. First, I deliver to them news of their grandchildren, the offspring of Florence and Jerome, and now a quartet of great grandchildren. (They've stopped expecting news of my children, resigned to the idea that I didn't contribute any.) That done, I relax and impart whatever rises to the surface: anger, love, apologies, or all those. I mostly seek--even vocally ask for--a release from the tangled continual feelings of affection and regret that they, my parents, evoke.

That requires attention. Giving it my best, I look up momentarily and discover that there's company. With a full face stare from the branch of a live oak tree, a red-headed bird is intruding on my visit. What an orchestra seat on mortality that fellow has had! Imagine the number of funerals he has attended right here, the private moments he's witnessed uninvited, the laughs he's gotten out of folks like me who were babies of a family and who have come to try facing the fact that they ceased to be kids long since.

After an hour or so, I run dry on news and even anger for Mother and Dad. "Well, I'll be back again," I tell them, and decide I must go. I follow tradition and leave a pebble on their stone. Then, heading toward the gate, with throat still tight, I turn back and see that the winged creature isn't the least moved. He simply chirps, lifts off for a ten-second circular trip, settles back on his branch and does a carefree reprise of his song.

In the plot where my parents are buried, a couple of unused spaces remain. They belong to our family and now, I suppose, to me; my father paid for them decades ago. Regardless of my mixed feelings about family or all the years away, one of those spots is where I've decided I want to end up. I'm not sure why, since there's no temptation to call that state home again. Not now and not soon, if I can help it, but one day. Back in severely sunny Dallas, where I started. Back next to my folks and the handsome white marble stone that marks their place.

And back with that bird.

"So," I say, with a skeptical glance at the red-head resting in the tree, "so long for a while. You'll be seeing me again."