To tell them or not: parenting, post-October 7

“I know how to end the war,” one of my boys says. He’s referring to Russian invasion of Ukraine, where I lived as a child. “The Russian people should run away from Russia and move to Ukraine, to help them fight Putin…”

Putin is the reference point for evil in our home. (Is China’s president worse than Putin? Is Putin the biggest baddie?) Not Hitler. Not Hamas. In our family’s version of “don’t mention the war” – on my insistence, not my husband’s, I should clarify – we don’t talk about the enemies of Jews.

And we don’t talk about the war that began with the October 7 massacre. For as long as possible, I want my boys to grow up free of the dark cloud of antisemitism that has hovered above my head since my childhood.

I am ashamed to say this, but I will: I never wanted my children to be Jewish. In the Soviet Union, where I grew up, I couldn’t move around without bumping into my Jewishness. My classmates liked pointing it out to me accompanied with foul language and sometimes pinches or shoves.

The kids in hospitals, where I spent much time then, enjoyed telling me antisemitic jokes. Then my parents turned religious and there was much talk at home about destroyed temples and enslaved Jews.

Later, when we moved to Israel, the school curriculum teemed with Holocaust memoirs and fiction. As a teen, I had recurring dreams about people running through a kind of giant meat mincer. Being Jewish, I learned early, was synonymous with being in pain.

I didn’t want my children to be in pain. I enrolled them into a public school. We want to support public education and for the boys to have diverse friendships, I told everyone who cared to hear. This was true. But it was the surface truth. Really, I didn’t want the boys to think of themselves as Jewish. Without religion or Jewish education, why should they?

Yet what control do we really have over our children’s minds?

My sons both have disabilities. My eldest is what we call “on the spectrum”. At 11, he’s intelligent but emotionally younger and more naive than his peers. My eight-year-old has albinism, hence his strikingly Arian appearance of corn-blond hair and cornflower-blue eyes which would have had even Hitler fooled, and his impaired vision.

In my lowest moments, when I think of our burning planet and imagine my boys’ hypothetical futures as living in Darwinian environments, places where only the fittest survive, I get dark about their prospects even before I consider their Jewishness…

Perhaps ironically, but it was due to the special needs of our children that after a few years in public schooling we moved them to a small secular Jewish school where every child gets close attention.

With Hebrew, Yiddish and Jewish studies, my boys’ Jewishness bloomed bright at the front of their consciousness. “Are you Jewish?” they took to asking babysitters, friends, random strangers. To my relief, it was just a phase. Soon being Jewish ceased being a novelty and became a natural part of their otherwise Australian world. Their friends come from a variety of cultures. They love Israeli falafel and Aussie meat pies. They proudly think of themselves as both Australian and Jewish.

My higher brain tells me I should be happy about this state of affairs, especially as for me, since October 7, the concept of Jewish pride is no longer a concept but my lifeline. But my amygdala, the chorus of my instincts, screams: make them hide the Jewish part! HIDE.

My amygdala has gotten the upper hand since October 7. Since “Israel” – the country my boys are yet to visit but are already attached to through its food, language, music and their mother – became a slur word. Since our school increased its security and the frequency of its emergency drills.

So we don’t mention the war.

Is this wise? Probably not. But what is the wise choice here? What’s healthier, to grow blissfully ignorant, or aware and fearful, sad, angry?

I don’t know.

I do know it’s my job to prepare my children for living in the real world, as it is. I read the parent manual. And yet my main parenting strategy nowadays is evasion – hissing at my husband when he mentions the news, avoiding Melbourne’s CBD which is now the hub of anti-Israel protesters, terminating phone calls on the car’s speaker from friends describing antisemitic incidents, distracting the boys away from the sight of hateful graffities. As if by doing all this, I’d make that dark cloud disappear.

Not infrequently, my impulse to protect my children clashes fiercely with… the same impulse:  to protect. Like when my boys decide to practice Hebrew in a busy shopping centre. Do I ask them to be quiet like my parents, fearful of antisemitic attacks, did to me in Odessa if I said anything “Jewish”? Who would have thought that one day I, too, would become seized by anxiety at the sight of my children chatting in the language in which I wrote three books?

These days, many Australian Jewish parents I know make choices similar to those of my parents, like telling their children to take off their school uniforms with Hebrew lettering when in public or instructing them not to tell strangers they are Jewish. Perhaps I should do the same. But I cannot. At least not yet.

I cannot bring myself to pass that dread pent up in my family’s generations to my boys, even for their own safety. Their happy Hebrew chatter goes on. But what if someone abuses them simply for being supposedly Israeli, or Jewish? Nowadays, this is no longer a farfetched possibility.

So, against the parenting manual’s rules, I use distraction and bribery. I offer my boys, in English, the things I usually refuse – lollies, overpriced Pokémon cards, arcade games – anything to take their minds away from Hebrew.

To be a Jewish parent post-October 7 is to be faced daily with impossible choices, the kind of choices where nothing is ever right. It is to be extra-extra-vigilant. And also extra, stickily, tender. Whenever the photo of Kfir, the toddler held captive by Hamas, pops up on my socials, I rush to my children and hold them for as long as they let me.

“Are you okay, Mama?”

How do I shield them from my sadness?

In my writing classes, I say the writer’s job is to try and answer such questions, not just ask them. But nowadays, I have no answers. There’s only one thing I know for certain – I’m not going to get Mother of the Year.

Sometimes, for distraction, I scroll through mummy blogs. Mummy blogs always have answers, plus I like their pastel, organic concerns. How to hide vegetables in Bolognese sauce? Where to source ethically made children’s cotton undies? Even – how to talk to your child about sex?

What would I explore in my mummy blog? How to talk to your child about the torture and rape on October 7? Or the devastation in Gaza? How to hide your anxiety from your kids when you drop them at school and furtively check around for angry men acting strangely? How to manage laughing at your child’s joke after you’ve just heard about an arson attack on a local Jewish politician’s office?

I live in Australia and I have an Australian passport, but I am no longer an Australian parent. My daily routine of school pickups and playground or shopping ventures has become a minefield. So, I click to order ethically made cotton undies in the hope that this will redeem the day. Although, right now, the only thing that truly redeems anything is my boys’ blissful ignorance. Their tiny sorrows over a lost chess match or a botched drawing make me ridiculously happy.

“You know, mama,” says my youngest casually, as I’m typing in my credit card number, “Australians don’t like Jews.”

My heart dives under the floor.

“Who told you this?” I ask faintly, checking his face for signs of upset.

“The girls in my class say this,” he replies with equanimity.

Then, no longer interested in the subject: “What’s for dinner?”