There’s a movie we saw today called the counterfeiters. Apparently it won an Oscar this year, and it probably deserved it- it’s really good, exciting and heartbreaking and full of interesting ways of looking at things. There’s a scene in it, near the beginning, where the protagonist, a master forger named Sally Sorowitsch, is at a bar in Berlin in the late 1930’s. He’s with friends and associates drinking and having fun, and he’s clearly someone people are interested in. One friend approaches with a woman he’s met and she smiles at him as she’s introduced to Sally.

that’s a funny name, she says to her friend, what’s it short for?

salomon.

And then she looks at him like he’s made out of cancer and walks away without another word.

It made me think about Montana and France, places I’ve been where certain things about me that aren’t true become true, because that’s how people think about things.

I’m not Jewish, but I have a name that’s about as Old Testament as you’re liable to find unless you’re Jesus Isiah Moses or David Israel. Daniel James Solomon, which is an anglicized version of salomon, itself from suleiman. My family name was never one of those, however- we were something unpronounceable and unspellable in Russian a few generations ago, until my great-grandfather, Abraham, changed it to solomon upon emigrating to England in the 19th Century.

I’m not Jewish, and maybe the best way to explain it is to say that my paternal grandparents were. My dad was raised Jewish, but not all that strictly- they had a Christmas tree in their house every year, because my grandmother thought Christmas was neat, and when my grandfather died, the newspaper ran a brief article to commemorate the passing of a Jew who dressed as Santa Claus every year for poor kids. My dad would very rarely go to Temple when I was a kid, but for reasons of community, not for reasons of faith. I’ve never set foot in one, and never considered myself Jewish in any way. I was raised Catholic, because my mom is Catholic, and went the bulk of my life without ever identifying with Jews in any way at all.

When you travel, certain prejudices that may not be a part of your world can sometimes intrude on you. I had grown up, for the most part, in the Indiana suburbs of Chicago, and attended Catholic school in kindergarten and first grade; my family moved to Florida for a few years after that, and y’all know what they say about Jews and Florida. We spent a year or so in Omaha when I was thirteen, and it never came up there; when we returned to Indiana the following year, I was remembered from my brief time at the Catholic school that about a third of my graduating class attended, and again Jewishness was not a part of my identity in any way. When I went down to Texas at eighteen, I was in South Texas, down on the border, then San Antonio and Austin- places in which no one thought of me as Jewish because they had never really met any Jews, so it never came up.

All of this is to say that I made it until my 24th birthday or so without feeling like I was Jewish any more than I was English, or Polish, or Russian- these were the things that my grandparents had been, had identified with. I had some affection for them, but they were not me. I was but a simple boy from Texas.

Then I spent a couple of months out in America, depending on strangers.

sorry, i don’t want any zionists sleeping at my house.

with a name like solomon, you’ve got to be voting for kerry!

are you funny on stage because you’re jewish? jews are pretty funny.

Rabbinical law says I’m not a Jew- Orthodox rules say that you’re only a Jew if your mother’s Jewish, because you always know who a baby’s mother is but can’t always be sure about the father.

German law during Nazi rule says I am a Jew- anyone with a Jewish ancestor was a Jew, according to Hitler.

To some Jewish friends, I’ve never been a Jew; to others, they’ll take solidarity with anyone Hitler would have killed. I’ve since felt a bit like Schrödinger’s Jew, both Jewish and not-Jewish at the same time.

(Schrödinger’s Cat is a theory in quantum mechanics that is based on the idea that a cat in a box with a radioactive particle that has a 50/50 chance of killing the cat can be considered both alive and dead at the same time, until the box is opened.)

We were in Paris a few weeks ago, and it happened again. We were lost, and I was asking a strange woman for directions. She heard the American accent and asked where I was from. texas, I told her. She looked at me. what’s a jewish boy like you doing in texas?

That one stuck with me and got me thinking about what all of this means. It’s the sort of thing that becomes a priority when it keeps happening. I hadn’t said anything to the woman in France that was, like, Jew-y. There was no oy yoy yoy, we’re so lost! It’s just maybe the look of my face, my nose and the manner in which my hair’s thinning. She took a look at me and decided I was Jewish, decided that I should know that she knew it.

I think the reason people bring it up is to let you know that they know. It’s an uncomfortable thing to think about, but it makes a lot of sense. To call a stranger on the street out as a Jew lets him know that he’s not passing through undetected; to claim you know his political views based on his last name means that you’ve identified him and know him before he opens his mouth; to immediately tag him as a zionist without the subject of Israel ever coming up gives you the opportunity to reinforce your re-branding of anti-semitism as anti-zionism. The instinct is to let a Jew know that he’s been spotted, and that he’s not normal around here.

And it’s not something I think about very much- mostly after it happens, or after I watch a movie set in Nazi Germany where someone is shunned by strangers because he has the same name that I do. This is healthy; thinking about it too much is pointless, and it’s hardly the worst thing in the world. There are people whose skin color or physical attributes or sexual orientation keep them from ever being branded as normal, and for me, most of the time, that’s not a problem.

But it’s interesting. Because I’m not Jewish, and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to feel about this, to be affected by it. Are they even talking about me?

Well, yeah. And that’s what’s weird. They’re talking about me, but it’s someone I’ve never met. Jew and not-Jew at the same time, I guess, depending who looks in the box.