The Immense Privilege of Weeding

A story about a Jew in Maine

When my editor at the Washington Post passed on the piece about evacuating my son from Israel, she asked me to pitch her other sections, covering parenting, home, and … gardening?

I wrote back that, weirdly, I might have a gardening piece.

“We now have a house in Maine, and I’ve started gardening for the first time in my life. I LOVE it. Like, if I could spend all day weeding I 100% would. I am actually the first member of my family to have both access to a garden and the time to tend it — 120 years after my family immigrated to America! Possibly too heavy for the garden section, but I’ve been thinking a lot about land and immigration, and who gets the privilege of putting their hands in dirt they personally own.”

Not too heavy at all, my editor responded. Sounds beautiful.

So, I wrote the piece below, because my editor said she wanted it, but also to answer the question: would anyone run a story about American Jews? I crafted exactly the kind of essay this editor loved, even writing a slightly cheesy ending that I knew would make her go “awww.”

I didn’t hear back for a month. Meh, it’s Christmas, then New Years’, maybe she’s busy, I thought. But, this is a person I have known for years. The silence felt ominous. Finally, I checked in with her.

She apologized for being slow to respond, but they were passing. For over a decade, this editor accepted every piece I wrote, on topics from government procurement to why Americans should all take August off. I expressed surprise. No response. I bumped up my email, asking again what was wrong with the piece. No response.

This is what antisemitism looks like. You can never know for sure, because instead of saying, “we’re not running anything about Jews,” an editor you’ve worked with for fifteen years can simply retreat from your inbox. A local friend you’ve seen weekly for a decade can be … really busy. Your colleagues can be … heads down in their work.

After this piece was rejected, I took a long, screaming walk with a Jewish friend and tried to parse what had just happened.

My friend explained: she doesn’t want the comments in her Gardening section to turn into a shitshow about Gaza. Why run a piece about Jews owning land, and have people screaming about “land back” and genocidal Zionists and settler colonialism, when you could just … not?

And so she didn’t, and they didn’t. And here we are.

Thanks for reading.

Hana

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As a life-long city dweller, gardening was never on my radar as a potential area of interest. Not only did I grow up in a small city (New Haven, CT) and spend most of my adult life in a large one (Brooklyn, NY), but none of my forebears gardened. 

My parents were both third-generation Brooklyn Jews, raised in cramped apartments. When they wanted to see a tree or touch a blade of grass, they went to the park. Trees and grass were spare, shared resources, like a party line on a phone, or a bus.

Even if they’d had a garden, no one would have had time to tend to it. All four of my grandparents worked long hours, with one grandmother teaching and the other running a family business in the rag trade, both returning home to make dinners out of cans and collapse. My mother made a few half-hearted attempts to get a garden going when we lived in New Haven, grabbing slivers of time between childcare or grad school. After an animal ate our strawberries she gave up.

My understanding of where I fell within the great American rainbow of cultures was among the non-gardening peoples, though I’d never given much thought to why.

But just when you think you know who you are as a human being (non-gardening), life tends to present new challenges. A few years ago, following a car crash and a legal settlement, my husband and I purchased a house in a small city in Maine. Before I knew it, I owned both a front and back yard. Not only that but, get this: I own a side yard, too. 

Nothing grew in the side yard, which we learned from the house deed was reserved for the egress of our neighbor’s horse and carriage. We giggled at this piece of Maine arcana – the neighbors probably hadn’t owned a horse and carriage for a hundred years – but as I surveyed the largest piece of land I’d ever owned, I felt a wave of panic. What did I, a Jewish city dweller descended from generations of city dwellers, know about land? And was it somehow a betrayal to my people to gain this forbidden knowledge?

As Jews, all eight of my great-grandparents were banned from owning land in Eastern Europe. Restrictions on Jewish life meant most of my great-grandparents grew up confined to various cities’ Jewish sections. A few lived in smaller shtetls where they owned their home, but the land beneath was rented, putting even subsistence farming beyond their reach. They were poor, and they were hungry. They came to America in search of a better life, but most of all, they came in search of a piece of land they could call their own.

Only one set of my great-grandparents – Eva and Abraham Schenkolowski – achieved that dream, which turned into a nightmare. Eva and Abraham were two of thousands of Jews who, in the 1910s, with financial help from the Jewish Agricultural Society, left their tubercular, overstuffed tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and purchased a farm on a rocky hilltop in the Catskill Mountains. 

Eva and Abraham didn’t know how to farm, raise animals, or make a garden grow – that knowledge had been limited only to Russians. Jews living in the Russian Empire were not considered Russian. But the Agricultural Society offered them training and encouragement, promising that one day their farm would grow a bounty so great you could explode from so much food.

The philanthropist funding this venture was Maurice de Hirsch, a wealthy Central European Jew whose grandfather had been one of the few Jews allowed to own land in Bavaria. De Hirsch had never been to America. He didn’t know the land in the Catskills was not the same as the land in the Bavaria, had been overworked for generations, and wasn’t going to produce a bountiful harvest no matter how many Yiddish-language magazines promised such a future. 

My great-grandparents began taking in boarders so they wouldn’t starve – they had four kids to feed. Soon their farm was a kosher boarding house. When things got bad, they burned the place to the ground for the insurance money – the locals called it “Jewish Lightning.” Eventually, Eva and Abraham sold the farm and bought a hotel in the winter resort town of Lakewood, New Jersey. A gardener cared for the grounds. No one in my family touched dirt again. Until now.

I surveyed my massive 1/10th of an acre, and with the help of a local gardener, identified which growing things were weeds and which were intentionally planted. 

“So I pull out this stuff over here?” I asked him, pointing to a clump of ambiguously blooming stalks. 

“I mean, yeah, those are weeds, but it’s really up to you,” he shrugged.

I stared at him for a moment. It was up to me. It was my land, and I could decide what was a weed and what was not. He offered to come back later and do the weeding, but I knew instantly that I didn’t want someone else making decisions about what grew on my land. I had work to do and meetings to attend, but first, I needed to weed.

I started tentatively, pulling out strands that looked obviously feral. I experimented with different pulling techniques, and then quickly realized that if I was going to do this gardening thing, I’d need to commit and buy tools. I thought about my childhood friends whose mothers gardened – they came inside looking slightly disheveled, wearing special gardening shoes and pulling off gardening gloves decorated with daisies. 

At the gardening store, I repeatedly took a pair of gardening gloves off the rack, put them in my basket, and then put them back on the rack. A spade, shears and that fork-like thingy I could easily purchase. But the gardening gloves felt like a bridge too far. Gardening gloves said, ”I am a person with both leisure time and land.” After generations of city life, gardening gloves said that I had finally realized my great-grandparents’ collective dream. I owned land, and instead of bringing me grief, it would bring me joy. Like a real American.

Three years later, I watch my land like a hawk, eager to velcro shut my dirt-encrusted gloves and decide which plants I – the master of my domain – choose to grow. Every time I sink my hands into the earth, I think about how fortunate I am to have the immense privilege of weeding. I have both the financial means and the legal ability to own a tiny slice of earth, and a job that leaves me with enough energy and time to make it beautiful to me. The side yard, which used to be an egress for a horse, should grow wildflowers this summer. I can’t wait to weed it.