Carolyn Cooper | A Jewish boy comes home to his other mother

Last Thursday, Ian Randle Publishers launched their latest book, Another Mother. It’s a memoir written by Jewish American journalist, Ross Urken, who was raised by a Jamaican nanny, Mrs Dezna Sanderson. For the launch, I was invited to engage in conversation with Urken about the book. The first question I asked was about his upbringing as a Jew in Princeton, New Jersey, and the connections he’s made with our local Jewish community.

Chapter 5 of the memoir, ‘Exodus’, includes excerpts from an essay by Urken, ‘The Forgotten Jewish Pirates of Jamaica’, published in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2016. There I discovered the pirate Moses Cohen Henriques. As it turns out, he’s a relative of upstanding Ainsley Cohen Henriques, a former chairman of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust.

The history of Jews in Jamaica is quite contentious. It’s not widely known that Jews were pirates or that they invested in the ships that brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. Jews actively participated in plantation slavery, owning both property and people. After Emancipation, they continued to play a major role in the Jamaican economy. For example, The Gleaner Company was founded in 1834 by Joshua and Jacob De Cordova, the children of British Jews of Spanish descent.

Urken tells an amusing story about trying to escape from his American tour group who were tracking down Jewish gravesites in Black River. He wanted to go to Mahogany Hill in search of Miss Dezna’s family home. The origins of the woman who nurtured him from 18 months until his Bar Mitzvah mattered far more to him than old Jewish graves.

WRITING AS THERAPY

In February 1988, Miss Dezna arrived in Princeton to look after ‘Maas Ras’ and his sister, Nicole. Another Mother is, largely, an upbeat account of the nurturing relationship Ross enjoys with Miss Dezna. He uses a brilliant mathematical image to distinguish her from his dysfunctional parents: “In the equation of my home life, Dezna was a constant, my parents variables.” And he contrasts his mother’s “synthetic Similac” with his nanny’s “authentic sustenance”.

A striking subtext in the memoir is the guilt Urken seems to feel at the sacrifice Miss Dezna made to leave her own children in Jamaica. It’s an all too familiar story. Urken views the nanny contract as essentially exploitative. Assuming the voice of an unconscionable employer, he writes: “I realise I am paying you to lavish love and care on my children in place of the time you might spend with your own – I just don’t want to hear too much about that sob story.”

I couldn’t help wondering. Was it “hear too much” or “hear at all”? Was the wall of emotional blockage essential for the survival of the domestic contract? I asked Urken if his search for Miss Dezna’s origins and, especially her children, was his way of compensating for her own emotional loss. And I asked if writing the memoir was fundamentally therapeutic. His answer to both questions was a qualified yes. As a child, he didn’t understand the dynamics of the relationship. As an adult he could certainly appreciate its complications.

DISTORTED MIRROR IMAGE

After the launch, I had an instructive conversation with a friend whose story is the distorted mirror image of Urken’s. She was left behind in Jamaica when her mother went to New York to do nursing. She was only three years old and didn’t join her mother until she was eleven. Her father, a farmer, stayed with his three children for some years and then he, too, left. They were raised by a nurturing grandmother.

My friend went to public school in New York and, with the love and guidance of her parents, became a high achiever. She went to an Ivy League college for her undergraduate degree. When her classmates found out that she was Jamaican, their usual response was that they had a Jamaican nanny. And it seemed as if they couldn’t understand how she, the presumed child of a nanny, could be rubbing shoulders with them at an elite college.

Coming from James Hill, across the way from Mocho, my friend knew that her parents wanted to give their children opportunities that were impossible in the back bush of Clarendon. But the price of opportunity was separation and loss. Her family survived. Others did not.

Urken uses references to Jamaican popular songs as chapter headings: Of Melodies Pure and True; Could You Be Loved?; One Blood. Then there’s Exodus which is ambiguous. It could be a reference to the second book of the Judaic Old Testament or the Marley song which is itself derived from the Bible.

I asked Urken about the impact of Jamaican music and, more broadly, Jamaican culture on his writing. He said he couldn’t listen to music while writing. But he could when editing. The words and riddims of Jamaican music are in his consciousness and find their way on the page. Miss Dezna is a very happy duppy. The lessons she taught Maas Ras have borne fruit abundantly in Another Mother.

- Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a specialist on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com