Jewface

this is an excerpt from the essay "Jewface," which has just appeared in Fairy Tale Review's current volume The Old Lace Issue (2025), ed. Kate Bernheimer, published by Wayne State University Press.

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“Come, I want you to meet my friend. He keeps goats.” The poet takes me by the hand and gently pulls me over to the man who keeps goats. “This is Sabrina,” says the poet. I reach my hand out. “Nice to meet you.” The man who keeps goats has a soft friendly face. He’s a writer who teaches writing too, but most of his time he devotes not to his students but to his goats. I tell him I know a woman who left academia to keep goats. “I think she makes cheese,” I say, stupidly. “Chèvre,” I add. “Chèvre means goat,” say the man who keeps goats. “I know,” I say. But I didn’t know.

His eyes rest on my throat. “I can’t help but notice your Jewish Star,” he says. It’s small and diamond. “You know,” he says, “all goats are Jews. Especially the Nubian goats. They, of all the Jew goats are the Jewiest and so even the other goats, Jews themselves, hate them. The Nubian goats are the loudest and most obnoxious,” he says, “but” – he laughs – “I love them the most.” I touch my face to check to see if my face is still there. It is. Does it matter whether or not the man I am speaking to is Jewish? Of course it matters. After we say so lovely to meet you, and shake hands, I google him. He, like all goats, is a Jew. I look up Nubian goats. Nubian goat milk contains the most butterfat, and is therefore the richest. I screenshot the face of a Nubian goat and send it to my husband. “Do I look like this goat?” I ask. The horns of the goat are finite. When they are cut they do not grow back.

Years ago I showed my husband a photo of Jonathan Safran Foer. “Do we look alike?” I asked. “You really can’t see yourself at all,” said my husband. “But we have moles on our faces in the exact same spot,” I said, “and our eyes even when they are nearby seem faraway.” “What do you think people see when they see you?” my husband asked. Now I would say “a goat,” but then I would’ve said “Jonathan Safran Foer.” “It’s okay,” I say. “You can tell me.”

The Nubian’s bleat is loud and often. They hate the rain. To herd a goat simply nudge her with your knee in the direction you wish her to go.

It was around this time that I started dreaming about a goat, not like a woman dreams about a goat but like a goat dreams about a goat. The tips of his black horns touched the stars, and I stood close to him in the meadow. I would tell the goat a joke and he would laugh like a goat laughs, and then the goat would tell me a joke and I would laugh like a goat laughs. We were Jews in the dream because we were goats, and we were goats because we were Jews. And so we understood each other and we laughed so hard we couldn’t catch our breath. I galloped after the goat, but before I could add to the joke that was by now as tall and wide as a blackberry bush he disappeared into the herd and I woke up beside my husband who was no more dreaming about goats than I was, if not a goat already, becoming one.

Every night I dreamed about the goat. And every night I added another line to the joke. And every night the goat disappeared into the herd, and each time he did I woke up beside my husband. The joke grew.

I trotted up to the fence. A woman reached through the wire and offered me a palmful of salt. I ate from her hand. The goat with the black horns that touched the stars nudged his goat head next to my goat head so he too could taste the salt too. Our ears touched.

At night I would dream about the goat, and during the day I cleaned my house. The pantry really needed everything removed, and the shelves wiped down and organized. I could never find anything. The cans kept toppling over. A half open box of angel hair pasta was on the lowest shelf, and a second box of open angel hair was two shelves above it. It made no sense. I researched storage solutions. The most popular advice were see-through containers and so I purchased six which would probably not be enough but I needed to start somewhere.

While I continued to research storage solutions, my brother (also a Jew and therefore also a goat) offered the wall of his building to an artist in Culver City so that he could install a mural made up of red and white posters picturing the hostages kidnapped on October 7^th. The installation was 120-feet long and 22-feet high. In the morning a man shouted “Jewface” at my brother as he disappeared into his building, but when he emerged later that evening after a long day’s work the man was gone. Unlike the paper flyers, the mural could not be torn down. The installation included seven mirrors, each framed by the same red that framed the hostage posters. “What if this was you?” it asked. I looked into the mirror and was reminded that it was only by circumstance that I am a Jew, and therefore a goat, living freely in America dreaming of goats and not a dead mother in Gaza or a starving hostage or nothing but ashes on a burnt down kibbutz. “What if this was you?” No matter how many times I stood outside my brother’s building and looked into the mirror I was the only one ever staring back at me. My soft fur. My upright ears. My cloven hooves.

The nice thing about the can rack was that it was stackable and tilted so you could see all the cans at once.

“Things aren’t going to stay that way,” said my husband, as he watched me arrange and rearrange. I understood a bag of chips might not be closed properly or might drift to where the flour is stored, but what did he mean by “things?” Wasn’t there enough room for everything? There was. There was more than enough room. Why couldn’t the sugar stay where the sugar belonged? Why couldn’t we agree that things would stay exactly as I had arranged them to stay?

I tried to follow advice from a popular blogger to repurpose what I had. She suggested, for example, I clean out the plastic trail mix jar and use it for cereal. I was attracted to her ascetism, but what would I then do with the trail mix? Or did she mean I had already eaten the trail mix? The storage solutions blogger didn’t specify, but she did admit that while the trail mix jar wouldn’t be as pretty as having matching glassware it would give me a chance to see if the system worked before I invested in it. That night I dreamed of palmfuls and palmfuls of salt. Gigantic hands cupping Himalayan pink salt and black salt and kosher salt and sea salt. In the distance, I could see the goat with the long black horns that touched the stars, but he did not see me. When I looked down at my hoof it looked less like a hoof and more like my waking hand. I was beginning to lose myself to the person I most belonged…

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