The Seed of My Lifelong Interest and Love for the Jewish People
The Story of Sheilagh, Part 1
Editor’s Note: at God of the Desert Books we aspire to publish autobiographical writings for all our contributors, both book authors and those who offer shorter pieces on our substack, this is the first of three writings for one of our newer contributors and I hope you enjoy hearing all about her!
First things first: Sheilagh rhymes with Layla, like the Eric Clapton song. My parents always told me this was the “Irish spelling” of the name. When, as a child, I would lament that no one ever knew how to pronounce my name, they would assure me, “One day, when you go to Ireland, everyone will know how to pronounce it.”
I had reason to doubt this. My Irish-born high school physics teacher, in fact, told my parents, “Your daughter’s name is Sheela. You’ve been pronouncing it wrong!” We all had a good laugh about that.
During one of the summers I spent working on a former cargo ship (which is another story), I had the opportunity to visit Dublin. This was it! My time had finally come.
Sure enough, every time I approached a friendly-looking Irishman and asked him to read out my name, to a man each one promptly said, “Sheela.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, nearly six weeks early and after putting my mother through two days of labor (while my father enjoyed pizza with the nurses) and an emergency c-section. From the beginning, I had a flair for drama.
I attended the same Catholic school that my mother had a few decades earlier, where she learned such things as why the First World War happened (people didn’t pray the rosary enough). The nuns who were responsible for these kinds of lessons were all gone by my day. While at the time I probably would have complained about my Catholic schooling to anyone willing to listen, I do credit it with laying the groundwork, through certain children’s books and Bible stories, for my lifelong interest in and love for the Jewish people.
In the third grade, one of our major projects was to research any country in the world and teach the rest of the class about it by making a colorful display, wearing national dress, and reading a speech off of notecards. For some reason, the teacher insisted someone choose Israel. For no particular reason, I volunteered. During my research for this project, I ate my first falafel, obtained a menorah, and read a book that mostly talked about orange growing. The book was extremely boring to an eight-year-old child, but the seed was nevertheless sown.
Check out Part 2 coming Wednesday!