SOAPBOX: Deborah Sussman's first summer camp romance got complicated

On KJZZ's  SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. In our latest series, listeners tell their own true stories on the theme of Summer Camp. 

Summer camp is a place where lots of kids experience their first romance. But for Tempe writer Deborah Sussman, it got complicated.

They say the more we revisit a memory, the less reliable that memory becomes. That seems to me a kind of cruel trick — the more important a memory is to us, the less likely we are to recall its details. But we keep trying.

Colline aux Nuages was the second sleepaway summer camp I attended as a kid, and the first I actually liked. Colline aux Nuages means cloud hill in French. The camp’s tag line was “French with fun,” which must have appealed to my parents, who wanted my brothers and me to speak many languages. At 11, I spoke only English and enough German to say “My name is Deborah. I am a little girl.”

It was at this camp nestled somewhere in the wilds of Quebec, on the shores of a placid lake, that I met a boy.

How does young romance happen? I’m not sure. I only know that there was a boy and he liked me and I liked him, and one day we walked into the woods together and sat under a tree and dared to hold hands. As we sat there, we talked. Did we talk about where our parents lived? Did we talk about our favorite books? Now, all these years later, I only know that, somewhere in what felt like the middle of our conversation, I told him that I was Jewish. There was a recalibration so immediate on his part that I felt it — as if he had mistaken me for someone else and now saw clearly. “You’re Jewish?” he said. “I hate Jews.” And that was the end of the conversation, and of our friendship.

It didn’t feel like it hurt me at the time. I’m not sure I even told anybody about it until college, when another student asked me if I’d ever experienced antisemitism. The boy’s reaction stunned me more than anything else — how could that one piece of information about my identity change everything? I didn’t consider that what he said might have affected me until I was a parent and similar things happened to my own child.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our capacity as human beings to dislike someone based on the circumstances of their birth, something over which they have no control. What if that boy and I had kept talking? Is there a chance he might have changed his mind? Would I remember anything else about him beyond the fact that he said he hated me because I was Jewish? The world is so full of difficult and important conversations. I have to hope that we can overcome our preconceived beliefs and keep talking.