Creative Nonfiction - Fall 2017

CREATIVE NONFICTION 59

SYLVIA SUKOP is an MFA

candidate in the creative

writing program at Washington

University in St. Louis. She is a

recipient of several fellowships,

including PEN USA Emerging

Voices, Lambda Emerging

Writers, and a Fulbright in

Germany. Previous essays

have been published in the

PEN anthology Strange Cargo

(2010), the Heyday anthology

LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s

Atlas (2015), and the Lambda

Literary anthology Emerge

(2016). Her essay “Soundings:

Field Notes on Communication

with Animals and God” is a

finalist in the 2017 Southeast

Review Narrative Nonfiction

Contest and will be published

in 2018. She is working on her

first book, a memoir.

he first time I approached Nurit*, she was leaning

against the wall with a dessert plate in her hand. Cookies

and sliced fruit and occasionally birthday cake with rainbow-

colored icing were staples of the social hour that followed every

Friday night service at Beth Chayim Chadashim. It was called

the oneg, a Hebrew word for “joy”—aspirational, like the tribe

of single queers it attracted alongside the already partnered.

For me, joy did not come naturally, but hung back, had

to be coaxed from its hideout gradually, a fact that was not

obvious, for I moved through the world with a joyful façade.

People loved my sunny disposition, which seemed especially

pronounced in Jewish contexts. I was the unencumbered Jew,

unburdened by grim history, by grandparents murdered, by

deeply ingrained distrust. I was open and eager to connect, any

cautiousness mainly the residue of habitual self-doubt and prior

disappointment in love.

Born in Israel, Nurit had grown up in Brazil, where her family

had moved when she was nine. Now in her late twenties and

T

SYLVIA SUKOP

Under the Stars

*^ Not her real name