My new landlady is a huge racist.

I totally forgot about this, but Jason's landlady? Mrs. R? Hates Jews. She told me that one day, in exquisite detail. And I just stood there listening to her.
I didn't agree with her or anything, but I didn't say a word.
She had seen my name, I think, on a piece of mail (she's not all that into the whole privacy-of-mail issue, and sometimes she just takes his/our mail into her house and keeps it for a few days before passing it on), and seeing that I have an Italian last name, she asked me one day if I was Italian. (She is from Italy, although actually she's Sicilian, to her that's a big distinction.)
This was back when I wasn't working all that much, so I was there quite often during the day, living with / off of Jason, and she'd ring the bell every few days to tell me not to leave without turning the heat down, or to complain about the bill for whatever she uses to heat the house, or to ask me to pour bleach down the drain of the shower (I have no idea why). Mostly I think she was just being nosy and seeing if I was there.
So she asked me if I was Italian, I get that sometimes (when I worked at Rizzoli, I think I got a promotion at least in part due to my boss thinking I was Italian), because I have such a distinctly Italian last name but I don't LOOK Italian, and I told her, no, I'm mostly Irish. Which turned out to be the right answer, because she had some Jewish tenants once who I guess had some candles burning and almost burned her house to the ground, to hear her tell it. And as a result, she hates Jews and WILL NOT ALLOW THEM TO LIVE IN HER HOUSE.
I just stood there listening to all this. I don't really self-identify as Jewish any more, but I was raised Jewish, my dad's side of the family are Jewish, and I should not allow people to say things like that to me.
Of course I was standing there thinking that if I said anything, she'd throw me and possibly also Jason out onto the street. And she probably would have. But god, I HATE when that shit happens and I don't say anything. I feel like one of those French women after WWII who had their heads shaved because they'd had relations with Nazis. I feel like a collaborator.
Of course, I really can't stand her now. I wasn't all that crazy about her anyway, because she invades J's privacy all the time.
He seems not to mind that she sometimes lets herself in when he's not there, and he reminds me that she hasn't raised the rent in four years. Which, great, but I don't know that she can raise the rent, because I'm pretty sure this is not a legal apartment. I promise you that she is not reporting the rent as income, and the plumbing was apparently put in by one of her idiot sons, because it sucks.
It's a basement apartment, you see, and there have been floods. Floods of really gross-smelling water. I think the floods happen because the pipes that take the water out of the house are not big enough. So disgusting.

None of this is even the point. The point is, now she likes me a whole bunch, because J has lived for four years like he's in a flophouse or something. I mean, I threw away bills and scraps of paper the other day that were dated as far back as 2003, and she loves that I'm cleaning the place up and making it as nice an apartment as it can possibly be. And I *want* her to like me, so that she doesn't complain that I'm living there.
And she is a person who goes around having conversations about how she hates Jews. I don't know what to do about this. It's very disturbing, and I'm afraid to say anything to her, even to tell her that I have lots of Jewish friends and I like them fine and I don't want to talk about how awful Jews are.
It's upsetting. I feel like this makes me a very bad person, or at least a very weak person. Like I would have tried to pass as a non-Jew when they were rounding my people up and shipping them off to the camps. This is worse, because it's not to save my life, it's just to keep the peace. I'm disgusted with myself for wanting her to like me. I'm disgusted that I don't have enough courage even to ask her not to be a horrible anti-semite when she's talking to me,
I wish I'd had the nerve to tell her to shut it when she went off on that rant. I hope that if she ever tries to bond with me again over how much the Jews all suck, I'll have the balls to tell her to stop.
But I know I won't.

I just hate Sicilians because they are such lousy plumbers.