HOW MY ATHEISTIC, SOULESS JEWISH FAMILY CELEBRATED A JEWISH HOLIDAY
HOW MY ATHEISTIC, SOULESS JEWISH FAMILY CELEBRATED A JEWISH HOLIDAY
By
David Gottfried
PREFACE ABOUT CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL AFFAIRS:
It is a grim time. Covid deaths in the U.S. are exceeding 3000 a day, and much of the Republican Party is trying to undue the result of the recent election. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnel is more intent on passage of legislation that would immunize businesses from liability for Covid than in giving Americans relief.
However, I am not writing about that today. What is there to say. I could go through the Thesaurus and find 100 synonyms for egregious and odious and that would feel woefully incomplete.
In part, I feel the way I felt when I read Alfred Kazin’s memoir, “New York Jew,” in which he recounts his great joy in the fall of 1942 because he had just gotten published, moved to Manhattan, and was invited to all the really right parties where everyone debated Nazism, Communism and all the other isms.
When I read this, I wanted to punch Kazin in the Jaw. There was nothing to debate in 1942. There was only to destroy. As an American and as a Jew, Kazin should have stopped writing and talking and should have enlisted in the marines, Or the Royal Air Force or the Red Army. And so there really is nothing to debate about the Republicans. There is only to destroy.
HOW MY ATHEISTIC, SOULESS JEWISH FAMILY CELEBRATED A JEWISH HOLIDAY
As I noted in prior chapters, the apartment house of my childhood was sort of like a cesspool of insects and rodents. However, there was a sanctuary: My Grandmother’s house only five blocks away. The entire building had not a single roach or a single rodent.
On Jewish Holidays, and on every Friday night, we went to Grandma’s house.
My Mother’s Mother started serving our Friday Night Sabbath meal, and our Holiday meals, at 3:30 in the afternoon. Not only in the winter, when Sabbath starts sooner because sunset comes sooner, but also in the Summer, when the sun did not set until well after 7 PM. We were all free by three oclock on Friday. Since my cousin Barry and I were in school, we were free when school let out at three o’clock. Since my Mother was a teacher, she was free at three oclock. Since my Mother’s Brother was a doctor who worked for himself, and my Mother’s Sister was a nurse who worked for her Brother, they were free to call it quits at 3:00 pm, their sick patients be damned.
And so we all streamed to Grandma’s house like frightened mice trying to hide inside Kreplachs (They are the Jewish equivalent of Chinese Wonton’s and float in chicken broth). We started eating our “Sabbath” (We were gastro-intestinal Jews, whose Judaism was restricted to the consumption of Eastern European delicacies, and we uttered no prayers) meal at 3:30 and usually had completed it by 4:00. Then we began eating again.
We were a family smitten with and enslaved by fat. We were stout and stolid and perpetually sated to the point of nausea. After our frequent orgies of nervous consumption, we forever tried to relieve the feeling of fullness by trying new and zinging mildly acidic sodas, and frenetically oscillated between green colored sodas that were given a sense of tang with liberal amounts of phosphoric acid and orange colored sodas in which the manufacturer splurged in the purchase of souring agents and so inserted citric acid, but the effervescence of the would be fillips, instead of making us feel as lively and sprightly as the models who drank such beverages during television commercials, only seemed to make our abdomens reach the point of bursting. When beautifully appealing bottles of soda did not work, and did not serve the purpose of perking-up and making our stuffed and overworked stomachs right, we considered the possibilities presented by chocolate covered cherries.
Now one might have thought that after six courses of food liberally bathed in chicken fat, chocolate covered cherries would not be an apt means of providing gastric rectification. Certainly, given the level of medical proficiency in the house – the man in the house was a doctor, one of the women was a nurse – the efficacy of chocolate covered cherries should have seemed dubious. But their schooling and their refinements were illusions, or thin veneers of etiquette and taste imposed over their true selves, which was something in the nature of a large, frightened baby forever sucking at his bottle.
And so chocolate covered cherries it was. My Aunt Trudy, the nurse, would, after much melodrama about her bloated belly and heavy sighing, rise from her chair at the dining table and hobble the two yards to the sofa as if it were expedition along the lines of Mao’s Long March. Upon arriving at the sofa she would promptly collapse as if she were a balloon pierced by a dart. Then, upon reclining on the sofa and wallowing in her nausea, her bored and irritable mind conceived of the therapeutic properties of chocolate covered chocolates and other succulent candies. Of course, the curative effects of chocolate covered cherries were not that far-fetched. Although the idea of consuming heavy chocolate after a rich, multi-course meal might seem a tad redundant or even perverse, after one bite into the chocolate one’s greedy, grasping teeth and tongue confronted the shimmering succulence of a cherry. After a meal of fat and heaviness, the cherry, and its sparkling sheer redness, seemed as glorious as the angelic figures drawn on bottles of white rock soda. After all, as doctors they knew that redness was something equivalent to life. And so the chocolate covered cherries were not all that bad, and were indeed probably very good, and in those days, the early 1960’s, when people had not yet heard of the virtues of natural foods and lolled about in a wonderbread and Cambell’s soup cuisine of utterly fabricated, unnatural food, cherries, even if they were colored with dye, drenched in corn syrup, imprisoned in chocolate, and sitting in a candy box for three months, somehow seemed delightfully wild, sprightly, and fresh.
“David, get me some chocolate covered cherries from over by the window,” Trudy chirped.
I was happy to oblige and hike across the dining room with the treasured candies, but before I could embark on my mission, my Mother, angrily biting chicken bones to extract from their marrow and fiber every last drop of animal sustenance, promptly intervened and screamed, “No, it’s bad to eat candy.”
My Mother was a woman of varied and shifting interests. She was bright enough to comprehend any idea that came her way, but her intellect lacked the measure of discernment necessary to recognize those ideas which were worthwhile and those ideas which were not. And so she took-up ideologies and notions with the promiscuity of a whore in Babylon, at various times heeding, and then just as quickly discarding, psychoanalysis, feminism, extra sensory perception, wine tasting courses, a chaotic method of packing clothes that made me a laughing stock at sleep-away camp, French cooking, and ancient African Art. Her capriciousness in thought was no less evident in her dietary predilections. Indeed, she endeavored to relate to food as she related to ideas, and in so doing she tried to be a good and compliant student. As a practical matter, this meant that she would believe in eating whatever it was that the health and pseudo-science writers of the middle brow pseudo intellectual press would foist upon the public. And so one day she would sing the praises of celery, proudly noting that the calories expended in chewing celery exceeds the calories contained in celery, while she excoriated corn. On another day she would heap hosannas on grapefruits, imbuing them with such nurturing properties that they resembled, in her hyperbolic discourse, some strange species of citric breasts, while she staunchly condemned the banality of starchy, plebian potatoes. However, in her whirling universe of shifting allegiances and beliefs, one belief was constant and that was the belief that if something was enjoyable it most certainly had to be bad, and if something was exceptionally enjoyable it must be shot through with mortal sin, and so, while My Mother was a prodigious eater, who would, like a good trooper, shovel in bowls of ferina and chicken livers (For the first year of my life she gave me only chopped beef liver) and all sorts of utterly undistinguished and at times practically nauseating foodstuffs, my Mother was filled with fright and white with rage at the thought of scintillating, sexy, chocolate covered cherries.
My Mother yelped, “David, don’t get the candies, they’re VERY, VERY bad. If you want to eat, you should eat a radish or a carrot or something like that, but don’t ever eat candy.”
After admonishing me to abstain from retrieving the chocolate with all the fervor of a Mother telling a daughter not to go too far on her first date, I would have at times gotten the chocolate, and at other times I would have declined to fetch the chocolate, but it never really mattered because the chocolate sooner or later, and usually much sooner, would be eaten.
The first chocolate would send shivers of pleasure radiating out from the throat and the teeth as if one had bitten into radioactive gold which was now blessing one’s head with waves of gilded joy. Within seconds of consuming the first chocolate, one’s grubby fingers raided the box for a second piece of chocolate so one might revisit the sensation experienced when the first chocolate was eaten. But it was all for naught and much like cocaine. Invariably, the second chocolate somehow did not seem as fine as the first and this led to ingestion of yet a third chocolate, and the progressive mediocrity of each successive chocolate led to the consumption of even more chocolates.
After Aunt Trudy had eaten her tenth chocolate, a mere three minutes after having had the first chocolate, her pace would slacken, her enthusiasm would wane, and the deep brown chocolate and the gloried red of the inner cherry began to seem as humdrum and nauseating as gallon buckets of chicken fat and gristle.
And then we could not deny it any longer. We were too full and there was no way in which the consumption of additional foods could serve to assuage our abdominal discontent. There was no brash and tingling soda, no red as the devil cherry, which could annihilate the monotony of our frightened, miserable lives. If we ate another morsel, we would, in all probability, simply vomit.
And so we were alone with our nausea and our flatulence. The whole family, which only minutes earlier had been devouring food with manic abandon, sat glum, stupefied and sluggish. The quick verbal acumen of the family members, which always manifested itself in unparalleled sarcasm in English and Yiddish, was replaced by a stupor in which only the most halting and hesitant of utterances were heard. Everyone was suddenly very stupid. It seemed as if the chicken fat of the table had not only converted the shape of our torsos into ungainly Anjou Pears but had also managed to lodge along the neuronal pathways of the brain, making every flicker of intelligence that much more faint, indistinct and feeble. We simply had nothing worthwhile to say.
Then, at around six O’clock, the evening news would begin, and we could begin to derive some amount of satisfaction from the travails of the world’s unfortunate. An earthquake or coup de etat might provide sufficient emotional energy to prompt a lusty fart or a bitter belch from our tired bulbous bowels. And as Walter Cronkite calmly read through the evening news, the steady recitation of the world’s discontents, while it may have eroded the morale of other listeners, seemed to metamorphosize into a very effective dietary aid, the stings of bad news serving as waves of hydrochloric acid to break down and digest the chicken fat. Yes, we might be fat, but at least we are not as miserable as starving people in India, and that thought sufficed to annihilate a hornet’s nest of stuffed derma sitting atop the duodenum. Yes, we may be lonely, but at least President Johnson has not commanded us to fight in Vietnam, and the happy manic meanness that that instills will secrete enough acid to break-up five boxes of Barton’s chocolate sitting on the rightward portions of our stomach, pressing on our liver.
By the conclusion of the news, when the announcer talks about less urgent events, such as Lady Bird’s plans for highway beautification, we are almost cured. Therefore, we reason that we can, and might, have a little bit more to eat of something else.
Of course there is no reason for us to eat anything else, but we will. We will do anything to take our minds off the fact that we our fundamentally unhappy, that we do not believe in Judaism, no longer believe in Socialism, do not believe in an afterlife and suspect that we will spend our dying days vegetating in a fly infested, crowded nursing home reeking of excrement, rancid food, and cancerous flesh.
So we would have a few more helpings. Nothing too extravagant, no sides of beef or pints of Matzoh Ball soup. Just a little something for our angry teeth to pulverize. A little Kugel to turn into a nice wet plaster in our mouths. An elegant, storied Tagelah that our bulldozer jaws could turn to rubble. And if we couldn’t hit the balls on the baseball diamond, we were able to get our teeth around plenty of balls in the forms of grapes and cherries and nuts.
Finally, as the sky turned from shades of scarlet and violet to black, we realized that it was time to leave. By we, I am referring to my Mother and I, and my Mother’s Sister Trudy and her son. The four of us lived in the aforementioned rodent-infested apartment building a few blocks away. (The Brother of Trudy and My Mother lived with their Mother at the home where we had just had our “Jewish meal.”)
So My Mother and I, and Trudy and Barry, wearily walked down the steps of my Grandmother’s house, mournfully faced the cold air outside, or irritatingly greeted the hot air outside, and plodded on the pavement to the car.
We then drove five blocks to our apartment house. Halfway through our drive my Mother would fret over the possibilities of finding a parking space, perhaps drive five to ten blocks in this and that direction in an increasingly haphazard effort to find a parking space, and then, while periodically shrieking and exclaiming and reviling the dearth of parking spaces, always eventually find a space.
My Mother, and My Aunt Trudy, were now utterly exhausted. After all, they been working very hard, eating chicken soup and stuffing themselves with candies and had gone through a trying time of finding a parking space. Everything was over but the moaning.
My Aunt Trudy made up her own special baby talk to explain her woe. She kept saying “utzka trutzka” with every third exhalation, every time her heavy body collapsed onto a chair or a sofa, and after every exhausting effort to adjust the television’s reception. Although utzka trutzka was her own unique sort of schizophrenic language, it did seem to bear a certain resemblance to Eastern European tongues, what with its hearty, earthy gutturalness. Perhaps, in this vein my Aunt Trudy permitted herself to imagine that she was at one with our Jewish ancestors from the old Country. Occasionally, her nostalgia for older days of American Jewry manifested itself in her propensity to say, “A kluk a Columbus,” which means “A curse on Columbus.”
On the Lower East Side, in the days before the New Deal, when miserable Jews slaved and starved in the closet-sized rooms of tubercular tenements, they spoke like this. Most Jews, after the Holocaust, never said “A kluk a Columbus” again.
It was not 1929; it was 1964, and my Grandmother had a big, nicely framed photograph of my Aunt Trudy shaking hands with President Lyndon Johnson. And my Aunt always wintered in Florida, often flew to Europe, and spent so much time shopping at Abraham & Srauss’s department store that she was designated shopper of the year in 1964. But just try telling Trudy that she wasn’t suffering.
“Oh, do you know what I have to go through. I mean, really, it’s terrible. The NONSENSE that I have to deal with. I was on the subway and there were shvatzas everywhere (My Aunt was liberal except when she thought of Blacks). They were pushing and shoving and smelling and oh I just can’t stand it. I am tired. I have to move by bowels. I don’t feel well. I need something for my acid stomach. Really.”
While Trudy free associated about the depravity of humanity, my Mother would quickly interject with a series of consolations: “Oh, I know.” “There, there, Tru, don’t let it get you.” “Of course, they’re all disgusting.” “Let it pass, its only gas.”
Trudy and her son Barry lived in an apartment that was identical to the apartment my Mother and I lived in and was one flight over us. They were two bedroom apartments, with lots of large windows, and each one could have easily accommodated a fifty person cocktail party, and they were protected by New York City’s Rent Control Laws, which, in the 1960’s, were impregnable to attack from Landlords and Republicans. But Aunt Trudy was incensed:
“This place is filthy. It’s a slum. And the super, Logan, is a dumb shvatza. I mean Grandma has a super who’s a Nazi, but at least he’s white. And there are roaches. And there are mice. And we’re living in poverty.”
After we entered my Aunt’s apartment (My Mother and I usually went to her apartment before we went to our own because my Aunt was like the eye of the storm that we all whirled about.), my Aunt grabbed a big bottle of ice cold beautifully dyed soda, and plopped on her bed.
My aunt and my Mother loved their beds. Although they had large living rooms, and a variety of comfortable chairs and sofas, whenever they entered their respective homes they made straight for their beds, happily collapsing in their heaps of feminine fattiness. Invariably they picked up a newspaper, and turned on the television, and they let their attention shift from the screen to the printed page depending upon the whim of their roving eyes. My aunt might be delighted to read an article that gave her the opportunity to feel happily furious about a politician’s peccadillos in which case she would roar, “Serves him right, what a jerk. He should drop dead.” When the evening news came on My Aunt was equally enchanted, finding so many things to test her bite on. If she didn’t yell at the Civil Rights marchers, she would find pleasure in yelling at the Southern Segregationists who she saw no inconsistency in hating with all the intensity with which she hated the blacks. And so she would heckle her TV screen, spread out her legs and let her dress ride up over her bloomers, and holler at George Wallace or Martin Luther King or whoever seemed inspired with conviction.
While My Mother and Aunt Trudy lied in their respective beds, screaming at the Newspaper and the Television, my cousin Barry and I played with our toys. Our toys consisted of ornery little animals, of a reptilian nature, that bore a congruity to our cantankerous lives. Nothing fluffy for us. No dogs or cats or anything with fur. Fur made sense on fur coats; on animals, they were a source of allergens and as bright, neurotic Jews with a very well developed sense of the hypochondriacal, we didn’t need a diagnosis of asthma to know our lungs were well on their way to filling-up with fluid.
And so instead of pets with sloppy emotions, we always went in for snide and silent types. Turtles and Salamanders were the usual choices. I don’t remember how many we had. We went through them the way our Mothers, if they had been wealthier, might have gone through maids.
My first turtle was a present from my Uncle, My Mother’s Brother. He bought the turtle at the Seattle World’s fair, mailed it from Seattle to Brooklyn in a very small envelope, and the tiny creature arrived at my house squished and dead. This was my introduction to pet care. (I once heard a black comic relate the exact same story: A relative mailed him a turtle in a small envelope, from the Seattle World’s Fair, and it arrived at the little boy’s home predictably dead. The comic said that this was the sort of thing only black people did. Not so.)
The thing about salamanders and turtles was that you did not really have to do anything with them. You just put them in a nice rectangular prism of a box and the damn things never made a sound, didn’t eat too much, and only made a miniscule amount of shit. In fact, I can’t even remember where their shit went. Perhaps, my cousin fed their bowel movements to the mice.
In any event, the glorious thing about these pets was that even though you did not really have to do anything with them, you could still say you had a pet and thereby be as normal as someone on a situation comedy playing with his dog rex. Although they generally could be disregarded, at night my cousin and I might spend a few minutes with our green and khaki creatures, peering into their little box cages, and taking comfort in the realization that even though our lives might be frightening at least we weren’t salamanders and turtles.
With such reassuring thoughts, we journeyed to our beds.
I say journeyed to our beds because I, at least, did not fall asleep too readily. Instead, I played a little game with my eyes. I had this ability to imagine that my darkened bedroom was filled with thousands of sparkling colored lights and I would actually see lights, of every color of the spectrum, flash through the room like the glitter used in elementary school arts and crafts or the sprinkles used to decorate ice cream cones. I could see the reds of the most breathtaking cherry sodas and the oranges of the most sublime orange sodas and I would lie in my bed, for about fifteen minutes, enjoying the light show courtesy of my florid imagination. Since then I read an article that declared that my ability to see beautiful colors at an early age was consistent with a rare and profound form of human genius and derangement. It’s preferable to believing that it was a prelude to garden variety schizophrenia. (I didn’t really hallucinate. I just sort of hallucinated. I could turn it on or off at whim.)
Soon enough, it was Saturday morning. This, inevitably, meant the consumption of cartoons. But today it was a holiday, a big Jewish holiday, and my attendance at the Synagogue was mandatory.
I don’t think it takes more than two minutes to put on a pair of pants and a shirt, and I find it hard to believe that I took more than ten minutes getting dressed when I was a child, but if I think back, when I had to do something important, or go someplace of importance, I vaguely recall taking hours to get dressed. My whole family did.
It was an entire production. First one would eat breakfast. Then, one would bathe and wash, an activity which provided limitless opportunities for lazing in a daze in the bathtub. (Years ago, people bathed more than showered) Then, I would dry off, and this was, if one put one’s mind to it, a challenging procedure because one did not necessarily know when one was completely dry, or how vigorously one might rub the towel against one’s body, or whether the towel which just a moment ago traversed your rear has now contaminated one’s chest, requiring that we regress to the very beginning and start our bath again.
My Mother did not like the inordinate time I spent in getting dressed, but I hardly thought she was in a position to complain. She spent hours engaging in all sorts of grooming procedures. And my Aunt, well my Aunt was an edifice to be built.
The dressing of my Aunt was a complex affair. She was a big, heavy woman, and a very proper woman, and this of course meant the donning of an elaborate set of undergarments the centerpiece of which was, of course, the girdle.
When my aunt put on her girdle, I had the sense of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge being built, what with all the suspending lines, and straps and bindings holding stuff up as if she were some vast and lumbering suspension bridge. I can’t remember all the straps and where they went, but they seemed to go everywhere. Her stockings were fastened to the hem of her girdle, and the girdle was tied up in a million different directions of such beguiling complexity that it made getting dressed a brief primer in engineering. Oh there were so many things to a women’s outfit: There were panties, and panty liners, and feminine napkins whatever that might be, and enormous bulging bras, and stockings, and girdles, and fifteen different kinds of make-up, and so many different forms of jewelry, and none of the outfit is going to work unless the shoes and the purse match, and we haven’t even talked about the hair yet.
When my Mother and my Aunt were dressed, they imagined themselves a plump hybrid of Jackie Kennedy and Diana Ross. For all the persecutions they imagined they endured, after they put their duds on, and did a few jiggers of perfume, they were able to walk into a room and convey the studied bitchiness that said Jackie Kennedy. And the way in which their dresses hugged their butts suggested the Supremes.
We completed breakfast, and finished getting dressed, by about noon. The house would be suffused with all manner of citrusy fragrances from the perfumes My Mother and Aunt had tried on and then discarded. There would be tissue boxes everywhere and rags and papers and napkins with smudges of white and every imaginable shade of red which bore the residue of their judicious applications of every cream and lotion Maybeline and Revlon had conjured-up. The house smelled very henny. It seemed as if our mailbox should have read “Residence of the Tampons.” I felt so immersed in all things feminine that I would not have been surprised if, somehow, I had walked out of the house with a pair of panties on my head. My Mother and my Aunt may have been going to the Synagogue for Services, but they seemed to think they were Norma Shearer playing Marie Antoinette and that the Synagogue was nothing but a vast ball where they must outclass Madame Du Barry.
And so then My Mother, Aunt Trudy and I walked the few blocks to the Synagogue. (My cousin Barry had already gone to temple an hour before to talk to his friend Benny Weisowitz about the best times to give a rotten teacher annoyance calls.)
On the way to the temple, My Mother and Trudy had what they called their Jewish purity look. They might not have known too much about the Jewish religion. They might have loved to eat shrimp with lobster sauce at the Chinese restaurant. When they ate Ham with Sliced Pineapple and a maraschino cherry they felt as if they were enjoying all the tropical luxuries of Hawaii, the hottest place to be. But they just knew, I mean they just knew, that now they looked pure and Jewish and superior. First, they were looking so beautiful, and then they had been eating all that Jewish food the night before, and now they were walking – I mean they were walking a full four blocks instead of taking the car to show respect for Jewish tradition – to temple. They had every hair in place, and as they walked down the street they imagined that the goyim would part for them the way the Red Sea parted for Moses or the crowd at the cemetery separated for Audrey Hepburn when she looked so regal and wronged in “The Children’s Hour.”
Upon arriving at the synagogue, my Mother and Aunt whispered to each other in conspiratorial tones, assessing the foe: The good looking women. The Hebrew liturgy might have pertained to our love of the Lord, or our need to repent, but such thoughts were the stuff of gullible and stupid boy scouts and girl scouts. As suave New York bitches, they knew that an ethical underpinning to one’s life was a travesty they could not afford. And they spoke like this:
“Did you see the nerve of her, walking around in those shoes from Bergdorfs. A few years ago she was in the freaking blitz and then all it takes is a rich Jewish husband, she puts a Swanson TV dinner in the oven – I mean she’s a lazy one – and she’s got Park Avenue fashion,” Trudy moaned to My Mother.
“She’s a cheap, stupid, inconsiderate, loud mouthed girl whose cheap low class English accent is so damn tacky and brassy that I can’t even like the sound of High Class English anymore. I mean the other day I heard that fagellah John Gielgoud, who has a very fancy shmancy English accent, that I used to love, but I didn’t like it because it reminded me of Micky.”
Now, it might seem odd for someone to talk like that during religious services, but I suppose I ought to be more precise about where these services were taking place. The services were conducted, as one might expect, inside the temple. Although some of the people spent most of their time inside the building, actually praying, a great number of people stood on the sidewalk in front of the temple just looking, getting looked at, and gossiping. After all, after you got all dolled-up for services, what’s the point of going to temple if people aren’t going to admire how wonderful you look. So, My Mother and Trudy stood outside the temple, in a throng of mink coats, and proved their Solomonic wisdom with wise and world-weary comments.
And while the women stood outside of the temple, they engaged in the numbers show. We believed that most things could be quantified, and that included success, and success implied happiness. And so various ladies would regale the throng with high numbers, whether it be the valuations of their stocks, or their real estate or their sons’ SAT and MCAT scores. By exclaiming that one had a ton of bucks, one made other people feel inferior, and this gave one Schadenfreude or pleasure from other peoples’ misfortune. And this is how we asked G-d for forgiveness for our sins on Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur. As I said in an earlier chapter, if the ladies had their wont, they would have distributed photocopies of their portfolios and sons’ test scores. Since that would be too gauche, they had to content themselves by simply wearing lots of jewelry and making every fourth word out of their mouths a number which quantified the value of a home or the score on a test.
All the women, and quite a few of the men, were nothing but catty divas. I learned to get hysterical because Izzy Kaplinski got ninety seven on a math test whereas I got a lowly ninety five and a half. We got into the swing of things when we walked through the Hebrew School, at the age of eight, testing ourselves to see who could name the most Nazi concentration camps. (Actually, we never did that, but we came pretty damn close)
My cousin Barry even established a scaled score for all the other scores. The objective was to get lots of happiness points, which he called “Nachus” points. Each particular academic feat yielded a certain number of points. Getting 1300 on the SATS might confer 1000 nachus points, while getting 1500 on the SATS would award one a dazzling 1500 nachus points.
Some members of the community did not get a lot of points; some people aren’t brilliant or don’t gleam with the narcissism of diamonds. These sorts were not wanted as we had to be extraordinary. The community was like an organism, and just as an organism has to be apprised of those parts that have become diseased, a community has to know when some of its members are no longer up to snuff. When things like that happen, sometimes the poorly performing members of the community have to be eliminated.
Now we don’t formally excommunicate people anymore. It’s not necessary. All one has to do is let someone know they are unwanted, unliked and no longer invited. It’s all very simple. You can tell the President of the Sisterhood who can tell the cantor who can tell the director of the mens’ club that Hershel Yaplinski lost his job, is drinking in Irish bars and looking rather haggard and then everyone can let it be known that Hershel Yaplinski is not wanted. When he comes to community meetings, one can move a little further away from where he is sitting so one doesn’t get his poor person goyische smell. When he asks you what you’re doing this weekend, you can learn not to answer his question but to just sort of scowl with a look that says, “Well I’m certainly not going to get drunk and be disgusting like you.” When he invites you to his house to watch a ballgame, you can tell him that you’re busy reading an educational Leon Uris novel about the Holocaust. Little by little, he’ll get the message.
Actually, I remember reading an OP Ed in the New York Times, in the 1980’s, in which a prominent leader of a major US Jewish Organization said that the crisis of intermarriage was not that bad because poorer Jews were intermarrying more than wealthier Jews. If this decadent, European-ghetto way of being Jewish takes hold in Israel, the Jewish state will fall apart as all of its once brave Jewish soldiers will become little Jared Kushners wallowing in decadence, deceit and dishonor.
(Of course, there is a type of Jew who is defiantly obstinate about being Jewish and does not issue Fatwahs against poor Jews. I am speaking of the Orthodox and ultra Orthodox. I may be gay, and they may deem me corrupt, but I will give them credit for one thing: They will not berate me for not walking around with gold trinkets like a fourteen carot gold Jewish Princess. They do not believe that people of modest means are not worthy of being Jewish.)
The pressure to be rich was most exquisitely and excruciatingly imposed by rich “liberal” synagogues and it was imposed on the guys. If a woman was somewhat upper middle class, people would proclaim that she was such a great person, she was a woman who had made it in a man’s world. All sorts of undeserved compliments and credits went her way.
A Jewish man had to meet impossible thresholds. A Jewish man had to show financial reserves big enough to fill up a football stadium with enough left over to set up a foundation for poor girls in the third world.
The women needed only to pout at someone, really severely, to make that person know he was as unwelcome as the “Beverly Hillbillies” were in Rene Drysdale’s immaculate mansion. With a really searching glare at a young man, they seemed to inquire as to whether or not he had secured admission to a sufficiently prestigious university. With retorts so roiling that they seemed to have been lifted from the dialogue of “All About Eve,” they could make anyone sorry for celebrating the Jewish holiday and be sure to think twice before celebrating it again.
They were swift and sure sentinels, perched on the pavement like Eagles, the toes on their pumps as pointy as a bird’s webbed foot. They were disdainful. They were dismissive. They were thoroughly happy: They would stand around a little bit longer, then they would actually go into the Synagogue for services to observe the old men moaning their prayers, then they would come outside again so they could gossip with some more people from the temple, and then they would stuff their face. They would stuff their faces at the Kiddush, which was the reception hosted by the Synagogue, and they would stuff their faces at their Mother’s house, where they would eat all the food that they had eaten the prior evening, and which they had eaten for every Friday night, Sabbath meal and holiday meal in their entire lives, and they would eat this food with a mad rabid intensity. When they ate their food their eyes would glaze over and they would start to sweat and they would breathe heavily and they seemed more and more like animals, as if the only thing in the world that mattered was the food they were shoveling into their mouths.
But it wasn’t time to eat yet. First, they had to walk into the temple to sit around for a few obligatory minutes and prey or commune with god.
When they walked in, the synagogue was hushed and splendid. The only sound in the synagogue was the sound of the cantor, the person in the congregation who led everyone in prayer. Of course, almost no one knew what the cantor was saying because he was singing his prayers in Hebrew, and almost no one could understand Hebrew. In a couple of years I would learn to read Hebrew, like all the other little boys in the congregation, but we still weren’t taught to understand it. In other words, we knew the sounds that each letter made, and we could easily put the sounds of the letters together to make words, but we did not know what the words meant. (We were taught conversational Hebrew for a few years, but soon enough that would be forgotten. Our elders wanted us to spend our time with biology and chemistry so we could become rich doctors. Americana trumped everything.)
At times we would race one another while we read Hebrew, happy to show off our dazzling proficiency at Hebrew phonetics and make it clear that we were probably also good at standardized tests and thus likely, someday, to make a lot of money as a doctor. What the words meant did not really matter and we did not care.
But while the Cantor sang, his voice indicated that he deeply cared about the words, that he knew what they were about, and that they pertained to something precious and profound in our history. When he sang, he seemed to cry. The gobbley gook Hebrew syllables connoted an infinity of meaning for him, and in his performance he worked every syllable and note for every last ounce of agony.
Although we did not know what anything meant, we all had an impression of what the words might have meant: That we had suffered, and we had been hurt, and our ancestors were wonderful, and we must never forget the glorious misery of our forefathers. Every so often I would look at my Grandmother, who did speak Yiddish but of course did not speak Hebrew, who knew not a thing of what was going on. But when I would look at my Grandmother in the middle of the Cantor’s lamentations, she would, invariably, find it suitable to nod her head to and fro with a troubled, wise and weary look which seemed to say that she understood what this was about, that she knew it from the old country and that she personally witnessed the atrocities the cantor was singing about. All the old people knew.
However, Judaism is a lot more than a recitation of the names of the various death camps of the Third Reich. It is a lot more than a chronicle of misery. But for most wholly ignorant American Jews, the atrocities we endured is the alpha and omega of Judaism.
My Aunt Trudy and my Mother were not as adept at affecting my Grandmother’s aura of spiritual contemplation. But then again, that wasn’t their scene. They were interested in pretending that they were the Jewish Version of Marlo Thomas in “That Girl,” outlandishly fashionable, trendy in every respect. And so they knew it was best to look a little bit bored.
THE FOLLOWING SECTION IS HIGHLIGHTED ONLY BECAUSE OF FORMATTING PROBLEMS.
Of course it wasn’t hard for them to get bored when we progressed to those portions of the service where the congregation joined in. There were certain sections of the Service in which not only the cantor but every other old man as well would join in and raucously shout and sing in Hebrew.
The men would sway, and they would rock, and they would gesticulate wildly, and when they prayed they seemed to be the most confident people I had ever met. When they prayed to God, they did not seem to implore him for his intercession in their lives. They did not seem to beg forgiveness for their sins. They did not seem to be fearful of their final entry in the judgment book. No, when they preyed, they reveled in their ability to articulate Hebrew syllables, with a very Guttural accent, that was much like the performance of an auctioneer showing off his ability to deliver quick rhythmic speech. When they prayed, they seemed like a bunch of very aged, bright first graders enthusiastically proving that they had mastered their reading textbook.
This was a man’s job. Not a women’s job. In the Jewish religion, the women don’t have any obligations to recite any prayers; it is their job to prepare the same festive, fat-laden foods several thousand times in the course of their lives. And so my Aunt Trudy and my Mother had nothing to do while all this was going on. They would on occasion nudge one another, and whisper under their breath about another women’s poor taste in stockings or handbags, and when the opportunity to chastise their fellow females did not arise they took turns complaining about me, insisting that I sit up straight, or not pick my nose, and endeavor to be properly lifeless and passive.
Finally, the monotony of melodramatic morose Hebrew chants came to an end. The Rabbi came to the podium to give us his sermon.
Our Rabbi supposedly had a great reputation for very brilliant and learned sermons. He was, supposedly, one of the most highly paid Rabbis among the conservative congregations in Brooklyn, New York, and he received his princely compensation even though he was not married, as mandated by Judaic Law – a Shanda (Scandal).
However, I can’t remember a single one of his sermons. All I remember is various snippets of sermons that make no sense at all. One day he told the story of an old man whose greatest love was a nice hot roll and coffee, and the whole congregation seemed especially moved, almost to the point of tears, when he talked about butter melting on a hot roll, suggesting that the Rabbi had touched the inner gastrointestinal heart strings of the Jewish people. The old man longed for a heaven which was a succession of hot rolls. The congregation’s identification with the old man seemed as maudlin as a bunch of old queens identifying with Judy Garland. In the Spring of 1969, the Rabbi gave the floor to another wise old man in the temple who spent the entire sermon excoriating Richard Nixon for not being sufficiently pro-Israeli because Nixon, he lamentably notified us, said that he wanted to maintain a balance of power in the Middle East when in fact good friends of Israel will always insist that Israel possess a preponderance of power. And at that time we had half a million men fighting and dying in South Vietnam.
The synagogue taught me lots of rules and regulations and customs, and many of them made infinite sense and many of them were rooted in a more refined, logical and exacting sense of morality than that discernable in Christianity, but there was nothing which made the cornucopia of Jewish wisdom cohere and come together.
By sunset the holiday would be over. And we would be back to sweet and sour shrimp and the good old rat race which was the whole point of living.