Traditional Jewish Jokes & Anecdotes, No. 11

My Father’s favorite Joke

To my parents, relatives and neighbors when I was growing up, World War II came to mean only one thing: the Holocaust.  The information coming in from Europe was overwhelmingly bad beyond belief.  The only good news in those post-war years was the foundation of the State of Israel.  For my father, after he would watch newsreels and listen to the radio, what amazed him was that in this new Eretz Yisroel, Jews could be policemen, firemen, rubbish collectors and almost everything there needed to be to run a country from top to bottom.  For someone who was brought up to be fearful of anyone in uniform—who wasn’t fighting the Nazis and the Japs—it was amazing for me to see his reactions to photographs in the papers of Jewish soldiers in Israel.

This was therefore one of his favorite jokes, a story filled with awe, pride and a need to rationalize the new facts to his whole cultural background.

One day at the entrance to a military base somewhere in Israel, young men were walking in and out of the gate, saluting one another, and seeming to behave the way all soldiers do.  My father had been in the Army for nearly four years, so he knew such things.

Anyway, as one of the officers walked by and was saluted by most of the regular troops going by, one young man did not give a salute.  The officer, a man who had trained in the British battalion, a man with a big mustache and a swagger stick under his arm, turned around, clicked his heels, and shouted in a loud voice: Halt!

The young soldier suddenly seemed to wake up out of dream, stopped, and stared at the officer, fear mounting in his face.

The officer marched up to this frightened young soldier and stared down at him from his commanding height, physical and institutional.  He looked at the young man for almost a minute, his eyes trying to pierce the young fellow’s mind, and then he said:

“So epis, maybe you are breugis?”[1]

At that point my father could not control himself.  His face turned bright red and he laughed and laughed, with tears rolling down his eyes.  After two thousand or more years of subservience, persecution and humiliations, just imagining such a scene was too much for him to bear.  He laughed and laughed and laughed, and then, patting me on the head, he whispered through his tears: “A Yiddisha kupf, heh?”[2]

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[1] Roughly translated: “So tell me, please, you are perhaps upset about something?”

[2] Roughly translated: “That’s some Jewish head, isn’t it?”