Traditional Jokes and Anecdotes, No. 4

Jokes don’t have to be quick one-line gags, full of insults and put-downs.  The best are slow, subtle, and develop themes that explore character, ethics and morals.  Because they work their way through the personalities of the teller and the audience, shaped by current circumstances and various anxieties, they have to be told over and over again, and though they may seem familiar, they still pack a real punch.  The trick here is to present a written text and to find a way to make it assume the special means of a spoken performance. I set this “amusing anecdote” (to use my father’s expression) in the not too distant past, for me at least, and put it in a specific setting that seems most appropriate to the cast of characters and their way of relating to one another.  Maybe ti works and maybe it doesn’t.

It’s All A Matter Of Perspective

February 23^rd 1954.  On the veranda of the luxurious and strictly kosher Casa Florida Hotel on a small street between Collins Avenue and the middle-class bungalows of Miami Beach.  It is late afternoon and delicious sea breezes begin to blow in off the surf. Two women of a certain age, both widows, are sitting beside one another looking down a broad avenue of palm trees.  Each one is a sipping a long cool drink.

One of these women is Mrs. Edith Offenbach, formerly of Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn; the other, Mrs. Yetta Blitzfinger, formerly of The Grand Concourse, the Bronx.  These two ex-New Yorkers have much in common and much to talk about, though they have known each other a few weeks.  Recently widowed, they decided to come south for the winter and maybe, who knows, for a longer time, if everything works out, you never know, do you?

Almost every day, they meet on the veranda, sit next to one another, sip their drinks, and discuss.  They share information about their husbands, may they rest in peace, who were wise enough to provide for them if necessary, as it now is, about their homes, each one having lived most of their married lives in relative comfort in large apartments on their respective wide streets in The City.  Most of all they discuss the most important things to them and to the world, their children. 

“Oy, let me tell you,” says Edith, “ when my doctor was little, did he give me trouble, with every disease you can imagine, no wonder he became a famous surgeon, he earns more than my husband (God rest his soul) made his whole life and that’s just on one year.”

“Taka, taka,” responds Yetta.  “It’s not easy being a mother, and I should know.”

“And me, too,” says Edith.  “Because, let me tell you, not only did my doctor give me trouble all the time with his measles and his mumps and his small pox, but once, God forbid, we thought he had polio.”

Yetta spat on the ground three times: “It shouldn’t happen to our worst enemies.”

“No, denken Gotts, it was something else.  But¸ as I said, for aggravation, it’s was not only Hymie, my doctor, but we also had tsuris, such troubles from Jacob, my lawyer, when he became able to run around the house, with gotkas and without.  Always this famous lawyer that assures me soon he will be going to the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, what else, when he was a real bondit, we always had to keep him from sticking his fingers into the light sockets, a shock would kill him, and maybe even, so crazy he was, his little peepee.”

They both sat back, sipped their drinks again, and watched the waves roll in and roll out, roll in and roll out, so rhythmic it was a comfort after life times filled with aggravation.  Now, forgive the thought, but as widows and mothers they might relax and enjoy a little bit of life.

Edith then spoke again: “So let me tell you what happened a few years later, the two boys growing up, coming near to bar mitzvah.  Jake was a year younger, a little more, but already a lawyer he argued up and down every day that it wasn’t fair his brother, Hymie, should become a man first, and he wanted either we wait a year until he too is thirteen or, better, he should be given an extra year because he wanted it so much, so they could both become menschen at the same time. All the time, every day, the lawyer makes his spiel: you could save money on the reception, we could both take lessons together and help one another, it would be less trouble for the relatives that have to shlep from all over, from Chicago, Saint Louis, Los Angeles, and on and on.  My poor husband, he comes home from a hard day at the factory—did I tell you he was a manufacturer, a dress-maker, but such a success, in Jersey City, my Herbie, may he rest in peace—he has to listen and he almost gives in.  But then the doctor, who hears all this, you should understand, puts his foot down and howls: No, it’s impossible.  I will kill myself first.  Such a thing for a surgeon to say when he is only almost thirteen.”

“So how did you settle this problem?” asks Yetta.

“Settle-shmettle.  We offered bribes with money, promised him a vacation to the mountains he could  learn to ski, we would buy him a fancy bicycle, whatever.  But nothing seemed to move him.  His arguments became louder and more subtle, you would think he was a yeshiva-bocher what knows all the passages of the Talmud.  Mostly this lawyer wheedles and irritates, like a professional.  My Uncle Herman, already a great lawyer in a big firm where they allow Jews to be partners, comes to visit and makes a speech with fancy legal terms.  It doesn’t work.  My cousin Shelley—you know the one who owns one of those big chicken farms and plans to make a killing with the southern fried colonel, I told you last week—also he comes and points his finger a lot and tells my lawyer not to be such a baby and a shmuck and to wait until next year like every other proper Jewish boy in the world.  That too doesn’t work.  Then comes my husband’s best friend from work, a big shot accountant, and he sits the boy down at the table, takes out papers and pencil, makes drawings and lines, and puts down lots of numbers, and says, “You don’t save any money with two boys at the same time a bar mitzvah.  Better to wait, get double presents, because I assure you anybody who comes will klnow you don’t just give the bar mitzvah boy a fountain pen or a wristwatch, you also give his brother, he shouldn’t be jealous.”  It doesn’t work.  By then, both my husband and me, I am ready to give in, for a little peace in the house.

“Nu, nu? So how did you resolve this great conundrum?” asks Yetta.

“Like you can’t guess?  I will tell you.  One night, after his bar mitzvah lessons with Rabbi Ginzburg, out of the little study in the back of our apartment, the rabbi sits down at the table with us for a glass of tea and a piece of honey cake I bought in Schraft’s just that very morning, so it was soft and moist, and such a good shmeck, the whole world should be so happy. 

So the rabbi looks at my husband and at me, and he starts to say looking at my son with eyes that could cut a hole in a metal door:

 “Boychik, what’s this I hear?  Your brother wants to make a bar mitzvah at the same time as you?  Where is this crazy boy?” 

My doctor looks more frightened than he ever did before in his life.

“Ma, where is my brother Jake? I don’t want him he should be a bar mitzvah on the same day with me.  I don’t like it.”

My husband stands up and goes to the lawyer’s bedroom.  He doesn’t knock. He throws it open, and shouts: “Out this minute.”

This boy is more frightened than the first because he has been listening in you couldn’t help it, with everybody shouting around the table.

He sits down with us.  The rabbi gives him a klap on his face.  “What are you, mishuggah, boy?”

My lawyer sits there with tears in his eyes and blubbers.

“Speak up, boy,” says the rabbi.  “What kind of mishagas is this to become a bar mitzvah before you are thirteen? What, are you some kind of Talmud scholar to change the laws after five thousand years? Fehh on you!”

The lawyer blubs again.

This time my Herbie turns to him.  He picks him up and drags him into the bedroom.  I can hear a good potch in tuchas going on and some voices through the closed door.  In a few minutes, my lawyer comes out, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

“I am sorry.  I don’t want my bar mitzvah with Hymie.”

“And what else?” says my husband.

“And I will be a good boy, and listen to my tatta-mamma and my rabbi, and do everything right.”

Then Mrs. Edith Offenbach turns to her friend Mrs. Yetta Blitzfinger and says: “So now you understand.”

“Certainly,” says Yetta.  “But now let me tell you about my children.”

“Wait a minute,” says Edith.  “Kikarun, take a look at his.”

“Look at what?” asks Yetta.

“At what is coming up the path here from the beach. Do you see what I see? It’s a person with one leg shorter than the other, limping along like something out of the circus.  And, now see what I see, he has one arm all twisted around, he could be a pretzel.  And, vey ist mir! that face: his nose is squashed down, and his eyes, I can’t look, one is droopy it will fall into mouth.  Did you ever?” asks Edith.

“But that is my son, my Avraham-Moshe.”

“Your son?”

“Yes, my poor son,” and Yetta starts to cry.

“Oh,” says Edith, “well, let me tell you, on him it looks good.”

NImshol/Coda

You are supposed to laugh at this point, the last line representing the punch line to the joke. In the normal telling, then, Edith’s comment supposedly shows a surprising degree of politeness and indicates that she wishes to deflect any cruelty in her remarks on the young’s man’s deformities.  The joke manifests in the real lack of compassion on her part, but in the listeners’ realization that she has bested her new-found friend in the game of boasting about their sons while they sit idly on the veranda of the Miami hotel.  In the original, Yetta says nothing, does not cry, and has no other function but to serve as the butt of the double cruelty of Edith’s remarks: first, that she triumphs over her friend by having two important grown-up sons while Yetta only has a grotesque monster to speak of; and second, that she makes a ridiculous statement to save her own dignity, still at the expense of her friend, since her comment does nothing to alleviate the pain caused not merely by the appearance of the young man coming up the path which she assumes haunts the other woman all through her life, but also by rubbing salt into the wound with this fatuous formula of mitigation. One cannot imagine, Edith thinks, the spectators to this performance assume, that Yetta is unaware of how ugly her boy is and what disgust he rouses in other people and that is probably why she remains silent while the other mother flaunts her good luck in the success of her two sons, their childish antics only confirming what a wonderful mother she is.  By adding the few words to allow Yetta a different kind of awareness, this version of the joke suggests a different mode of comedy.  The real emotion in Yetta’s voice and her tears point back to another way of approaching her refusal to engage in the boasting match. Her earlier comments can be read after the fact in a new light now.  Read in this way, the joke begins to turn on Edith, her obtuseness, inability to empathize with her companion, and—this may be the hardest to and thus the last insight to struggle through the contours of the traditional bit of Jewish Witz—her failure ever to have understood her own sons.