10. Traditional Make-Believe Jewish Stories of Boro Park

Shabbos and the Shabbos Goys

They yelled that out of the windows: Shabbos goy!

They pointed at me as I walked down the street early on Saturday morning to buy fresh eggs from the Alpine Dairy and then warm bagels and bialys just out of the oven in a bakery a few shops down on Thirteenth Avenue.

When I walked back home, they were standing on their stoop already to go to little shul across the street, and they yelled, pointed and stuck out their tongues: Shabbos goy!

What could you say when these mishugganah tuchas-warmers did that to you? With their fur hats, long gabardine coats, and payos curling all around their ears, you couldn’t make fun of them. You would be as bad as they were, or, worse, like a Nazi.

It was just something you had to learn to put up with, said my father. And it was because of my father that they taunted me and my family. My father was a dentist and he kept his office open both on Friday evening and Saturday morning because many of his patients worked long hours and couldn’t come at other times. He also didn’t have a beard (but he did have a moustache), did not wear a yarmulka and only a hat to keep his head warm in the winter. As for my mother, she did not wear a sheytel as married women were supposed to do, and it was rumoured that she didn’t keep strictly kosher.

Although we never had pig meat in our house, we did sometimes have shrimp salad, and people guessed that we neither kept meat and milk products completely separate, or have two different sets of dishes and utensils, and certainly not two different sinks or refrigerators.  I went to public school, also without a yarmulka, and though I went to cheder after school for an hour every day, it was not strict enough for our next-doorniks.

Every time I got yelled at in the street, my father would take me aside and tell me they were ignorant backwards people. He told me: Don’t worry. Soon enough, God willing, they will realize what they are doing. They will learn to be Americans and be tolerant. You think I believed that?

Usually, if you ask around or look it up in a book, you find out that a Shabbos Goy was a non-Jewish neighbour who did things that a religious Jew was not allowed to do, such as lighting candles or turning on the electric lights, and such a person did this either as an act of goodwill or for a small favour or payment. 

However, when our religious neighbours from the Old Country shouted out the window that everyone in my family, but especially my father, was a Shabbos Goy, they meant something quite different. He was supposed to be a Jew, the father of a family, a good husband and also a leader of the community.  But on every point, in their eyes, he failed: he neither looked like or acted like any Jew they had ever met. My family, to them, were wild savages, desecrators of the Law. I was sure to grow up a heretic. My mother, alas, she was beyond comprehension for what she did and said, and the fact that she was both young and suffered from some strange illness that made her faint in the streets, have a shwarzer maid clean the house, and drank coffee and other non-kosher foods at the little restaurant around the corner, made her seem to them like some demonic spirit. And even more off-putting to them, she gave piano lessons.  She was a performer, and you know what those kind of people are, don’t you? To them, too, my father was very rich, an important man—as they could see by all the visitors we had with MD on their license plates, the fancy suits they wore when they came in late at night after work to have a piece of cake and a glass of tea, and the fact that he had his dental office right in his big three-story house. In other words, he was a Rockefeller and thus he should provide big donations to their little shtibble across the street.

So every Saturday morning when I went out early to bring home a nice fresh breakfast, you can see how this would offend these neighbours and put them in a rage. They couldn’t control themselves. Shabbos Goy! they shouted out of their window.

My parents tried to explain to me—and probably to themselves, as well—that since those people came from backwards little villages in Hungary and had only barely survived the Holocaust, they couldn’t understand how a family, educated and middle class, could not be strict in serving the Law and God. By our actions, we made a mockery of their survival and dishonoured all their relatives and friends who died in the Shoah. 

It just didn’t make sense to me. At the wise and all-knowing age of eleven, I found all these explanations and excuses specious. How could they shame us in public if they were followers of the rabbinical codes and commentaries which, as I learned in my Talmud Torah class, said that one of the worst sins a person could commit would be to bad-mouth someone else, especially another Jew. People should be nice to one another, and respectful?

There is no way one could have talked to them and discussed the problem and tried some way to work it out. Neither my father nor I were Talmudic scholars to work through the big rabbinical books to find arguments that the next-doorniks would understand, and it was a matter beyond rational discourse. They had been traumatized by their experiences—and dislocated to a new country and a new culture—and were now holding on tight to what they could understand. No one else on the block joined them in their public taunts, so we would just have to ride it out. Hold our breaths and hope they would move away sooner or later. 

But such reasoning on the male side of the family conferences, such as they were—more like little snippets of conversation between my father and myself: for we never really ever talked in my family—did not consider what my mother might do. Not she would be able to bake a nice kugel or other dish for them to make peace, as they would never eat anything that came out of our house. Without a sheytel, my mother could not approach the lady of the house next door, the baalabuster.  She couldn’t appeal to female instincts in the other. So what could she do?  My mother always found a way around custom, reason and instinct.

 What can you call it but emotional politics? Mystical insight into the workings of the world? Somehow, beyond anything people talked about on the radio or wrote about in the newspapers, was as completely cruel, horrible and evil as what actually happened to Jews who were caught in rural areas, hunted down like animals by the Blue Police, flushed out of the woods by village volunteer fire brigades, chased into ambushes by enraged peasants angry when the Jewish people they were hiding ran out of money, and beaten to a pulp by wild teenage boys and girls looking for the thrill of killing someone, someone no longer considered human. Bloody pitchforks, scythes and axes, big stones—anything they could get their hands on. 

My mother divined this truth behind the truth beyond imagining. She felt deep within herself—perhaps because her own grandparents had been hunted down, shot and burnt in northern Romania at the turn of the century—that she had to act like a human being.

But how does a mensch act in crazy circumstances that defy all understanding?

One Saturday morning very early she went out of her house, walked a few paces to the next-doorniks, sat down on their stoop, and began to weep. She became louder and louder. She yelled and she howled, Oy givalt! Oy givalt! Soon people were looking out their windows and men and boys on their way to shul stopped and looked at her. The family next door opened their windows and stared at her. My mother didn’t look up at them and she didn’t speak to them directly. She beat her hands on her head and shrieked: Oy givalt! Oy givalt! The people next door came down their stairs, opened the door, and stopped: they could not go down the stoop while she there and wailed.

My father came out of our house and stood in front of my mother. He looked afraid and tried to say something, but he obviously could not think of anything to say. I came out of our house and stood behind my father and stared in amazement. Nothing made any sense.

I said: Momma, come home. I am afraid.

She only said: Oy givalt! Oy givalt!

Then a neighbour from the other side came to stand in front of my mother. He said: What is going on?

Then my father said: Come home. The neighbours will think you are meshuggah.

Then I said: Momma, come home. I am afraid.

The whole family from next-door pushed their heads out from their door and stared at my mother.

My mother shouted: Oy givalt! All the Jews in the world are being killed. Oy givalt!

No, no, no, said my father, we are safe here. Come home.

My mother said: How can we be safe? Oy givalt! They are killing us and driving us crazy.

The man from the other side said: Please, missus, we are safe. This is America.

My mother said: Are you sure? Who is safe in this whole world? Oy givalt!

Please, come home, said my father.

Oy givalt! Can nobody see what a world this is?

The next-doorniks pulled their heads in and shut the door. They didn’t say a word.

My father went and took my mother’s hand. Please, come home.

Please, momma, come home, I said.

The man from the other side said, Listen to your husband, lady. Go home. Everybody is safe.

My mother put out her hand and my father helped her up and led her home.

Everybody was quiet in the house next door.

Nobody ever asked my mother why she sat on the stoop next door and wept and wailed.

Nobody ever called me a Shabbos Goy again.

The rest of my life I tried to understand why all this happened. But everyone who could have talked to me and explained the world has now disappeared and is silent beyond all questioning.

Oy givalt!

9 Traditional Jewish Stories from Boro Park

Brises, Funerals, Weddings and other Secret Rites

I never saw a circumcision taking place. I never attended a funeral. I never went to a wedding. Well, eventually I did go to the last two, but only long after I was grown up and then very rarely throughout my life. These celebratory rituals are among the secrets of the religion into to which I was born a very long time ago.

I remember going to my grandparents’ house on Mina Street when a boy cousin was born and was told it was a bris. What that meant I didn’t find out for many years. My parents took me and they joined other relatives in the kitchen until the whole room was crowded. Then everyone became silent for a moment while the rabbi went into a back bedroom and my father and his brothers and brothers-in-law went in and shut the door. As soon as they were gone, my mother, her aunts and sisters-in-law, along with a few other children like me, talked, ate tidbits (for instance, hard-boiled eggs, small slices of bagels known as “benches”, and oatmeal cookies) and drank glasses of seltzer with flavours from jars of jam. After about fifteen minutes, the men came back in, and my Uncle Joe was holding something on a pillow wrapped in a blue blanket, and this something I was told was my new boy cousin. As soon as the men came back, there was a moment of silence, until everyone started to shout Mazel Tov  and Congratulations! and We have a new little Jew in the family! The men drank whisky from little glasses and they clinked each other and shouted: Another Jew added to the world! What happened in that back bedroom, however, was not explained to me. Another cousin, yet still younger than I, whispered: “They chop off his sisser.” Of course, in later years I was able to read about the ceremony and its religious significance, but there was never an occasion for me to view, as an adult, the operation whether performed by a moyle or a surgeon.

Funerals were also strictly off-limits for children under thirteen and sometimes beyond to sixteen or seventeen. They should at no time see or touch the corpse, should not accompany the funeral cortege of limousines past the gates of the cemetery, or watch the dead body lowered into the grave or help with throwing clods of dirt, rocks or flowers into the hole in the ground. Very young children and infants stayed at home with a baby-sitter or some adult too old, tired or sick to shlep to the cemetery.

However, since a funeral has several component parts, there were some aspects of the farewelling of the dead which children could observe if not participate in. Once the body of the person who used to be alive was removed from the home, put in the care of the chevra kadosha for washing and dressing, the burial in a shroud occurred in a cemetery, the family washed their hands and returned home to sit shiva for seven days. At this time, youngsters were taken to the house or apartment of the mourners and passed through the room where the grieving family sat on low benches and greeted each new arrival with tears, hugging and a moment of laughter when the departed’s favourite jokes were told. The children could be hugged, pinched and tickled for a few moments but then we were ushered into the kitchen where there lots of snacks and drinks to keep us busy for the hour or so while our parents consoled the grieving survivors.

Boys and girls might also stand or play outside the synagogue when grown-ups went in to say the kaddish for the departed and, if they wished, go up close to the door, and listen to the collected group saying yizkor together. During the first week of mourning, if a child was the son or daughter of the deceased, playing games that involved a lot of noise and racing around were discouraged; but thereafter, they were free to join with the other kids and be as hysterical as they wanted.

It was not, however, explained that so and so—grandparent, aunt, close friend of the family—was dead, gone to heaven or passed into a better life beyond. Nobody whispered: They have gone to sleep forever. Adults would say: Uncle this or Aunt that or cousin whatever was now just a memory. We are very sad but that is God’s will, or, It’s just the way it is. Modern parents added: When they put the body in the ground, it will fertilize the soil and grass, plants and flowers will grow on this spot. None of the children, as I recall, ever asked for a further explanation. We accepted mysteries as just that, mysteries of life.

But weddings, let me tell you, that is a completely other story. Grown-up people got married, we were told, so that they could become mommies and daddies. The bride and the groom were grown up, far too grown up for us to understand anything about them, and we could barely see the difference when they gathered in clumps, all dressed up in their fancy clothes, hugging and smooching together, between the happy couple, their parents, grandparents and other big cousins, uncles and aunts and very very old people. When we went to a wedding, we also got dressed up in our best clothes; usually this happened  just before we had to go out the door and get into a car or taxi because you couldn’t trust us to keep our shoes clean, our pants and shorts from being torn, and our hair from messing up. When we got to the wedding place, if we wanted, we could go into the special room where the rabbi made the bride and the groom a married couple, a wife and a husband, as they stood under the houpa and recited prayers; otherwise we could go into different big room for playing in, or if it weren’t raining, we could go outside in the garden to run around and scream all we wanted. After the ceremony, everybody came out in a great rush and went into the dining hall, shaking hands, slapping each other on the back, and crying out “Mazel tov!” “Congratulations!” and “Hooray, there will be more Jews in the world!”

As for weddings during the rest of my life, since hardly any of our friends’ children tied the knot formally and with ceremonies, so we hardly ever went to one. But even back in the olden times in Boro Park, when we were not old enough to attend—or to have our one age cohort approach the hoopa—it was a mystery of how two people that had been just grown-up kids became a couple that would become a mother and a father and then have babies.

Instead of this being forever and ever and until death do ye part, there was a certain way called—no, not called but whispered—to separate them called a divorce. Then the couple were not a couple, even though they might still be a mother and a father. It happened in a less festive time, place and attitude.

What I could see, in a sort of a way, was the gathering of women in our kitchen and then the arrival of some grown-up woman—at that time everyone over fifteen was an adult to me, and there seemed no difference between ages except in the style of clothes, of which I was not very aware. When a woman like that arrived, three things happened: first, everything went silent; second, I was told to go away; and third, they all went upstairs for a few hours.  Through certain not very obvious hints and comments made subsequently and over the next few years with a growing glimmer of understanding of what the grown-up world was all about, I learned (perhaps much too grandiose word to use here: I guessed or made-up) that these were wives on the verge of divorce.

As far as I could gather, a divorce was a very shameful thing, the reverse of a wedding, and something to be hidden from children like myself. In some cases, the gathering of my mother’s closest, most intimate gossiping and mah-jong-playing friends, embraced the young (to them maybe) woman because she was the victim of something her husband said or did, so that she was being cast out into the wilderness where only a cluster of sympathetic women could protect her and guide her into whatever would be the next stage of her life. However, even if this were the situation, the protectors also attempted, if the fatal step had not been taken, “to save the marriage”, that is, to preserve the young woman from social opprobrium. No one said “Mazel tov!” or “Congratulations!” They shook their heads and said “Tsk, tsk, tsk” or “Oy givalt!” “What a business!”

The gathering in our kitchen, after they came downstairs again, would try to make her “give him another chance” and to swallow her pride and to think of the rest of the family and so on. In the other case, though, where the woman was blamed for initiating the divorce by “defiling” the marriage vow by “promiscuity” or “walking out on the man” or failing to give him “his due”, they would lean in on her, try to talk her out of the decision, or signal that she would no longer be welcome in their company. Tsk, task, tsk. A  real shanda! What a thing to happen to the Jews!

Please understand that at that time I could not have expressed myself on these secret matters in such mature and sophisticated terms and had only the most vague and skewered sense of the term “understanding”. In brief, I didn’t know what they were talking about. How could I, since I really had no idea of what marriage meant or what obligated the husband and wife to do something and not to do something else, for and with each other.  The only possible example of a marriage that I was familiar with, the union of my father and mother, and that was something eternally fixed in the universe from the beginning of time, which was when I was born; in other words, my father and mother were (a) always together, (b) always adults, and (c) always concerned with home-making and income-earning.

Though I knew in a few years that my sister was born and she entered the family as a baby, which changed my relations to my parents, other visitors to the house, and kids on the street, I could not imagine there was ever a time when I did not exist for my father and mother, just as I did for myself. So how could I have known what a young man and a young woman did when they got married to have children and make a family or what it meant for such a couple to separate, all this was even more mysterious, let alone what happened behind closed doors when the rabbi c hopped off some boy baby’s sisser.

The special secret session of the women and the potential or actual divorcee seemed to involve a lot of silent and loud crying and drinking of many cups of coffee, and also the eating of a lot of cake brought into the house from the visitors. That it was a religious occasion was indicated by the lowering of voices and the switch from English to Yiddish. This happened at other events or when my parents wished to discuss things they didn’t want me to hear about.

For this reason alone, it was my firm belief that religion was a secret affair and that someone had to be grown-up enough to understand its mysteries, mysteries that had nothing to do with how the world was created or what happened to make it what it was today—divided into the people you could trust and those who were out to kill you, like the Cossacks or the Nazis, filled with things such as machines and institutions that made no sense at all except that they were there and you shouldn’t get mixed up with them—but only with what happened inside the Jewish community, the family and then rooms and times when little kids could not be allowed. If I ever asked somebody, like a grandma, what do we believe in—that is, what should I have faith and trust in—she would say, “Don’t worry, when they throw you in the ovens, they don’t give you a test!” Yet even that made no sense. Tsk, tsk,tsk!

8. Traditional Made-up Jewish Tales from Boro Park

8

Yemenite Pesach in Boro Park.

When I was a boy growing up in Boro Park, Brooklyn during the years just following the Second World War, I hardly thought of myself as Jewish or what that meant. Everyone I knew was either Jewish or belonged to that other world religion, the Italians. There were many shuls, synagogues, shtibbleh and temples in the neighbourhood, and only one for the Sepharadim. So far as I was aware, they were different only in size, the amount of noise they made, and whether or not they wore their tallases in the street walking from home to services and then back. As for the Italians, they lived several streets away, went to big churches and, if they were in my school, called themselves the Junior Mafia, except for the girls.  They were mysteriously different. Far away, sometimes an hour or more on the subways (even if they were sometimes also the El), was the City (Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx), and even further away than that was a mysterious land full of goyim called America. And further, across the ocean “over there” was the Old World where my family came from, and then the rest of the world which it was impossible to contemplate.

At the end of the 1940s, there was a meeting of my parents, their friends and other interested members of the community, mostly secular and highly educated people.  They met to discuss the arrival of a new cohort of Yemenite refugees. Like my parents, those gathered were already second or third generation migrants to America, assimilated fully in their own eyes, and yet it came as a shock to my ten-year-old ears to hear them arguing about whether or not they should object to dark-skinned people buying houses on their streets. To me, it seemed as though they sounded like the goyim who were afraid to let shwartzers into their all-white neighbourhoods. Five years since the Holocaust, these nice Jewish families that I grew up with and learned my liberal, tolerant ideas from sounded like what I had heard them saying about the Nazis and other antasemitin in the Old Country. They seemed to talk about the Yemenites as though they were some kind of savage people who couldn’t understand how to live in a modern America. To their credit, however, by the end of the evening, the consensus was that these new comers were to be tolerated, allowed to buy houses, set up businesses and build their own synagogues.  Of course, even if they had decided the other way, they had no power to prevent anyone doing whatever they wanted. Hopefully, though, they would come to an understanding of how ridiculous and grotesque their meeting had been.

A year later, there were at least two or three Yemenite families living on every street in Boro Park, many shops opened on 13^th Avenue, and a few new synagogues spread through the neighbourhood. More than that, a few of these immigrants became patients of my father, the dentist on 47^th Street, and thus as usual friends of my family. Thus it happened that when Pesach rolled around in 1953, when I was thirteen years old, a few months away from my coming-of age, we were invited to the home of the Najjars for second seder.

The seder began with a lot of familiar ritual acts though in a spoken Hebrew that UI had never heard before. Then my father, at the direction of Mr. Najjar, told me to ask the Four Questions, insofar as among the guests, I was the youngest person at the table. Somewhat hesitantly, in front of strangers, I chanted the familiar Manishtana ha Layla hazeh, Why is this night different from all other nights.… and was almost at the end when SMACK! Someone cracked a hard-boiled egg on my forehead. The blow came just at the moment when I finished the last word of the fourth question and sent me into stunned silence.

Was it wrong for me to read out the questions in the sing-song whining voice of what the Israelis later told me was a voos-voos voice? You know, like those old-fashioned, shrivelled up Jews out of Eastern Europe who looked around at everything and asked Voos is das? And then Voos is dis? Because the whole modern world was strange to them, even a Jewish country seemed foreign, alien and impossible. And it was best, so these young, strong, and very healthy-looking Israelis thought, to put away old ways of thinking, feeling, behaving and, especially, speaking an Ashkenazi-inflected ivrit. Like the survivors of the Holocaust when they somehow made it to America or some other goyish country where they had relatives, they were told, even as they landed on the promised soil: Don’t talk about what happened to you; no one cares; just get on with life and make yourself into a real person.

But at this time, sitting  around the seder table, with so many people looking different, with dark skins, speaking a language I was told was sometimes the Hebrew of the Yemenites, sometimes the Arabic of their surrounding old-new culture, it was not them, the inferior refugees of backwards countries who were out of place, but me, the little twelve year-old, almost thirteen, pishika from 47^th Street (formerly of 49^th Street and Old New Utrecht Road where we lived with my grandma while my father was away at the war)—I had somehow insulted them, put into the midst of their Jewish Passover my stupid unthinking sing-song voos-voos voice. No wonder they hit me on the fore head with a hard-boiled egg.

But then I looked around and saw my mother and father beaming with pride. For what? For some Yemenite man to humiliate their son in front of everybody? I looked at the other faces, and they weren’t mocking me, but also smiling and saying things like “mazel tov!” and “Such a nice voice.” And: “How wonderful that he knows the questions in Hebrew.” How could they all be saying such things?

Then my father patted me on the shoulder, like he never did, and he didn’t say anything , but it seemed like he was holding back a sob. For what?

The world is utterly confusing. One year, the neighbourhood gets together to decide whether the foreign refugees with dark skin and strange ancient customs were really Jews and could be allowed to come into the streets and live next to them; and my parents and their friends acting like racial bigots, as though these newcomers were shwarzes—though everyone should bite their tongues and knock themselves on the head for such ugly stupid thoughts. Then the next year, already they are welcoming the Yemenites and becoming friends with them, and then we are going to the house of Najjars for Pesach. And I am permitted to make a fool of myself in front of them, only to find out, so maybe not only wasn’t I a fool, but also that these people from somewhere in the world that was not the Old World (where the Nazis murdered our relatives) or America (where everybody was free to be whatever they wanted, provided you didn’t cross the colour bar), and they could accept me for being what I was—and praising me for being different.

Can anybody understand such a world? Maybe, as they say, next year.

And now it is next year, and many many beyond that, and when I look back, an alta kaka myself, it is still very confusing. When you remember words and actions, that is one thing: you can see how times change, people learn, and you yourself grow up and accept what was unacceptable—or even impossible to contemplate. But you also remember feelings, especially about your family, your parents and yourself, and those feelings are mixed: they collide, crash and fight with one another. You love them, but you don’t like sometimes what they did and said. You know you were an immature little ignorant nothing, but it was yourself. So you walk around, especially in your dreams, when some memories only return which you can’t ever make yourself think about, and these people you see—are they monsters, funny masks, twisted up pictures of everyone you once loved and thought would live forever, because nothing would ever change—are still inside you, part of you, are you.

And then, out of nowhere, SMACK! it all comes to an end. 

The end of the mystery and the shame.

The memory cracks apart, and all times flow into one another, past and future, future and nothingness.

On this night, as on no other, we gather together and ask basic questions about life and death, about who we are and we come from, and why we are different from one another. Our differences make us who we are. We eat differently, we sit differently, we see and taste in new ways, and we hear our voices in marvellous ways. Enough already!

We tell the same stories over and over, listen from different angles, untangle the words and the narratives, learn truths that come out of the darkness of the unknown and illuminate the blurred and inconsequential surrounding world. Enough already!

We open the door and invite in strangers, shadowy images of ourselves. We curse the darkness that threatens and wait for the untenable presence of the promise. Enough.

We sing of ancient rabbis, little goats, pyramids we built and generations we have forgotten. Broken matzah, bitter herbs, burnt shanks of lamb, chopped raisins and nuts, fresh greens, eggs hardened and singed, sips of water, gefilte fish, chicken soup and empty cups of wine. And if this were not enough, it is yet enough: dayenu.

Three Prehistorical Poems for February

Listening Deep Within Ourselves

Scientists find evidence of “ghost population”

of ancient humans.

You call us ghosts, your own ancestors,

As though we conspired deep inside your consciousness

Like demons out to get you and turn the course

Of  history against you, you godless stinking mess.

We all lived together in the forests, shared rivers

And herds of four-footed ones, and, yes, sometimes

We quarrelled and came to blows, but nothing could reverse

The basic patterns of our growth as cousins; no crimes

So bad we would not speak together or make love

To celebrate the seasons. You make it sound obscene,

As gradually over the millennia we walked hand in glove,

Until there were no differences to speak of. Unclean,

You call us, as though we were not mixed together

Forever like macaronic verses or birds of a feather.

The First Song in the World

The oldest song. they claim, comes from Ugarit

Transcribed in chiselled letters, which they now strum,

But what they mean to say—I am so angry I could spit—

Is the first one they found. What about the drum

Or the hand slapped on the chest? Without wit,

These fools! I hear in the baby’s babble and the mum

Responding, archaic melodies, from tit

And slurping tongue the earliest harmonium.
In twisted tunnels of the cavern, where they lit

Their lamps, they danced and sang; no need to strum

On strings of the creature’s guts, so they sit

Together and weep for siblings, until there come

Out of the rocks themselves the echo-gods

Who live beyond this life of clay-born clods.

The Last Performance of the Ancient Songs

We have come into the caves deep in the earth, and crawled

Beyond our understanding to find our destiny;

We have moistened our hands in ochre, and bawled

Like infants at the beginning of time, and sunk our knee

Into the madness of the hunt and the fearfulness, and sprawled

Across the boundaries of life and death, dug into the debris

Of many generations’ hopes: made our mark

On the ceiling of hallucinations, over bats and bears,

And cried out silently to the vibrant voices in the dark,

All things beating their wings, overbearing—

Until the beasts depicted heave and sway, stark

Reminders of what lies ahead, sounds beyond hearing:

Contemplation in the savage ciphers of our song,

Revealing how the ancient ecstasies went wrong.

7 Made-Up Traditional Stories from Boro Park

Bar Mitzvah Boys and their Antics[1]

As the old saying goes, on this special day a Jewish boy becomes a man, gets his own fountain pen[2] and is allowed to run riot through the reception banqueting hall while all his relatives stuff themselves with kosher versions of goyish food. In the middle of everything, of course, is a big chopped liver statue of a chicken.[3]

And what does all this mean?

To be a man, who knows? But to get your fountain pen, that is something, really something special. It means you can write your name on official documents. It means, with practice, you can squirt someone at the next desk at school. It means you can write a whole story without stopping to sharpen a pencil or get a refill for a leaky ballpoint pen. 

Now, about running riot through the reception of your Bar Mitzvah, that is of a different complexion altogether.[4] There is a certain time in every Jewish boy’s life when, not only he turns thirteen and has his Bar Mitzvah, but all his friends from school, except the Italian kids, though they are invited too, have similar ceremonies and receptions. Almost every week over a period of two or three months[5] you have to get dressed up in a suit, put on a tie, polish your shoes, and go to this temple or shul or that synagogue for the religious part and a few hours later to some restaurant, fancy hall or if possible a house big enough to sit a lot of people.[6]

 It is all very exciting, mostly when it is your own Bar Mitzvah, but after a while, when you have been to six or seven in as many weekends, it can get boring, unless you invent your own secret games to play. Since it is basically your own gang who invent these games—Melvin, Perry, David, the two Henries, George, the two Alberts, Eddie, Sam and Daniel[7]—you only have to explain when outsiders join in, or try to. Who are outsiders?  First of all, anyone who doesn’t fit in the two main categories: kids who live on 47^th, 48^th and 49^th Street between 13^th and 14^th Avenue and who don’t attend P.S. 164.  Second of all, cousins and children of uncles and aunts who live elsewhere in Boro Park, different neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, and those from Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. This second group, by the way, despite all natural instincts, could include female girls, though they usually don’t want to join in because they think we are stupid, rowdy and silly. And third of all, total strangers who appear out of nowhere, are unrecognized during and denied after the games, since they seem to cause serious trouble: agents provocateurs, subversive ghosts of past ceremonies in that place, and an assortment of djinns, imps and irrepressible urges to create anarchy and chaos.[8]

For we are talking about bar mitzvah boys as a pack of wild savages (vilde chayas)[9] about to pass from the stage of the pre-human to the human. Virtually werewolves.[10]  Under the tables of the fancy reception hall or in a normally staid and proper bourgeois home, amidst the roving band of pubescent creatures—people whom their parents can no longer recognize, shape-shifted and mind-twisted—lurk our most ancient and archaic ancestors, long before the appearance of Abraham and Moses, way before the desert-wandering nomads of Nimrod’s time, and those completely bizarre and shadowy beings who somehow survived the Flood.[11]

As the banquet is served and while parents, relatives, friends and some work associates and favoured clients  sit around the tables introducing themselves to one another, chatting about the probable costs of the meal, and gossiping in a melodious rhapsody of interests, the boys g row restless. They slip away into the spaces between the tables and gather in the corners. Then they begin to go from one place to another, following waiters with trays laden with supposedly empty plates and glasses who look away when the Bar Mitzvah Boy himself and his ilk, and sly hands grab sweet rolls, bagel benches, and half-sour pickles, stuffed olives and scraps of smoked meat—most of all, glasses with left over spirituous liquids: wines of various colours, liquors and unknown alcoholic beverages. The chew and sip, pour small amounts of drink from small and tall tumblers into one glass. The colours are mixed and stand in precipitated layers. They sip and sip, pour and pour, and soon a haze of intoxication fills their minds.  Their collective minds tell them to crawl under the tables, to creep from one table to the next, and to play innocent pranks that make the grown-ups laugh nervously.

While the boys play under the tables and crawl under the feet of waiters to go around the room, the adults chatter and gossip, many of them recalling their own silly foibles.

“Yes, we would do the same silly things. It’s just a phase.”

Then someone else would say, “Impossible. We could never have behaved that way before our parents.”

“Well,” an old auntie whom I hardly saw, shouted, “if any of my boys did such things, they would get a zetz[12] like you never heard of.” 

An uncle who was usually always very quiet, banged on the table with his glass, and said: “Then it’s a damned good thing you never noticed the things that went on right under your feet.”

Several fathers and mothers all shouted at once, and then some others started to laugh, and soon everybody was talking so fast nobody could understand what they were saying. Nobody looked under the table where we were hiding like their own bad memories, no body reached under with an arm to give us a klop in the face or a shoe in the pupik to suppress these demonic thoughts we had aroused from the collective past, and nobody really talked the way I just said they did. There just happened to be two different worlds, one for the grown-ups and one for the kinderle. So far as the big people were concerned, as we could see, they were unconscious of everything except the food they ate, the drinks they drank and the gossip they gossiped, all perfectly normal for them to do—even though any outsider from the Old World, whether over there where the horrible events that happened less than ten years before they didn’t want to discuss over here, or from the Olden Times when they were children and their parents were children in a mist of prehistoric magic, superstition and pietistic learning, all of which they had run away from to become what they were today: doctors and dentists, lawyers and accountants, musicians and piano teachers, artists and art dealers, engineers and electricians, as well as professors of ancient history and medieval poetry, psychoanalysts and journalists….[13] Or so they all dreamed they had become, with a great pile of learning between themselves and what they had run away from.

Meanwhile we played around under the tables, tickling each other like wild puppies, and, because we had been drinking unheard of cocktails, we snorted and sneezed. We were the products of immigration and modern education, movement up in the social order and away from the racial, religious and political orders and disorders that wracked the world and wrecked so many lives. Protected by the myths and ideologies of the New World (der Goldene Medina), we were oblivious to what we could have been had our elders not taken strategic decisions before we were born and to the consequences we would have to face all too soon when we reached our own maturity and stepped out into a world that was more confusing that anyone in the room could or dared to perceive. For a few precious moments, as we scrambled and frolicked wildly under the table, ignoring all that they were and what they stood for above us, we lived out a version of childhood the world had never experienced since the dawn of time.[14]

Eventually, the grown-ups stopped bickering and started to get up to dance, and we lay down and watched what was going on through increasingly closed eyes. When we woke up hours later, we were shovelled into parental cars and shlepped  home.

From that moment on, whatever happened was as much a dream as it was real.[15]

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NOTES

[1] I should note here for people who may get worried I am neglecting the celebration of bat mitzvah for girls. Well, so far as I can remember, in those days at the beginning of history (my history, of course, from 1940 up to about 1954), there was not much of a thing as bat mitzvah, at least none that I ever attended.  Nothing  in that way for my female cousins or girls in the class at public school or in the neighbourhood, except maybe in the Reformed Synagogue, where we never went.

[2] The old joke comes from the version I learned from a Sam Levenson book. The boy who is reluctant to sturdy for his Bar Mitzvah is told that he will get lots of presents from his relatives and friends of the family, and he hears many times that he will be given a fountain pen. So when he stands up in shul to make his speech thanking his parents and teachers, he says: “Today I am a fountain pen.” Which also reminds me of another joke, about the kid who raises his hand, and asks the teacher who has just given a writing assignment: “Do we use pen or ink?”

[3] At weddings it would have been an ice statue. In either case, this was bad taste.

[4] A variation on “A horse of a different collar.”

[5] The time scheme is fluid, flexible and fictitious and represents the three years of 1952, 1953 and 1954, that is, before and after my own confirmation, coming-of-age, and bar mitzvah.

[6] Or if someone’s family couldn’t afford to rent, but this would be too embarrassing to mention here. Better think in terms of Mickey whose father managed a restaurant in downtown Brooklyn and got to use it for free on a Saturday morning the week after his son got bar mitvahed.

[7] These are some of the boys in the gang from 47^th Street who were also in the same class, grade after grade, in PS 164 Brooklyn, on 16^th Avenue. They belong also to the series known as “The Almost Very True Stories of Boro Park.” In other words, some of the names and descriptions are not completely made up.

[8] According  to Wikipedia, a site not always to be trusted, but useful for what people think they know: The Golem and the Jinni (known as The Golem and the Djinni  in the United Kingdom) is a debut novel written by Helene Wecker, published by Harper in April 2013.  S o I read this a few years ago, a story about the rivalry between a Jewish and Muslim flying spirit. I wondered if it would useful to mention sometime. So maybe now?

[9] So it also be vansim, bedbugs who jump all over the place.

[10] Useful to know: in the Middle Ages and also after, some legends made Jews the same as werewolves. And also, by the way, in a few modern movies, such as Werewolf in Paris (1997). Why? Because Jews were outsiders, looked funny and made trouble for the goyim simply by existing.

[11] Piltdown Men and Florenses Pygmies are counted, as well as Neanderthals, Cromagnons and Trogoldytes of all kinds.

[12] Or a klop.

[13] To be fair, there were also postmen, advertising jingle-writers, upholsters, cloth-cutters and people (like my grandpa Dave) who bought fruits and vegetables for the markets downtown.

[14] Bishop James Ussher, Primate of Ireland, calculated the exact date of Creation at around 6000 years ago.  But I was born in the year 5700, not since the beginning of time but since someday started counting the years. This Mr. Jimmy Bishop, by the way, was not an usher at anybody I know’s bris or wedding.

[15] A more sophisticated commentator would say “Or a joke.”