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!