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 47th, 48th and 49th
Street between 13th and 14th 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]
[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 47th Street who were
also in the same class, grade after grade, in PS 164 Brooklyn, on 16th
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.”
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