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.