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!