11. Traditional Jewish Tales

Secret Codes

There is an ancient prophecy that whenever a great tyrant rises up in the world who threatens the Jews, that monster will be murdered or die on a Jewish holiday. No matter when such a vast murdering creature died, that day is thereafter a Jewish holiday. For example,

Ø  Haman  16 Nissan  465 BCE                          death by hanging                Purim

Ø  Adolf Hitler    30 April   1945 CE                   death by suicide                 End of the Shoah

Ø  Joseph Stalin    5 March 1953  CE                  death by a stroke                Freedom for Russian Jews

Each of these terrible leaders gave his name to the type of murders he committed, and we celebrated all historical events in terms of our survival. The joke went that all Jewish holidays in the same way: we are told the story of how they tried to eliminate us all; then, they say, we ran away or fought back, or waited until the Almighty stretched out His arm to save us; then, of course, which is now,  we eat a collective meal, and wait for the next monster to rise up. He is probably just around the corner—literally, we thought, either on 48^th or 46^th Street. We knew it was our duty to save the world, even though the adult powers-that-be treated us as children, and thereby lay everyone open to genocide.

This is our story. 

The kids on 47^th Street between 13^th and 14^th Avenues, and who also were in the same class in P.S. 164. This is how we used secret codes and why we celebrated in secret our victory over the forces of evil from the Other Side, sitra acha, which we thought of as beyond Church Avenue and perhaps as far away as Bensonhurst and Brighton Beach

At public school (PS 164) and in cheder (Machzike Talmud Torah, 43^rd Street) we used a series of secret codes which we thought were invented by the gang and unknown to anyone else. These included using Hebrew letters to write out English words, eating selected coloured buttons from strips of sugar candy to make patterns resembling Braille, and making up special words and eccentric ways of pronouncing ordinary lexical units.  Before I begin to explain ciphers and why we used them, I must warn you that all of them had one terrible drawback, which nevertheless did not prevent us from playing at spies. 

The reason they could never be proper secret languages, codes or alphabets was that none of us could remember from day-to-day what the system of ciphers consisted of. Actually, it might be best to explain this failure as arising from a series of weaknesses: (1) the inconsistency of usage, which is related to (2) general youthful forgetfulness; but then also (3) our incomplete knowledge or mastery of the Hebrew aleph-bet, English spelling rules, and precise understanding of who we were, where we were, and what the world was all about.

Be that as it may, there is an importance about secret codes that is like the use of artificial languages, regional dialects and street-wise argots which is that, unlike many people believe and tell you at school to believe, the concept of language was not invented to communicate knowledge: danger ahead, for instance, or, this is my piece of birthday cake. It was created to keep other people, especially grown-ups, kids from different streets or avenues in Boro Park, girls, and those nations (goyim) which always want to kill us. In fact—are you ready for it?—language was not invented or created at all. It is something you grow up knowing but which you forget when you grow up, so that parents, teachers, rabbis and all other figures of authority in the world just make a lot of noise that no one can understand. With parents, of course, they make raspberry or slurping noises, cuddle you kitchy-kitchy-koo, and make you feel nice ahhh, mmmmhhh, lalalala, except when have to put you in the corner for making a mess at the table, send you to bed early for being nasty and irritable, and make you feel bad because you have done something wrong that they can’t explain to you. Teachers, too, think they are big shots and bosses and blabbety-blabbety-blab around all day with pieces of chalk and tell you to open books to read out something that is nothing but nonsense. Rabbis have long beards, thick unruly eyebrows, and spit when they talk, and they talk with funny accents, Oy, you nid a piece biggah chok to write on the bleck-berd oil de voids, and refer to things no one was ever alive to know about (Cossecks on horses that carry sawordles, villages with inns and pheasants what are ignorant, etc.), and then they pinch your cheeks or pull your ears, and say “Good little tattele or boychik”.  The rest of these grown-up type people, like policemen, postmen, butchers, bus drivers and soldiers, they wave their arms a lot and make a lot of empty noise. So phooey on all of them!

The worst of it is that all these adults think they know better than you do what you need, feel like, and should know. So is it any wonder that kids like us have to pass our special messages around in secret codes? How else were we going to save the world?

Now forget everything I just said.

Instead, imagine yourself into the minds of the Boro Park gang from 47^th Street in the early 1950s. We knew it was a case of us against them, and we could only stand up against them if we stayed together, kept in communication, and passed on our secret messages.

Here, finally, is the story.

One morning, early, as we wended our way schoolwards from our different houses, apartment buildings and upstairs from the stores, we all sensed something powerful in the atmosphere. Out of the dark recesses of our soul there crawled up a feeling that today would be the day. Act we must, or it would be too late. But no one could speak aloud lest outsiders or teachers become aware of this imminent final act in the epic adventure: Salvation and Rescue of the Jews.

As soon as we entered our classroom, hung  our coats in the wardrobe, sat at our old wooden desks and waited for the teacher to tell us what to do, the first coded message started to make its rounds: from desk to desk, hand to hand, eyeball to eyeball. As we each received the epistolary missive and scanned it, quickly decoding the strange ciphers inscribed thereon, each of us sensing the urgency of the call to action. Then, while everybody in the room had to stand up to say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the National Anthem, a second secret letter started to go up and down the aisles and across from one side of the room to the other. Only a few of us were, of course, privy to the content of this document and the occult manner in which it was framed, but the others in the class, such as  girls, Italians and people from streets that weren’t 47^th Street, between 13^th and 14^th Avenues, by a longstanding code of loyalty and dutifulness, passed on the coded message. When we sat down again, seats banging and scraping on the floor, desks clanking  open and shut while we took out our writing books and pencils, a third encoded epistle was sent forth.

Then, horror of horrors, near the back of the room, where the naughty kids (almost all boys) sat, there was an outburst of giggling, an instance of pushing and shoving, and a halt in the chain of communications.

The teacher, Mrs. Brownstein, banged on her desk with a ruler, THWACK! stood up, and said: “What is going on there? What is this commotion in my classroom?”

Silence and stillness followed. But only for a moment. Someone pushed. Someone else shoved. Two girls giggled. Oh my God, were chaos and anarchy to be set loose in the universe again?

THWACK! Down went the teacher’s ruler again, not on her own big desk, but on that of a kid in the front row, who jumped with fright.

“What is going on here? Tell me, tell me, tell me,” said Mrs. Brownstein, and then, TWANG!  on another desk.

She walked to the back of the room, tapping on desks as she went, and making more and more kids in the room leap, including those in the gang who were waiting urgently for the secret message to be passed to them. The mystical processes of the end of times were set in motion, the rusty old cogs of history shifted and the long-unused wheels of destiny turned.

By the time she reached the last desks and glared down on the shivering forms cowering before her authority, other people began to whisper, and then to speak more loudly, with some of us starting to withdraw the previous messages from inside our desks and tear them to pieces.

“What is this?” Mrs. Brownstein asked, holding up the offending document that had been laid flat on the desk and with someone’s hands trying to cover it. She held the paper up for all to see. She rattled the paper. “What is this? I must be told.”

The boy who had tried to hide it spoke softly and hesitantly, “I don’t know.”

She looked at the paper. “What is this, some kind of silly code?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy sitting next to him.

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to say?”

“Not mine,” he gasped out, and the other boy next to him, “We just pass it on.”

“Not yours,” she said. “You just pass it on? What is going on here?”

She swivelled about, strode several desks towards the front of the room, stared with her teacher’s look at the poor kid who trembled, was extremely nervous, could have been guilty and certainly was scared.

“Well,” she said, placing the paper on his desk, and banging her ruler again, THWACK! “Someone is going to tell me what this is or everybody is going to be punished. Everybody.”

“It’s just a game, Mrs Brownstein,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

She tapped her ruler on my head, and said sternly, “What kind of a game are you playing that has no meaning?”

Then she looked closely at the paper.

“There are some type of unusual letters written here. And you tell me it is only a game and means nothing.”

I could find no words to answer her.

Another member of our gang a few desks away whispered hesitatingly, “It’s a secret code, Miss.”

“Who said that?” she said, turning around and looking directly at the boy who had whispered our secret.

No one answered.

BA-BANG! Down went her ruler on the frightened boy’s desk.

“I will have no such games in my classroom,” and she tore the paper into many tiny pieces, took them over to the wastepaper basket next to her desk and let them drift down like snowflakes, sat down and announced: “No more of such nonsense. Now, on with our lesson.”

For close to an hour, everyone in the class concentrated on arithmetic and then spelling, and there were no more messages passed around. But that was too much. The world was in too parlous a state to be abandoned just because some stupid old teacher couldn’t understand secret codes. Gradually through the rest of the day, before and after lunch time, secret letters circulated through the class, and then from then on for several days thereafter the missives, epistles and messages, along with button-strips of candy eaten into symbolic patterns, went their appointed rounds. But we had all learned to be more circumspect, both in terms of not passing our notes through the untrustworthy and cowardly kids in the back of the room, and in deepening our secret codes, so that no one not in the know would understand them. 

By the end of the week, the universal crisis was averted. Despite it all—the dangers of madmen, dictators, antasemitin of all stripes and colours—the Jews of the world were saved for another season. We relaxed into our lifetimes and celebrated each holiday, festival and fast in the usual way, following the grown-ups but keeping within ourselves the hidden allegorical messages they contained. Unfortunately, as I said above, when we achieved maturity and entered into our own adult lives, we forgot all about the games we played. Except, when our own children began to ask us what the holidays meant, why we performed certain rituals and whether we all would have to face the coming another Haman, Hitler or Stalin, we could only feel uncomfortable and mumble something about tradition.