Through the Children's Gate (10 page)

Every Sunday morning for the next few weeks, Luke and I went together to Sable's, the extraordinary smoked-fish and appetizer store at Second Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street. Sable's is the only place in my neighborhood where my grandfather would have been entirely comfortable—with the hand-lettered signs and the Dr. Brown's and the mingled smell of pickles and herring—and yet it is owned and staffed by Asians who once worked as nova slicers at Zabar's, on the West Side, and who walked out to claim their freedom. (I imagined them wandering, in their aprons, through Central Park for years before arriving at the promised land.) They sell Jewish food, and with the same bullying, ironic Jewish manner that I recalled from my childhood trips with my grandfather, but they do it as a thing learned.

“They got nice stuff, anyway, Irving,” I said to Luke as we walked over.

“Why are you calling me Irving?” he asked.

“My grandfather always called me Irving when he took me shopping for smoked fish. He had me confused with Grandpop, I guess.”

“Oh. Is Grandpop's name Irving?”

“No,” I said. “His name isn't actually Irving, either. But your
great-grandfather could never remember what his name really was, so he called him Irving. I think he thought all small Jewish boys should be called Irving.”

Luke wasn't interested. “Oh,” he said. I could see he was looking inward. Then, in a rush: “Why in cartoons, when someone touches electricity, after you see their whole skeleton for a second, do they go all stiff and straight up in the air and then their whole body turns black and then it turns into dust and then it crumbles while they still look out and smile as if they were feeling sick? Why?”

I said it was just a convention, just the way cartoons are, and was meant to be funny.

“Why is it funny?” he asked.

We walked on in silence.

Later that day I sat down with a piece of paper. I had one mildly derivative comic idea, which was to adapt the Purim story to contemporary New York. Ahasuerus was Donald Trump: dumb as an ox, rich, lecherous, easily put out, and living in a gaudy apartment. So Vashti must be Ivana—that was easy—and Esther was a Russian Jewish model who had immigrated from Odessa, a beauty, but hardly aware that she was Jewish save for the convenience of immigration. Haman—what if you said that Haman … But I couldn't focus. How was it, I wondered, that I could know nothing of all this? For the truth is that “Jew”
is
written all over me. If, on my father's side, they were in wholesale food, on my mother's side, they were dark-skinned Sephardim who had stayed in Palestine—so busy squabbling that they actually missed the bus for the Diaspora. One of my maternal great grandfathers, family lore has it, was the rabbi sent from Hebron to Lisbon at the end of the nineteenth century to call the Jews out of hiding and back into the synagogue.

And yet, when I think about my own upbringing, the best I can say is that the most entirely Jewish thing about us was the intensity with which we celebrated Christmas: passionately, excessively, with the tallest tree and the most elaborately wrapped presents. Coming of age in the fifties, my parents, like so many young intellectuals of their generation, distanced themselves from the past as an act of deliberate
emancipation. My parents were not so much in rebellion against their own past as they were in love with the idea of using the values unconsciously taken from that culture to conquer another—they went from Jewish high school to Ivy League college and fell in love with English literature. Like so many others, they ended in that queer, thriving country of the Jewish-American possessor of the Christian literary heritage: They became Zionists of eighteenth-century literature, kibbutzniks of metaphysical poetry. The only Bible-related book I can recall from my childhood was in my father's office, an academic volume called
The Bible to Be Read as Living Literature;
the joke was, of course, that in those precincts it was literature that was to be read as the Bible. (We didn't have a Christian Christmas; we had a Dickensian Christmas.) The eradication left an imprint stronger than indoctrination could have. We had “Jew” written all over us in the form of marks from the eraser.

What was left of overt, nameable Jewishness was the most elemental Jewish thing, and that was a style of joking. My grandfather, who ran a small grocery store in a black neighborhood, lives in my memory, apart from Sunday-morning fish, mostly in his jokes, a round of one-liners as predictable as the hands on a clock, and yet, weirdly, getting funnier by the year: “Joe Banana and his bunch? The music with appeal.” And “I used to be a boxer. In a shoe store.” And “I used to sing tenor, but they traded me in for two fives.” And “Feel stiff in the joints? Then stay out of the joints.”

The first time I had a sense of Jewishness as a desirable state rather than as background radiation, humming in a Christian cosmos, was when I was thirteen and, turned on to the idea of New York, saw that it was made up of Jewish comedians; of jokes. I discovered the Marx Brothers and then Woody Allen. I bought a book of old comics’ routines and learned the telephone spiels of Georgie Jessel. (“Mom, why did you cook that bird? He was a valuable bird; he could speak six languages!” “Oh … he should a said something.”)
The Ed Sullivan Show
fascinated me: Corbett Monica and Norm Crosby and Jackie Vernon, and, hovering above even them, Myron Cohen, the mournful storyteller, and Henny Youngman, genuinely the funniest man, who looked
exactly like my grandfather, to boot. The greatest generation. I read interviews with obscure Jewish comedians, old and young—really obscure ones, Ed Bluestone and Ben Blue—and noticed with a rising thrill that none of them talked about “jokes” that you “told.” Instead, they talked about “bits” that they “did”—and killed “them” doing them. That, for me, explained everything, life and art: Life was stuff that happened, art was bits you did. It was the first religion that had ever made sense to me.

I came to New York to practice that faith, do bits, be a Purimspieler, only to find that world was gone. Sometime in the decade after my arrival, the Jewish comic culture dried up. The sense, so strong since the beginning of the century, that New York was naturally Jewish and, by an unforced corollary, naturally funny had gone. Of course, there were stand-up comics, many of them Jewish, but the particular uneasiness, the sense that talking too fast might keep you alive, the sense that you talked as a drowning man might wave his hands, the whining, high-pitched tone and the “R”-less accent: All that had gone. Paul Reiser, Jerry Seinfeld, much as I enjoyed and even identified with them, were as settled and as American as Bob and Ray or Will Rogers. This was an event with a specific date, marked in the work of the last great New York Jew comedian. Between 1977 and
Annie Hall,
in which being a Jewish comedian is a slightly weary and depressing obligation to be rebelled against, and
Broadway Danny Rose,
just seven years later, when the black-and-white world of the comics shpritzing at the Carnegie Deli is frankly presented as a Chagall world, a folktale setting, the whole thing vanished. Even Jackie Mason, a rabbi in training and ostensibly a master of the style, was quite different; in the eighties, when he returned from obscurity, his subject wasn't the unsuspected power of being a loser but the loss of power in the face of all those new immigrants.

New York Jewish comic manners were still around, only they were no longer practiced by Jews, or were practiced by Jews as something learned rather than as something felt. What had replaced the organic culture of Jewish comedy in New York was a permanent pantomime of Jewish manners. The fly doing the backstroke in the soup was part of a kind of chicken-soup synchronized-swimming event, as ordered
and regulated as an Olympic sport: Jewish New York manners were a thing anyone could imitate in order to indicate “comedy.”

One sensed this at Sable's, where Jewish traditions of shpritzing were carried on by non-Jews, and in television commercials, where New York taxi drivers were still represented as wise guys, even though they had not been for a generation or more. But it was true in subtler ways, too. On
Seinfeld,
which I had missed while living abroad but now could watch in reruns every night, everything is, at one level, shockingly Jewish, far more than Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks was ever allowed to be, with mohels and brisses and whining fathers who wait all week for their copy of
TV Guide
—but the unstated condition is that there be absolutely no mention of the “J” word, while the most Jewish character, George, is given an Italian last name, Costanza. This is not because Jewishness is forbidden but because it is so obvious. Jewishness is to
Seinfeld what
the violin was to Henny Youngman: the prop that you used between jokes, as much for continuity as for comedy. The Jewish situations are mimed by rote, while the real energy of the jokes lies in the observation of secular middle-class manners. In the old Jewish comedies, it had been just the opposite: The manners of the middle class were mimed by rote—the suits and ties, the altered names, Jack Benny's wife called Mary—while the energy of the jokes lay in the hidden Jewishness. (The comedy of Phil Silvers's great Sergeant Bilko almost scandalously derives from the one thing that no one on the show is allowed to mention, which is that Bilko is a clever New York Jew dominating a kind of all-star collection of dim Gentiles.) New York Jewishness was now the conscious setup rather than the hidden punch line.

One Sunday morning, Luke and I walked over to Sable's and bought even more than usual; we were having company. But the Cambodian cashier and the Chinese slicer were unimpressed. The cashier looked over our order.

“How many people you having?” he asked.

“Eight.”

“From out of town?”

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Me, I would be ashamed to put this on the table.”

“You would?”

He looked at the ritualized bits of cured sable and salmon and shrugged again—my grandfather to the life!

“This is not worth putting on the table. I would be ashamed.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“Get a pound of herring salad. Pound of whitefish salad. Pound of bluefish salad.”

I did. “Now I proud to put this on the table,” he said. “Now I no longer ashamed for you.”

He had learned to do it at Zabar's, I realized as I left—the permanent pantomime of Jewish manners with wings on! Though it cost me nearly a hundred dollars, it was worth it for the lesson. The combination of an Asian sense of face with a Jewish sense of guilt may be the most powerful commercial hybrid in history.

S
o, see, I have an Esther in my family, too. The matriarch of my family. She dominated her sisters, in a grasping way, and then came to die of emphysema in my grandparents’ apartment in Florida. We went to see her in—this is in about 1993, I guess. Wheezing and pained, she said, ‘People tell me you are doing well, but I lie here in bed at night and worry, oh, I worry about you. How I worry. So now tell me, tell me, so your aunt won't lie here as she is dying and worry … tell me … how much are you really making?’ ”

“You can't possibly tell that story,” Martha said. “It's anti-Semitic.”

“It's true,” I said.

“Of course it's true,” Martha said. “It's just not appropriate.”

I was trying out possible spiels on the more Jewish of our many Jewish friends. We have a certain number of friends who, though coming from backgrounds not unlike my own, have recommitted themselves to Jewishness in a serious way. While Yiddishkeit as a practice had nearly disappeared from New York, one of the things replacing it, paradoxically, was Judaism. A number of our friends are what I have come to think of as X-treme Jews, who study Kabbalah or glory in the details of the lives of Jewish gangsters and even like to call themselves
“Hebes,” in the manner of young black men calling each other “niggas.”

I envied my friends the seeming clarity of their Jewishness, just as I envied, a little, the clarity of the family of observant Jews who live down the hall from us. On warm Friday evenings, one or two of the adolescent boys in that family will come knocking at our door, galumphing in heavy shoes and with pale faces, and, looking woeful, say, “Could you come and turn on the air conditioner in our apartment? We can't, 'cause we're Jews.” I admired the simplicity of their self-definition: “We can't, 'cause we're Jews.” We are unashamed of our essence, even as it makes us sweat.

But whatever the appeal of that plain faith, I can't say I was inclined to follow them. It seemed to me that my contemporaries, in contrast to the boys down the hall, had chosen Jewish—they were
majoring
in Jewish, just as my father had majored in English—when the force of the tradition was that it was not elective. And since the choice of what to consider properly Jewish was always interpretive—nobody except the very simple or very faithful actually believed or followed it all, seven days of creation and the rules of animal sacrifice in the temple—there were only competing styles of Alexandrianism, of Jewishness rather than rote Judaism, some recognizing themselves as such.

I decided to sit down and read what I imagined was the Bible on the subject of New York Jewishness, Alfred Kazin's memoir
New York Jew,
a book that, over the years, I had neither read in nor read past but simply not read, thinking, unforgivably, that I already knew its contents. (The forties, boy! The fifties, joy! The sixties, oy!) In fact, it's an unpredictable, rhapsodic, uncontentious book—but for all the stark-ness of its title, its premise is that Jewishness is the board from which one springs, rather than the ground one must dig. To be a New York Jew is, for Kazin, like being a New York tree. It is what you are.

Reading Kazin, I became a little impatient with my own apologetic attitude toward the poverty of my Jewishness. Wasn't it the invigorating inheritance of the self-emancipation of my parents? My father had done the deracinating, to become a devotee of Pope and Swift, Molière and Shakespeare, and to reracinate was to be disloyal to him, to the act of emancipation from tribal reflexes that, with a considerable effort of
will and imagination, he had pulled off. What is bracing about Kazin is not his Jewishness but that he makes no effort to pretend he is something else. His liberation lay in not pretending to be Van Wyck Brooks; the liberation for us surely lies in not pretending to be Alfred Kazin.