Inside, Outside, page 21
I would go to Mar Weil’s home for my bar-mitzva drilling, and we’d sit out in a little back yard where sunflowers grew. Mar Weil loved Isaiah, and was a fine Hebraist. I remember the way he parsed each word and phrase of my bar-mitzva passage for me, his eyes lighting up, his gnarled hands dancing in precise little gestures. When I come on this chapter of Isaiah even today, I see those dancing hands, holding a bit of a cigarette smoking on a pin.
But I mention this only in passing. Mar Weil is no literary competition at all for Peter Quat’s famous Hebrew teacher in his sensational novella, The Smelly Melamed; Shraga Glutz, with his bad breath, garlicky body odor, thundering belches, and celebrated habit of picking his nose and parking the snot crusts under the seat of his chair. Peter is justly proud of Shraga Glutz, whom he made up out of thin air. Peter never had a bar mitzva. The part where the boy comes upon the bearded skullcapped Shraga abusing himself while peeking through a bathroom window at the boy’s mother on the toilet has caused much serious academic discussion, pro and con. Professor Levi Silverstein of Amherst, in a massive essay in The New York Review of Books, made the definitive defense of old Peter, calling the scene “the ultimate epiphanic moment of alienation in the fiction of the American Jewish experience.” Mar Weil could not have conceivably done anything so picturesque or epiphanic.
But then, Mar Weil couldn’t have kept whacking me over the knuckles with a strap until—as in Peter’s masterful climax—I threw the Bible in his face, kicked him in the testicles, and leaped out of a second-story window into a garden, shouting a la John Wilkes Booth, “I’m not a Jew, I’m an American!” Mar Weil was a gentle old scholar, and there was no literature in him. I just thought he rated a paragraph, if Shraga Glutz rated a whole novella, since at least Mar Weil existed.
And now about a bar mitzva that really happened.
***
I might as well start with the Bronx Home News, a sizable daily paper full of local doings; mainly social events, fires, robberies, and rapes. Rape was always reported enigmatically in the Bronx Home News as a “serious charge.” I puzzled for many boyhood years over the high number of unspecified serious charges. Well, that gives you an idea of the Bronx Home News. The Fairy Laundry advertised in it all the time.
So it occurred to Mom that my bar mitzva was hot news and rated a write-up, and Pop had no trouble arranging for a reporter to come to our flat for the scoop. The man was supposed to interview me, but I happened to get jugged that day, so he talked to Mom. I had been of two minds about the interview, half-dreading it and half-flattered. On the whole I was relieved that the reporter had come and gone in my absence. Still, I was a bit uneasy, for I knew that where I was concerned Mom was inclined to exaggerate. I asked her what she had told the reporter. “Oh, I just answered his questions,” said Mama, already up to her elbows in kishka-stuffing at a huge vat in the kitchen. So she did, God help us all.
The kishka was Mama’s second way of whittling down Aunt Sophie, as the newspaper story was the first. There would be nothing about Cousin Harold in the Bronx Home News, of course, and whatever the Chateau Deluxe might serve at the banquet, nothing was going to equal this historic kishka. No doubt the whole world knows that the dish called kishka is stuffed cow gut. Mom got hold of an entire intestine, yards and yards and yards of it, and stuffed it whole, instead of stuffing a short piece as she sometimes did on Sabbath. I believe this spectacular whole kishka was an old-country custom for great occasions. I know Bobbeh and Aunt Rivka both worked on it, as well as Mom and my sister Lee.
Lee still grouses, in fact, about that kishka, because she ended up in charge of it. Lee was seventeen and becoming very beautiful. A number of boys she liked came to the synagogue, but she had to stay home and mind the kishka. My bar-mitzva party was laid out in a vacant flat above our own—tables, chairs, food, soft drinks, and many bottles of Bobbeh’s wine—but the kishka was the pièce de résistance. It went twisting all through the place, in and out of the rooms, sort of like a fire hose, brown and spicy-smelling, truly the damnedest kishka anybody ever saw; and Lee had to drape and work it here and there, and keep it off the floors, and arrange it so that guests when they arrived wouldn’t get all tangled up in the kishka, or roped off by it from the drinks. I myself don’t think the kishka eclipsed Cousin Harold’s Chateau Deluxe banquet; and it gave my sister Lee another everlasting complaint, to wit, that only she in the whole Mishpokha didn’t hear me do my speeches and my Isaiah chant.
But that is a phony peeve. Lee knew the whole performance by heart from hearing me rehearse it. If she gets sufficiently pie-eyed she can still launch into that Isaiah passage, and my speech too, more than forty years later, and reel them off, glaring the while at the sheer injustice of life. Nobody gets more mileage out of a grudge than my sister Lee, but she has really worn that kishka out. Anyway, the kishka was much admired and praised by the guests at the party. I was the one to make the first cut, which sent it writhing off in two directions, dropping stuffing, to great cheers. Every inch of it was eaten up, and it was the talk of Longfellow Avenue for a week, so maybe it was worth the trouble, at that.
As for the great day in the synagogue, Mama simply outdid herself. Poor Aunt Sophie, poor Cousin Harold! They never had a look-in. When I say Mama I mean Papa, too, of course. He put her grandiose visions into execution, and probably gloried in them as I did.
To begin with, Mama engaged Cantor Levinson and his choir. How can I convey to you what it meant to us Bronxites to have Cantor Levinson—a great old-country cantor who made popular records, a cantor so much in demand that no congregation could afford him on a year-round basis—appear in person in the Minsker Congregation’s modest cellar, with his awesome purple pom-pom hat, and his full-length prayer shawl with its glistening gold-work collar, and his choir of twelve in purple robes? It was just stunning. But that wasn’t all. She also got hold of the famous itinerant Yiddish preacher, the Bialystoker Maggid, to deliver the sermon. Mind you, these superstars cost less by far than the seven-course roast beef banquet at the Chateau Deluxe, complete with little American and Jewish flags stuck in the grapefruit; but for impact, there was just no comparison.
And speaking of flags, Mom brought off a pretty good effect with flags, too. Old Mr. Weil had about forty kids in the Hebrew school, and Pop was the chairman of the school committee, so putting the kids to work as extras was no problem. When the services began, all those kids sat lined up in the first two rows, the boys and the girls separated. I sat on the front platform by the eastern wall, between Pop and the Bialystoker Maggid. The synagogue was jam-packed, of course, standing room only, as on Yom Kippur; for a large sign in Yiddish and English outside proclaimed that Cantor Levinson was officiating, and the Bialystoker Maggid speaking, at the bar mitzva of I. David Goodkind. I had a mother who thought of everything, and she wanted to be sure of a full house.
Well, the time came. Cantor Levinson, a small but leather-lunged man, rose on his tiptoes with pom-pom trembling, to belt out the traditional call to the Torah:
“Stand, Yisroel Dovid ben Eliyahu, the bar-mitzva youth, for the closing reading. Be strong!”
And the purple-robed twelve roared in rich harmony:
“BE STRONG!”
Whereupon the boys and girls of the Hebrew school stood up, formed two lines along the aisle from the eastern wall all the way to the raised reading desk in mid-synagogue, and crossed thirty flags, American and Jewish, to form a triumphal arch; and under that arch Israel David Goodkind, in a new gray Michaels suit, marched up to the Torah to do his thing. You never saw such a gaudy effect as that canopy of crossed flags. Cousin Harold was sitting in a front row, and he may well have given up the religion then and there, once and for all.
I read my Isaiah. I spoke in English. I spoke in Hebrew. Mar Weil had prepared my discourses, and they were heavy, but I sailed through them. The Bialystoker Maggid followed me—forty minutes of witty singsong Yiddish, rich with plums of parable, fable, plays on Scripture texts, and Talmudic twists, all leading up to his presenting me with a Bible. Cantor Levinson and the choir concluded the show with a gorgeously florid closing service, and a couple of hundred guests trooped to Longfellow Avenue to regale themselves on kishka, and drink and sing and dance.
All in all, a knockout of a bar mitzva. I proceeded to get pretty drunk on praise and Bobbeh’s wine; I had far too much of both, and they went to my head and had me giggling and reeling, but I was the hero of the day and could do no wrong. I seem to remember doing a jig up on a table at one point inside a ring of kishka while everybody sang and clapped, but I hope that didn’t really happen.
***
Now let me leap ahead two weeks to finish the Cousin Harold part, before we take up the Arista catastrophe.
Harold had his bar mitzva in the Minsker Congregation cellar, too. He had his prophetic passage down pat, but his heart wasn’t in it. If he had dared, he would have chanted fifteen minutes of “onions and potatoes.” He just slouched up to the reading desk when Morris Elfenbein called his name, and went through his chant like a robot with dying batteries. He made a speech, too, which Uncle Hyman had written, a good speech, but his delivery was lacklustre, and the half-empty synagogue buzzed all through it. Silence fell, however, when I ascended the platform.
Why, yes, here came the old Godol himself. Encore! There was no Maggid to give Harold the Bible, so Mama had persuaded Aunt Sophie that it would be nice for David to do that. Aunt Sophie, a sweet and guileless soul at bottom, was so taken by this notion of Sarah Gitta’s David playing second fiddle to Cousin Harold for once, that the poor thing agreed, and even asked me to introduce Harold at the Chateau banquet!
There is more of The Green Cousin in me, possibly, than I care to admit. I ad-libbed an oration in handing Harold the Bible in shule, and then another that night at his banquet, which just shut him out with goose eggs. I don’t know why I’m telling this in public, but you may as well know all. Just don’t forget how Harold had been lording it over me with his Chateau Deluxe catered affair. It was bad business to start up with me on my home turf. Here in the Bronx, in matters Hebraic and ceremonial, I was Charles Strongfort; if down in Manhattan I was just the kid in the purple suit, passionately yearning to get into Arista.
But there is much of Aunt Sophie in Cousin Harold. He never held those goose eggs against me, not at all. I may have cast a soul adrift from Israel with this mischief, though I think Harold was already well on his way out, muttering “onions and potatoes.” Harold was and is a born skeptic, except he does believe that every word Sigmund Freud wrote was first uttered on Sinai. We can all use a revelation of sorts.
30
The Newspaper Story
The morning after my bar mitzva, I returned with Pop to the synagogue. What a contrast! Gloomy, silent, all but empty; down front, Morris Elfenbein and a few old men putting on prayer shawls and phylacteries, t’filin. I had my new phylacteries, and Mar Weil had taught me how to tie them on. Before my bar mitzva I had been ineligible to utter God’s name in the blessings; I now recited them as I fastened on the black leather boxes, with Pop’s eyes shining at me. That was good, but otherwise, what a letdown! Without me they’d actually have lacked the minyan, the quorum of ten men.
We American Jews have strange ways. Most of us tend to take the bar-mitzva blowout as a sort of graduation from religion until we get married or die, something drastic like that; when what it signifies is that observance is supposed to start in earnest. That was certainly how my father took it. I went with him to the Minsker shule every morning for weeks, arising at an ungodly hour to drive there. Afterward he would drop me at the subway, and ride off to the messy building site for his day’s aggravation and aging. It was hard going for both of us. It didn’t last. Eventually I was rushing through morning prayers at home, in an abbreviated format which my sons have irreverently dubbed “Straps on, straps off,” and which is the way they still do it, so far as I know. I don’t inquire.
This chapter is about the story in the Bronx Home News, but since I’ve wandered this far afield, let me add one thing more. The drop from the packed bar-mitzva Sabbath to the meager little service Sunday morning was in retrospect the crux of the experience. If Pop hadn’t made the effort I’d have missed the whole point. Anybody can stage a big bar mitzva, given a bundle of money and a boy willing to put up with the drills for the sake of the wingding. The backbone of our religion—who knows, perhaps of all religions in this distracted age—is a stubborn handful in a nearly vacant house of worship, carrying it on for just one more working day; out of habit, loyalty, inertia, superstition, sentiment, or possibly true faith; who can be sure which? My father taught me that somber truth. It has stayed with me, so that I still haul myself to synagogues on weekdays, especially when it rains or snows and the minyan looks chancy.
***
When Pop and I got home from shule that first Sunday, my sister Lee, sitting in the kitchen in a bathrobe with a cup of coffee, grouchily told us that there was a big story about the bar mitzva in the Bronx Home News, and Mama had taken the paper over to Aunt Sophie’s. Pop telephoned her there. I could hear Mom’s excited voice declaring that Sophie and Hyman agreed the write-up was marvelous, and Cousin Harold was reading it right that minute, and laughing like anything.
“Why is Harold laughing?” Papa asked. “Is there something comical in it?”
“No, no,” I heard Mom say. “He’s just so happy for David. I’ll be right home.”
Papa hung up and asked Lee whether the story was in any way funny.
“Funny? I’d call it tragic,” said Lee, evidently still burned up over the kishka affair.
“Why?” Pop wrinkled his forehead. “What’s wrong with the story?”
Reluctantly, after a long leisurely gulp of coffee, she answered, “The mistakes.”
I felt sick.
“What mistakes?” Papa insisted.
But Lee, if pushed too hard, can move fast from enigmatic evasions to her spitting treed-leopard vein, and then she fears no man—father, brother, husband, it’s all one to her. You just have to leave her alone, and give her time to climb down out of the tree.
She now spat at my father, “Look, was I supposed to MEMORIZE the damn story? I wasn’t even THERE for the damn bar mitzva, you know, Papa? One thing I know is, he sure spelled ‘kishka’ all wrong. Not that I give a damn!”
Three damns in a row, straight at Papa. He blinked and let them pass.
“What? He mentioned the kishka?” I faltered.
“MENTIONED it? It’s all ABOUT the kishka!” Lee snarled, setting down the cup with a crash. “You’d think it was the kishka that got bar mitzva’d! You’ll soon see for yourself! Leave me alone!” And away she flounced, wrapping the loose bathrobe close around her sexy young figure.
I went out into the hall and leaped up the stairway, hoping to come on a copy of a delivered Home News. I did find one and was frantically turning the pages, when the door was opened by a frowsy fat lady with practically nothing on, glaring at me and clutching modestly at herself here and there. I dropped the paper and went galloping out to the nearest newsstand. No Bronx Home News. When I got home Mom was there and Pop was looking at the paper.
“Where have you been, David?” said Mama affectionately. “Don’t you want to read all about yourself?”
“What about the mistakes?” I asked Papa.
He turned large sober brown eyes at me. “It’s a very nice write-up. Don’t worry, Yisroelke. People don’t pay attention to what they read in the papers.” He handed me the paper and left. In a fever I laid it out on the table. The story spread over three columns of the social news page, full of pictures of ill-favored brides and engaged girls. There was a picture of me, too, just my face, fat and squinty, blown up from a camp snapshot.
ISAAC GOODKIND BECOMES BAR MITZVA; BOY GENIUS WON FIVE GOLD MEDALS.
The shock of that headline I will never forget. My memories of the story are otherwise fragmentary. I have permanent amnesia about it. Too bad; it was a gem of the journalist’s art. I’ve since had some experience with reporters, including the widespread coverage of the obscenity trials, and have learned to shrug at what newspapers print. But this was a first, and a humdinger. Mama and the reporter between them had really done for me; paragraph by paragraph, as I read the thing, I felt myself being disembowelled with a rusty saw.
All through the story, I was Isaac; just once Isaac David. In the lead paragraph I was identified as the outstanding genius of Townsend Harris Hall, a school for brilliant students, where I had already won five gold medals—for English, dramatics, newspaper work, perfect physique, and boxing prowess. One sentence does swim up through my amnesia after all: “Young Isaac will chant the entire service from beginning to end, assisted by Cantor Levinson and his choir of twelve.” There was also a very garbled reference to the Bialystoker Maggid; he came out the Bubbleheaded Mugger, something like that.
I tell you, this was quite a news story. Young Isaac was descended from a long line of famous rabbis on his mother’s side, and his father was the laundry giant of the Bronx, and also the president of the Muenster Synagogue, of which young Isaac had laid the cornerstone; also the chairman of the Hebrew School, and the Bronx Zionist Chapter, and so on and on and on. Lee had exaggerated about the kishka, but at the end there was a short final paragraph stating that Isaac’s mother had prepared for the occasion a traditional religious dish called a pushka, forty feet long, by far the largest pushka ever cooked in the Bronx. In a final burst of creative accuracy, the reporter wrote that the recipe for the pushka had been supplied by the Bubbleheaded Mugger.
