DOES IT MATTER HOW YOU SLICE IT?

"Watch your fingers!” Uncle Ben says to me, almost neutral, slightly hurried, as if it’s his obligation as a relative and an adult, but not as if he’s really worried. So I continue pushing the steel blade of the slicing machine back and forth while thin, perfect rounds of liverwurst stack up on the matte side of the wax paper.  This interchange is happening on a Sunday afternoon at the delicatessen counter of Schmulka Bernstein Kosher Meats and Provisions, circa 1957, I’m twelve years old and have achieved my full height of just-tall-enough, five foot three. My uncle Ben is in his forties, sports a handsome moustache, he is my grandparents’ third child, the first to be born in the United States.   At this moment he is on his way somewhere else, maybe to the back hall that leads to the smokehouse he now manages because he “has had enough of the customers,” in retail.

           

I love to slice the cold cuts thin, my favorite setting on the blade is number one. Number one slices are elegant, shapely. They take a little more time to produce but, on the positive side, they make you feel you’re getting more for your money. Salami, bologna and liverwurst slice easily. Each one has a perfectly circular, clear edge and is plump and glossy to the touch when you push tight against the blade.

The counter man has gone out for a smoke and I have permission. That’s the wonder of it, looking back to this time. Zeide gave me permission. In this era adults do not spend excess time worrying about liability and safety. Children ride bicycles with the breeze moving past their hair because safety helmets are only associated with dire calamities like war. Even Uncle Ben doesn’t insist I stop what am I doing. 

           

“Butchers have lost fingers that way,” he calls over his shoulder as he moves down the dark hallway at the back of the store. But his fingers, all the uncles’ fingers, are intact. So I’m not worried. Besides, I’m very good at it.

           

My Uncle Ben speaks with a New York accent. Well, we all do. He has a strong warm, baritone with a hint of rasp and a touch of the nasal.  Nothing I would have ever noticed one way or the other except that it was this voice that kept him from becoming a high school English teacher which was what he aspired to after he graduated City College into the Great Depression.

Whenever my mother told the story she would begin in a sorrowful tone,  “He always had that voice.”  Then, “In those days it was very hard to get a teaching job.” Then, with disgust, “Now they’re begging for teachers.”

           
Only in graduate school do I read a history of Jewish teachers in the New York City school system and learn that it wasn’t personal to my uncle. The oral exam was designed to keep Jewish candidates from teaching. “An applicant’s voice had to be ‘audible, pleasant, well modulated, without being nasal, high-pitched, strident or noisy.’ Dropping the ‘g’ at the end of gerunds was considered a serious cultural defect. And though this could have applied to candidates from a variety of ethnicities, the criteria were perceived as being applied particularly to Jews.”

Did Ben know that it wasn’t personal to him? Did he know he was a victim of a seasoning of antisemitism? And would that knowledge have made it easier to bear? My own historical air became a little clearer after I studied the wider circumstance, as if I had satisfactorily pushed a missing piece of the family jigsaw puzzle into place. But maybe, if it’s your heart’s desire, it doesn't matter that it wasn’t a personal flaw.

           

My uncle Ben remained a kosher butcher all his life, working first in the family business and then, when the business closed, he worked as a kosher butcher for others. Sometimes this made him terribly, tearfully unhappy. 

           

He solaced himself for a disappointing work life by being a good family man and an educated person. He read a lot. He and my Aunt Anne attended opera and ballet. He collected antique figurines from the Mediterranean basin. And then, when he was sixty-five and happily retired with a sturdy pension from the New York Kosher Butchers Association, he became the librarian of his quite large West Palm Beach condo association.  Woman, particularly women, asked him for suggestions as to what they should read.

           

“They all love him,” Aunt Anne said. She was somewhat gleeful about it. Perhaps because he was hers, perhaps because she liked seeing him blossom into the mentor he had always wanted to be. “He loves to talk about culture and literature, so they love him.”

           

More than a quarter century of fruitful retirement awaited him.  In a time when most of the adult males of his generation were incapable in the kitchen, Uncle Ben was also a superlative entrée chef and an expert appreciator of the best cuts of beef. A man who could bake an outstanding brisket and serve it sliced, against the grain, elegantly thin.

           

Zayde's Communal Moment

Our grandfather, the man who rarely traveled more than fifteen city blocks from home, once considered starting an intentional rural community.  Yes, really. This was the most surprising fact I learned from Uncle Harry when I interviewed him in 2005.  Schmulka Bernstein, an heir to the oh-so- American idyllic vision of Bronson Alcott or Robert Owen?   Who could imagine such a thing?  But maybe his openhanded wallet, his moniker, the Robin Hood of Rivington Street indicated a secret spirit of daring. After all, he did create and market a wholly original food product -  fry beef. 

Here is that moment, for it was only a moment, as Uncle Harry relayed it to me. “It was probably brought to his attention by a rabbi, no one else. So we come to this place in Somers,New York. It was about an hour from the city. I had a car by then. Me, and my brother Benny went.  Maybe Murray went. It was set up with different buildings, a main building like a clubhouse. It was like a condominium set up. Big buildings, some smaller buildings. My father wasn’t fazed by the amount of money. It was not cheap.  From his point of view, we would all live there, be religious, keep kosher.”

Notice the phrasing “From his point of view…” This didn’t indicate what Harry might have wanted and I wasn’t a savvy enough interviewer to ask him what now seems to me some obvious questions about his own point of view. When I play back the tape I can hear the exasperation rising in the back of his throat.

           

“He was going to bring his own rabbi up there – the Ostrower. Did you ever meet him? A little old grey haired man, white beard. We would go to him for advice. About kosher.”

           

And then the exasperation grows clearer. “About anything! You’d go to the old man. And the old man had sons. Lots of sons! And then my father took one of the sons in to be a mashgiach, and then he took another one in.  He was paying them all a lot of money.”

           

For this is what Zayde did. Although Harry, Ben and Murray were now ostensibly the managers of the business, Schmulka made all sorts of financial decisions without consultation. If someone needed a job and that someone was a religious man or the son of a rabbi, our grandfather would find him something to do. Or put him on the payroll with nothing much to do. It was the way to run a fiefdom, not a modern, profit-generating organization.

The brothers didn’t want to live under the rule of a rabbi. But this is not what they told their father.  In their own new married homes in Brooklyn and Queens they could leave father and mother and orthodoxy behind, join a synagogue with a moderated point of view, even go out on a Saturday night to try Chinese food. But they could not tell their father this outright. Instead they argued logistics.

“We were against it. When we got home we pointed out some of the flaws. His plan was not practical. You were going to live up there – all of us – and have the business on the East Side and travel up and back each day. For a change, he listened to us, maybe because my mother didn’t like the idea either.

           

“My mother had a best friend, Mrs. Sanchek. She lived upstairs on Rivington. She was a midwife. She delivered all of us. Anyway, Mrs. Sanchek was like our mother’s rebbe. They were together every day. Whatever Mrs. Sanchek said was the truth. And Mrs. Sanchek had to earn a living, as midwife. She wasn’t going to move upstate.”

           

What was Zayde looking for? Not the typical immigrant reward where the children do better than the parents. More like the idealist’s dream of the perfect shtetl where daily life is like a Marc Chagall painting, harmonious and charged with mystery.  Our Zayde was, after all, orphaned at a young age.  Maybe he wanted to keep all his children as close as possible. Maybe he wanted to take the memory of that poverty-stricken hamlet in which he had spent his childhood and recreate it as it should have been - safe, clean, prosperous.

           

It wouldn’t have worked out of course. I know because I’m a member of a rural intentional community and have been for twenty-five years.  Just like being part of a family business, living cooperatively is as annoying and difficult as it is satisfying. Success is rare because it requires enormous flexibility. So even though Zayde’s community wouldn’t have worked, I love that he had the idea.

                                       

TZITZIT STORIES

My brother Arne, recently, told me about his and our boy cousins' trial by tzitzit that took place during Sunday afternoon family visits to our grandparents on Rivington Street.  Tzitzit is the fringed ritual undershirt that observant Jewish men wear in accordance with Numbers 15:38 "Speak to the children of Israel and say to them that they shall make themselves tzitzit on the corners of their garments." The fringe is supposed to remind the wearer of the Divine Will.  It is also the fringe at the bottom of the prayer shawl that, until recent years, only males wore in religious services in the synagogue.

        

It was during the arrival kisses and hugs that Zayde would reach down under my brother's waistband as if to tickle, but  really to assess whether or not Arne's tzitzit were in place.   They were, so Arne passed the test, A-plus. A smile from grandpa, an extra squeeze and hug.   The reason he knew to wear these is that our Mom, Ida, Schmulke's youngest daughter, would remind him the morning of the visit. She knew her father, our Zayde, would inspect.  Perhaps he had checked up on her brothers when they were small. So, even though our mother "didn't want religious," meaning Orthodox in her life, she also didn't want her father to know that.         

        

Arne could bask in our grandfather's approval even though this came at the price of deception. The deception being the implication that he wore the undershirt in his daily life.

"I always felt comfortable with Bubbie and Zayde," Arne says now. "And I still like being around old people."

        

In contrast, our Aunt Natalie, who was only a daughter-in-law and was Jewish but not Jewishly educated, did not know to warn her sons. And so when Zayde moved to search a waistband his fingers met only cloth. Then came an old man's sigh.

        

Was it the mother's job you may ask. The answer is yes, it was. Besides, on those Sundays our fathers had already left, hours earlier, for work. The uncles to the butcher store or smokehouse, my own father two blocks away at his wholesale paper products warehouse.  Orthodox or not (and none of us were by then), our family work week went from Sunday morning to Friday afternoon.

        

The tzitzit incidents created a small gulf, a short, sad juncture. "I always felt I was a disappointment," cousin Dennis writes to me, "because of this."

        

Nothing else changed.  Other than that sigh, there was no punishment. Zayde continued to present each of us with the special two dollar bills, continued to give hugs and Irish Sweepstakes lottery tickets. Nothing changed except there were these moments, still remembered, of failed connection.

        

In my Jewish Study Bible it says that in the BCE time, fringes were common on clothes. And when most people couldn't write, pressing your fringe into a clay tablet was a legal sign endorsement for whatever the tablet stated. This means that in a prayer service where you are called to the Torah and you press your tzizit into the parchment you are making an ancient gesture of assent.

Whoever scribed Numbers could not imagine, then, that in the far future writing implements would be common as salt. That salt itself would be common and easy to obtain. That women would, if they wished, wear the fringed prayer shawls in the synagogue. That a direct descendant, and a female, myself, across an unknown ocean would be talking about the family problems caused by this holiness decree.

        

Years ago, when I asked Uncle Harry about his earliest memories, which would mean the nineteen-twenties, he also mentioned the tzizit.  "It was strictly religious. You had to obey. Before you went to sleep you said your prayers, there were four prayers. You had to wear tzitzit, you wore that. We didn't have peyes (long sidelocks). Thank goodness, we were spared that."

        Between the lines of those last sentences and the accompanying sigh I could hear the soft burden of difference that was, for him, the significance of the tzitzit.

        

In my current, easy going and egalitarian synagogue, there is no presiding rabbi.  Members guide all ritual functions. Women can and do lead or participate in any aspect of worship. There are prayer books for Reform, Renewal and Conservative services, and the service leader, male or female, gets to choose.  Some women wear a tallit to pray.   I'm not one of them.  In this congregation we're all what the sociologist Steven Cohen calls "postmodern Jews." Personal meaning is our arbiter of Jewish engagement. And my personal meaning, for who knows what reason, doesn't involve a prayer shawl.

        

For many years one of our members was an older Jewishly learned and observant man.  A man who, for all I knew, actually wore tzitzit.  He sometimes led services, but other times would just be part of the congregation.   After the Sh'ma was read aloud he had the habit of murmuring indistinctly the long paragraphs that followed, while the rest of us tended to read them silently or daydream.  He mumbled except for the word tzitzit that appears three times in the passage. Tzitzit he would pronounce distinctly and with gusto, as if it were a tasty treat.  I once mentioned this to him, but he just smiled without explanation.  

        

He has since re-married and moved away. But, even now, many years later, when I read that word in the text I hear his voice with its strong emphasis on the hissing, crunched sound of the tee pushing against the zee. It seemed to me that in that particular word he was relishing his special relationship to Divine purposes. As, perhaps, did my grandfather.  An option not available to me, at least not through the traditional fringe channel.

        

           

           

The Letter Tav

    You might not think the pronunciation of one consonant could open a rift between a grandfather and a beloved (I hope) grandchild. But so it happened. I am talking about the letter tav, the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet.

           

Say I'm eleven years old, it's 1956, and we are, as usual on a Sunday afternoon, visiting our grandparents on Rivington Street. This is the three room apartment, the smaller one, that they moved into later in life. Once inside, it is doorless and hall-less, each room opens onto the next. Wherever you are, you know what anyone in the other two rooms is doing or saying.

           

My seven year old sister, Jayne and four year old brother Arne are squabbling over who gets to ride up and down on the Barcalounger in the bedroom.  Zayde and I are in the middle room, the living room dining room combination, watching a Hopalong Cassidy western on a small black and white television.  I am in love with Lucky, Hopalong's handsome young sidekick who usually has his arm in a sling because of some bad guy.  I don't think Zayde is interested in the plot. But, as I've said before, he likes to watch the bounty of healthy herds of cattle lowing across the American plains.  At the kitchen sink my mother and Bubbie are peeling onions and potatoes, talking in Yiddish, their heads bent toward each other.

           

During an advertisement break Zayde asks me how I'm doing in my Jewish studies.

           

"Good, very good," I say.

           

And I am. I really like Hebrew school. I attend three times a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays after regular school and on Sunday mornings. There we study all things Jewish - prayer book and modern Hebrew, history and holidays.   My reports home are filled with the word mitzuyan, which means excellent. 

                                                 

           

Zayde asks me to read from the Sh'mona Esrei which is the central daily prayer. And confidently I begin the Amidah and come to the word "avoteinu..." our fathers. 

           

Which is where he stops me and begins speaking rapidly. At this moment, sensing interpersonal danger, my mother stops peeling vegetables and comes toward us on the couch.  

           

"He wants you to say it "Avosehnu," she points out.

           

I stare at them both in consternation. My Hebrew school teachers consider the soft tav a worn out relic. They would not allow it into our classroom. I'm the New Jew - not that I really know what that means. So are my teachers and everyone in Israel- not that we're in Israel, but still, none of those East European singsong nasal esses for us. I try to explain to my grandfather how we do it in the modern halls of Queens. But between my English and his Yiddish we are at an impasse.

           

My mother looks pained.

           

"Ma," I wail, "Ma, tell him."

           

And she does, in Yiddish. "This is the way it's taught now, Papa," and some elaboration on that theme. He is not satisfied.  The demonstration of my achievements is over for the day.  The two of us turn back to the television.  

           

The odd thing is, this same scene recurred several times over the next two years. It was as if Zayde hoped, each time he asked, that I would have learned the true articulation. And I hoped, each time, that he had finally understood how I had to read it.  This never happened.  But, now I think, it is to our credit that we kept trying to connect.  

                                             

The Last Seder at 110 Rivington

If you saw us that year, 1955, gathered at twilight at the Passover table, you might have thought we were the exemplary extended family. All ages represented. A large, "up from nothing, from dust" family, as my father, Max, would say, prospering, with two of the generations American born.  In a way we were, as much as any family can be ideal. Which is not very much.

        

There we sat, crowded around an expectant, appointed table that filled the middle room, some twenty of us- aunts, uncles, cousins and a few of Zayde's undernourished- looking bachelor friends. At each place setting a fine china soup bowl atop a fine china plate, beside a small Haggadah in English and Hebrew. Silverware polished to a high shine and two glasses - one for wine even for the children and one for water or seltzer.  In the center of the table, six candles flamed in wrought silver candlesticks and next to them a stack of matzahs that were covered by an embroidered cloth. Everything was ready. And we knew that in the apartment directly below us Uncle Sol and Aunt Ruth, cousins Isaac and Bernie, Eleanor and her husband Bill and their small son Ira, were sitting as we sat, about to begin as we were about to begin.  And all the Jews in New York City, including Uncle Harry and our cousins in Brooklyn, the same.

A couch with Mission-style wooden arms was pushed up against the table. This was where the children were placed- Barbara, myself, Harvey, David, Ira, Allen - I don't remember where the really little children were. My father and the uncles, Morris and Ben and Murray, sat facing us.  Zayde was at the head of the table leaning on pillows because the Haggadah said we must rest on pillows as we tell this story to demonstrate that we are free people.

        

And the women, you might be wondering. Where were the women - my mother, Ida and Aunt Yetta, Aunt Ann and Natalie, and Bubbie, where were they? Ah, now we begin to approach the flaws, the falling short that is part of any family picture. The women's chairs were nearest the kitchen door, at the open end of the table because they spent the evening getting up and helping Bubbie serve and then sitting down to eat something and then getting up again to clear and wash the dishes, all the while keeping note of which child was eating what and how much because being "a good eater" was much prized in those days. Bubbie didn't sit down at all.

        

Led by Zayde, the men rushed through the Hebrew text of the Haggadah in a mumbling singsong. Now about this Haggadah.  

Every year from the time I could read I would search in the Haggadah for the story, the really compelling story of Moses in the basket, the Princess who found him, his time in the desert, with the Pharoah and finally the great exodus from Egypt. Each year I would imagine I had somehow missed it the year before. But, no it wasn't there. It was never there. Instead the Haggadah was a series of obscure vignettes about ancient rabbis, Rabbi Gamliel was one, who said this or that and sat up disputing until the cock crowed. I assumed that this text was the way it had to be, like the Torah, not a word could be changed.

        

The men read on, but no matter how fast they read, it was not fast enough. The roast was getting cold, the children irritable. The women hovered, paced, ached to serve. It was already eight o'clock.  But the meal could not begin until the men had finished.  Cousin David pinched me and I rushed to pinch him back and our mothers glowered at us so we switched to kicking each other under the table.

        

Finally everyone was fed and the children went careening into the darkened far bedrooms to search for the afikomen, the hidden middle matzah without which the meal and the story are forever incomplete.  It was Ira, the oldest, who found it that last year, wrapped in a napkin, tucked under a lamp. He was promised five dollars when the holidays were over. The rest of us were each promised two.

        

Sometime later that spring Bubbie and Zayde decided they were too old to care for a six room apartment. They moved across the street to three rooms and our large gatherings downtown were no more.  

        

After that, the setting for our seders was a suburban finished basement, minus the grandparents who wouldn't travel on the holiday or stay in anyone else's home.  Without them the link to something larger vanished, at least for me. I'm not sure why this was. Maybe because we just repeated what had been - the same Rabbinic Haggadah stories we didn't understand, the mumbling, the hovering, the meal served too soon or too late. We never made it our own.

        

It's different now, as I'm sure you know.  The Haggadah, as it turns out, is not at all like the Torah. An infinite number of approaches are possible.  Currently, for every nuance of Jewish observance there exists a suitable Haggadah text in English or Hebrew or both. And, if you can't find a published one to your liking, you can always create your own. Even the occasional liberal church hosts some ecumenical version during the Easter season.

        

This year, on April 22, my sister Jayne will set a lovely table.  My husband Sam (not Jewish but might as well be by now) and I will go to her home in Connecticut where her husband Larry and all our adult children and their partners will join us.  Maybe there will also be some friends.  Our leader is female, it's me, since I'm the one who cares the most and is the most knowledgeable. I will lead the seder as a participatory event, mostly in English, using a Haggadah that tells the story of the Exodus and, with additional handouts, we will recall modern examples of oppression and freedom.  The telling, the washing, the dipping, the sandwich of bitter herbs and our songs are completed in less than an hour. For myself, on this night, the seder is remains a connection to Jews around the world and to our stories past and present. I do not know if this is so for my own children. Perhaps this year I will ask them.