“Long story short: I’m not looking for the female equivalent of you. You may have formidable genes, Herbie, but you lack yiddishkeit.”
“What do you mean? I have candlesticks.”
“I mean I want a woman who knows how to make a Jewish home.”
“May I direct the witness’s attention to the fact that it is Friday night and he just ordered shrimp?”
Zach cocked his chopsticks like a bow and arrow and mimed a shot across the table.
“How do you feel about converts?” Herb asked.
Zach closed his eyes for a moment. “I think we should probably rule them out.” He was in awe of people who’d undertaken the Jewish conversion process, but he wanted a girl who knew what it was like to be called a kike in kindergarten. “I need someone who was raised with the same ghosts I was. If I were to marry a convert and she said something critical about a Jew—which born Jews do all the time—I might suspect she’s a secret anti-Semite. And the next time a suicide bomber blows up a bus in Jerusalem, I might wonder if she feels the same kick in the gut as I do.”
“You’d never stop spying on her soul,” Herb said with mock melodrama.
“Maybe.”
“Okay, no converts. How about an import? A Sephardi from Seville? A Jewess from Johannesburg? You could be between Iraq and a hard place.”
“Very funny, but no. I once spent a weekend in Michigan with my Iranian Jewish roommate’s family. It was unbelievable, so painfully awkward. His mom wasn’t allowed to appear in male company unless his dad was in the room. She and the kids couldn’t touch any food until the father had eaten as much as he wanted. At night, he dropped his shoes in her lap and told her to shine them and have them back in his closet by seven in the morning.”
“Sounds like a nice deal,” Herb teased.
“No American woman would stand for that.”
“Neither would an Israeli. I have this friend, Aviva, early thirties, PhD from Hebrew University, policy wonk, works at a think tank. She’s also an IDF sharpshooter and looks great in camouflage.” Herb stared at the ceiling. “On second thought, you might not get along.”
“Why? She sounds amazing.”
“Hawk. Rabid Likudnik. She’ll call you a self-hating Jew and accuse you of being too easy on the Palestinians. She’ll tell you to either move to Israel or shut up and quit criticizing the government. You’d have to bury your back issues of the Nation.”
“Not happening,” Zach grinned. “Okay, never mind Aviva.”
When the appetizers arrived, the two men instinctively shared; Zach plopped one of his dumplings on his friend’s plate and got a spoonful of soup in return.
“I’m not sure I can scare up a fertile, liberal Zionist with lacrosse leg muscles by the time you get back from Melbourne.”
“Take as long as you like,” Zach replied between chews. “We’re talking about my soul mate here.”
“Prediction: the minute you fall in love, all your criteria will fly out the window.”
Zach smiled but knew better. People who weren’t children of survivors couldn’t seem to grasp how it felt to be the last man standing. And have promises to keep.
When their main dishes came, Herb pinched a tentacle of octopus between his chopsticks and waved it at Zach. “Exhibit A: No fins or scales. Ergo unkosher. Suppose your bashert asks you to keep the dietary laws? The Duke of Windsor gave up the throne for the woman he loved. Are you willing to give up bacon?”
“The question’s moot; you know I don’t eat pork.”
“You’re eating shrimp. Shellfish is underwater pork.”
“Shellfish is treif,” Zach said. “Pork is anti-Semitic.”
Herb hooted. “You’re parsing, Levy. And badly. Face it: You’re the same kind of Jew I am. You eat what I eat. You don’t keep the Sabbath like I don’t keep the Sabbath. You eat on Yom Kippur like I eat. The difference is you beat yourself up about it.”
“Not true! I always fast on Yom Kippur.” But he knew his Judaism was deficient, at best its definitions murky. Unlike Herb, Zach wasn’t a haven’t-been-to-shul-since-my-bar-mitzvah Jew, who felt it was enough to be “just Jewish” and not want to be anything else. Herb thought that doing the right thing—in his case, legal advocacy for children—made you as Jewishly legit as the black hats. He carried no freight from the Old Country, no Holocaust hangovers, no escape plan—it never having occurred to him that he could ever be in danger—and felt no compulsion to marry a Jew or produce Jewish progeny. Herb was at peace with his secular self.
Zach, meanwhile, was a pretzeled Jew who agonized over what he owed to his ancestors, a guilt-ridden Jew who went to shul on the High Holidays because he was afraid not to, a lefty Jew, a wannabe-a-better Jew, though to what end, he wasn’t sure. There were so many stripes along the spectrum. He wasn’t a Socialist, unionist Jew like his father, who equated economic exploitation with original sin, or a Survivalist Jew like his mother, for whom the purpose of ritual was to honor the dead. He wasn’t a True Believer like Izzy the furrier, the lontzman who lost his entire family in the death camps yet never faulted God. Or a schnapps-and-honeycake Jew like the rest of the lontzmen, who were bonded to the Jewish people by steam, sweat, and stories. At the moment, sitting across from his friend, Zach Levy was a neurotic, guilty, utterly confused Jew.
“For argument’s sake,” Herb continued, “let’s say you fall in love with a girl who has sexy calf muscles and a high fertility score but also happens to take Jewish law literally. Say her name is Hannah Horowitz and she doesn’t want you to use electricity from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. No TV. No breaking news. No championship games. I’m talking NIT, NCAA, Stanley Cup, World Series, for the rest of your married life!” Herb flashed his confident courtroom smile. “Would that not constitute a prima facie case of push comes to shove? Can you truthfully testify that you would skip even one American League playoff for Hannah Horowitz?”
This is how I talk, Zach thought; this must be how lawyers sound to normal people. “I’d get a Shabbos goy to turn on the set,” he said. “Jewish law doesn’t prohibit watching, only turning things on or off.”
“And what would the divine Hannah be doing in the meantime, reciting Psalms?”
Zach shook his head ruefully. He knew he would balk if anyone demanded he not turn on lights, answer the phone, watch TV, drive, ride, carry things, or handle money for twenty-five hours every week. He knew that some Orthodox Jews tear off squares of toilet paper in advance rather than perform that “work” on the Sabbath; no way would he do that. Nor would he give up a gold medal Olympic performance if Carl Lewis or Florence Griffith Joyner were running in a Friday night meet, or Greg Louganis was in a diving event on a Saturday afternoon. Zach finished the last of his shrimp and signaled the waiter for another round of beer.
“There’s got to be a middle ground here, Herbie. I want to live in a Jewish home, not a Boro Park yeshiva.”
“You keep saying Jewish home. What does that even mean?”
Zach studied his leftover shrimp tails, bright pink against the black enameled tray, one of many details that made the restaurant unmistakably Japanese. Others were the cool black slate under Herb’s sushi, the fingerlings of fish on pillows of rice, the rosebud of pickled ginger nestled beside a pinch of green wasabi. Ditto for the translucent screens, the wait staff padding about in plain gray tunics and split-toe slippers, the bonsai trees and smooth stones artfully placed on a bed of combed white sand, the softly trickling fountain—each element contributing to the serene, Asian aesthetic.
The Jewish aesthetic, at least to Zach, included Shabbos candlesticks, a kiddush cup, a Hanukkah menorah, and maybe a spicebox on the sideboard, a pot of matzoh ball soup on the stove, a tallis folded into its velvet sleeve, a blue and white tzedakah box, exposed or concealed. Beyond those items, he couldn’t quite capture how the ambience of a Jewish home registers on all five senses but he knew it added up to a sixth: the sense of belonging.
“It’s hard to defi
ne,” he said. “Kind of like what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity.”
Herb produced the relevant quote: “‘I know it when I see it.’”
“Right,” Zach replied. “When I see a mezuzah on a doorpost, I know Jews live there and if I were on the run, they’d take me in. Except a Jewish home isn’t a secret. We advertise it. We put our Hanukkah menorah in the window where everyone can see it. We build our sukkah in the front yard. We may as well shout, ‘Over here! The house with the thingy on the doorpost!’ The one where, for several days every autumn, the family eats outside sitting in a weird little booth with a roof that’s open to the sky. It might as well have a ten-foot sign: ‘Jews live here!’”
Herb laughed. “And inside the house?”
“Inside, we’re sitting around a table, arguing. Not in my apartment, of course; I told you I lived in a quiet zone, but in everyone else’s. On the table might be a bottle of seltzer, maybe a flickering yahrzeit memorial candle, a book with the place marked by an old zipper, a glass of hot tea with a spoonful of jam melting in it. The room would be rocking with laughter, Jews mocking their misery, telling jokes. In a Jewish home, when someone says, ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this,’ everyone pipes down and listens.”
Zach was remembering the house on Long Island where Bonnie grew up, the long, leisurely dinners with her parents and relatives, who often would eat a big meal then stay at the table, cracking nuts, cracking wise, or venting about an editorial, sermon, or book they disagreed with. He remembered the night when Bonnie’s Uncle Sid extolled Howard Fast, her Aunt Pearl decimated Ayn Rand, and her grandfather teed off against Judge Irving Kaufman who presided over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial and to everyone’s horror imposed the death sentence on them. Bonnie’s family table was where Zach learned to get a word in edgewise.
“In a Jewish home, a joke trumps everything,” he said.
“Great! Tell me a good one,” Herb commanded.
“Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this: Hymie meets his friend Moe walking down the street. ‘How ya doin’ Moe?’ he asks. ‘In a word? Fine,’ says Moe. ‘I’m in no rush,’ says Hymie, ‘Take two words.’ ‘In two words?’ says Moe. ‘Not fine.’”
The gag was older than Jack Benny but to Zach it embodied the condition of the Jewish people—fine and not fine, both. Fine was Bonnie’s family accepting him as if he were a newly discovered cousin. Not fine was losing them when he lost her.
Herb said, “Okay. So far we’ve got mezuzah, family arguments, and jokes. That’s your Jewish-home fantasy?”
“That and Jewish food—a little kasha varnishkes, a plateful of brisket or flanken, some gribenes crackling in a fry pan; to me Jewish food smells better than Chanel No. 5.”
Herb shook his head. “Not in my house. In my house we knew the ham was done when the smoke alarm went off.”
Zach suggested they order a carafe of hot sake. “Books!” he said, still in definition mode. “In a Jewish home the shelves are groaning with books.”
“Now that rings a bell,” Herb said. “You’ve seen my folks’ library.”
“It’s incredible. It looks like the French Bibliothèque. I remember a huge King James Bible on a beautiful wooden stand, right?”
“Right. That Bible contains handwritten records of all the births and deaths in our family over the last hundred and thirty years.”
“You should have your DNA tested, Herbie; you could be a Cabott or a Lodge.” Zach mimed a dandy with a monocle, then poured the hot sake. “I wasn’t even allowed to read the New Testament. For us, the Bible is the Old and only.”
They ordered green tea ice cream and marveled when the waiter delivered two tiny scoops.
“Small portions are definitely not Jewish,” Zach commented.
The penurious dessert reminded Herb of home. “Thursday was the cook’s day off so we made do with tuna or Spam. Doug and Miri aren’t into food.”
The restaurant served them complimentary plum wine in small metallic goblets that reminded Zach of the kiddush cup his parents gave him for his bar mitzvah. “It’s sterling silver, with my name engraved in Hebrew and English,” he recalled, as if in midthought. “They must have saved up for months to buy it. I haven’t seen it since Bonnie left me.”
Herb tried to lighten the moment. “For my bar mitzvah, my mother’s mother gave me a silver seder plate that belonged to her grandparents, but I’ll be damned if I know what goes into those little wells. Miri and Doug have a cabinet full of fancy Judaica they never use; it just gets handed down, from generation to generation.”
Zach leaned back and stretched; the plum wine almost could pass for Passover wine. “At least you don’t feel guilty about not knowing. I feel guilty about everything—things I don’t know, things I don’t do, the women I’m not dating, the kids I’m not having, the kiddush cup tarnishing in the cabinet.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find someone to shine it for you.”
“I’m not looking for a maid, Herbie, I’m looking for a mate. A woman to love, honor, and . . .”
“. . . impregnate. And I’m going to help you locate her!” Herb gave his friend’s shoulder a light jab. “Only she won’t hold a candle to Cybill Shepherd.”
They went their separate ways, Zach Levy to his Soho loft where he had every intention of unearthing his kiddush cup, Herb Black to catch a late train to Boston to spend the weekend with his parents in the big house where he grew up, never doubting that he was the right kind of Jew.
CHAPTER 7
TAKING SIDES
SOME COUPLES MEET CUTE: HE FINDS HER WALLET, SHE picks up his mail by mistake, her beagle mounts his schnauzer. Zach Levy met Cleo Scott at the founding conference of the Black-Jewish Coalition of New York.
Zach was aware going into it that tensions between the two communities had reached a boiling point. Jesse Jackson had recently called New York City “Hymietown” and, in response, a group called “Jews Against Jackson” had run a full-page ad in the Times describing the black candidate for president as “a national disaster,” and excoriating him for once saying he was “tired of hearing about the Holocaust,” for hugging Arafat and Gaddafi, and for refusing to repudiate Louis Farrakhan. Alarmed by these provocations, two prominent New York clergymen, Rabbi Sheldon Kahn and Reverend Jeremiah Birmingham, convened fifty community leaders—half of them black, half of them Jewish—to “foster respectful dialogue and intergroup harmony.”
The first meeting of the nascent coalition was held on Sunday afternoon, April 15, 1984, in a large lecture hall at the New School in Greenwich Village. The sign-up sheet contained so many boldface names from politics, law, business, and the arts—including “Bacall, Lauren” and “Belafonte, Harry”—that “Levy, Zach” felt like an interloper. Though his name tag, which said, “ACLU Attorney/Chair, Families of Holocaust Survivors,” clearly entitled him to be there, Zach’s reasons for accepting the clergymen’s invitation were personal. A national poll that revealed a sharp increase in anti-Semitism among educated African Americans had aroused in him his mother’s fears and his father’s warning—“Once the intellectuals turn against you, the masses will follow.” He’d been recently rattled by the vitriolic ravings spewed by callers to a black talk show that he’d tuned in to by accident. Unnerving on a daily basis were the Jew-hating lies barked by proselytes of the Nation of Islam on a street corner Zach passed on his way to work. A clean-shaven black man wearing a white shirt and dark suit ranted incessantly about “the Jewish conspiracy” while his bearded partner, in a kente cloth robe and white crocheted cap, hawked incense, fragrance oils, and pamphlets promulgating anti-Semitic canards. The lawyer in Zach would defend their right to speak freely but the child within him hyperventilated when he heard the incendiary screed, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, described as if it were the Magna Carta.
Each participant who arrived at the New School received a packet of background materials including a timeline of key events in black-Jewish relations startin
g with the earliest days of the civil rights movement. “Ocean Hill Brownsville, 1968,” was the first event labeled a “clash of interests.” Zach remembered vividly what happened that year. He was a senior in DeWitt Clinton High School when the clash between black parents and white teachers over community control of the schools sparked a two-month teacher strike and riots in the streets throughout the city. Mostly, he remembered the Ocean Hill Brownsville brouhaha because his parents, who raised their voices about once a decade, had a big fight about it. Rivka believed that parents were entitled to take control of a school system that had failed their kids while Nathan insisted that the teachers, whom he called “the workers,” had the right to defend their jobs. The quarrel ended when Nathan stormed out, slamming the front door so hard that a framed picture of David Ben-Gurion shaking hands with John F. Kennedy popped off the wall and crashed to the floor, shattering the glass. It was the loudest memory of Zach’s childhood.
Another item on the timeline, “Andy Young Affair, 1979,” reminded Zach of the heated arguments that erupted among his friends five years before. The African Americans had uniformly blamed Jewish pressure for the resignation of the young black US Ambassador to the UN, while most of the Jews had supported Carter’s contention that, by talking to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Andrew Young had violated American law and thus could no longer represent the nation.
About the recent “Hymietown incident, 1984,” the timeline noted, “Jackson does not deny using word but calls it ‘innocuous street slang.’”
Now, as Zach watched blacks and Jews file into the lecture hall, he was struck not by gradations of their skin color but by their wildly varied hairdos—there were buzz cuts, Beatle bangs, shaved pates, spikes, dreadlocks, Afros, and pony tails on the men; and on the women, straight hair, ironed hair, ballet buns, ringlets, corn-rows, and sprayed bouffants. People’s clothing, too, ran the gamut, everything from church finery to tribal dress, business suits to sweat pants.
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