Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Stephanie, when she came up for her recitation of the V’ahafta, was nervous, and the first few lines were hardly audible. Carla tried to gesture for her to raise her voice, but Stephanie would not look in her direction. Fortunately the young rabbi now showed his mettle. He got up and whispered magisterially in Stephanie’s ear to take it up a notch, which she did to surprisingly good effect. Her voice was clear and sweet, and as the congregation grew quiet listening to her, she gained in confidence and sang even better.

  Her Torah and haftorah portions were subsequently performed beautifully.

  “The voice of an angel,” whispered one of the cousins from East Brunswick with typical overstatement.

  But it was true that Stephanie sang her portions very well and that even her friends stayed put rather than recess to the bathroom as they normally would at this juncture in the service. When she was done, there was a murmur of admiration. A child with a decent voice and some feel for the melodies had the ability to create a profound response to these age-old tunes. Nor was it Stephanie’s rendition alone that the congregation was responding to. Her performance brought to consciousness the rich cultural legacy obscured by the routine and bric-a-brac of daily life. Indeed, even where kids mangled the melodies and mispronounced the Hebrew, some of that cultural meaning always came through, lifting the event, if only briefly, into the realm of the sacred. A sense of wonder for the fact of the child turning into the adult, for the idea of family reaching back generations, for the religion that had endured despite persecution and hardship, for the sense of shared community—all this was present in those ancient melodies.

  “And now,” said the young senior rabbi, “the bat mitzvah, as is customary, will offer her own interpretation of her Torah portion. For those not familiar with our vocabulary,” he added sagely, “we use the term ‘bar or bat mitzvah’ to refer to our young initiates as well as to the ceremony in which they are engaged.” (This explanation was later deemed by the board to be a nice touch.)

  The rabbi now nodded to Stephanie, who took out a folded sheaf of paper from her imitation Kate Spade bag and wobbled to the lectern in her Nine West heels.

  She placed the speech on the lectern and then took a sip from the glass of water that the rabbi had placed there for her.

  Carla held her breath.

  “My Torah portion deals with Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream,” Stephanie began in the familiar adolescent singsong. “In my portion, Joseph is called out of prison by the Pharaoh who has heard that Joseph has the power to interpret dreams. He, the Pharaoh, tells him, Joseph, his dream. He says he dreamed about seven fat kine and seven lean kine—kine meaning cattle”—she shot Mark a look—“and Joseph tells him that this means that there will be seven fertile years in Egypt followed by seven lean years. The Pharaoh then rewards Joseph for his interpretation by giving him an important position in his government. Joseph then goes on to take care of things for the country. He makes sure that the country puts enough grain away during the fertile years so that they won’t go hungry during the lean years.

  “My Torah portion is about interpretation. Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream as telling the future, and he turns out to be right. I think this portion can be understood to show the power of interpretation. When we read a play or a story, there isn’t a set meaning to it. We interpret it according to who we are and what we think. It’s not always a matter of its being true or false but of its making sense and helping us to see things that we didn’t see before. We can’t really tell the future and we can’t really understand the past—but we can find ways to interpret them that help us live our lives better.

  “I can relate this to my own life. Recently, my grandmother had some strange ideas. She thought she had once lived in Shakespeare’s time. I don’t know if she really did or not, but her feelings about what happened helped me and other people see that time in a new way and read Shakespeare’s poetry in a new way. It also helped us see my grandmother differently. Sometimes you see people only in the ways you are used to. So your mom is just your mom and your grandma is just your grandma. But there’s more to people than that, and when something weird happens, it can make you look at them differently. My grandma is still my grandma, but I also learned that she’s a very interesting person.

  “I think this is what happened with Joseph and Pharaoh. Pharaoh was used to seeing things a certain way. When Joseph came, he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream and gave a new perspective on how to deal with his country’s food supply. Maybe Joseph was lucky and it happened that there were seven fertile years and seven lean years. Or maybe it was only a way of saying that when there’s a fertile time it’s good to plan for when there’s a lean time—that would make the story more like a metaphor. But maybe it was just that Pharaoh’s life had gotten really boring and he needed a new perspective on things. Joseph came along and gave him that. He helped make Pharaoh’s life better and also more interesting.

  “The lesson that I get from this is that we should be open to new influences that can make us see things differently. Also, that interpretation is very important and we should all do more of it.

  “I want to thank everyone who has helped me with my bat mitzvah. This includes my mother and father, who are the best parents in the world, even though they sometimes get on my nerves [laughter], my Grandma Rose, my Grandpa Charles, and my Grandma Jessie, who are the best grandparents, my brother Jeffrey, who is annoying but is getting better [laughter], and the rabbi and the cantor who have been very patient in helping me learn my Torah and haftorah portions. I’d also like to thank my teacher Mr. Pearson for teaching me about interpretation.

  “I would like to give part of my bat mitzvah money to the American Heart Association. My Grandpa Milt died of heart disease and I know this is a good cause that will help many people.

  “I am very happy that my friends and family could come and celebrate with me today and that I have finally completed my bat mitzvah.”

  Everyone laughed, as was customary when the bar mitzvah child expressed relief that the ordeal was over.

  But Carla bowed her head and cried with joy. It had struck her forcefully that Stephanie had said something worth saying, and that, suddenly, things seemed clearer and simpler than they had ever been before. She thought of her father and Mr. O’Hare, men she had loved who had passed on. And she thought of her mother and Stephanie, both, despite the vast difference in their ages, embarking on something new. She thought of her heritage, reaching back, generation upon generation, and of herself, one link in that chain. She knew things would go wrong again. She would be disappointed and irritated, stressed and unhappy. But right now she was experiencing life at its best, and she was grateful. “Dayenu,” she thought to herself in the words of the Passover song. This moment, which would soon pass into history, was enough.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  After the SHORT HAVDALAH PRAYER, IN WHICH THE LIGHTS in the synagogue were dimmed to dramatize the transition to evening, the service ended, with the children, as was customary, throwing candy at Stephanie. Rabbi Newman, who remembered being hit in the eye by a gumball at his own bar mitzvah, had ruled, among his first edicts, that bar mitzvah candy be of a consistency that would not cause bodily harm. A candy-vetting committee had been duly formed to assure this. As a result, all the candy that was thrown at Stephanie was of the soft Chuckles variety.

  Everyone recessed to the cocktail area directly outside the sanctuary. The synagogue had been built with a large, cavernous space that could be partitioned for various occasions. On High Holy Days, when the place was packed, all the partitions were opened and folding chairs were set up reaching to the back of the room. For bar mitzvahs and weddings, the space was partitioned into thirds. The front area, which included the bima and the built-in wooden pews, was where the ceremony took place. The second space, directly behind the site of the ceremony and relatively narrow, was used for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. The rest of the space was where the tables were set up
for the sit-down dinner.

  The idea was to funnel the congregants out of the ceremony, coop them up for an hour or so to gorge on a variety of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres until, schmoozed out and with the edge taken off their appetites, they would be allowed to spill into their seats at the designated tables in the remaining portion of the space. The whole process had been worked out at some antecedent time (possibly fifty years ago by a manager at Leonard’s of Great Neck) as the most efficient and psychologically effective way to handle things. No one was known to have deviated from it since.

  In the case of the Goodman bat mitzvah, Moishe had set up three hors d’oeuvres “stations” in the narrow cocktail space. As O’Hare and Pinsky had recommended, one was a mock-sushi bar, a favorite among the hipper guests; one a roast beef carving station, in which the carvers, wearing white chef hats and brandishing large knives, seemed to take an inordinate interest in the thirteen-year-old girls; and one a mashed-potato sundae bar in which, as O’Hare had surmised, the mashed potatoes were treated in the manner of ice cream with topping choices of gravy, faux cheese, mushrooms, and so on. This particular station had been the brainstorm of a caterer in Bayonne, New Jersey, some ten years ago, and the general consensus in the industry was that, if catering concepts were so recognized, he would be the recipient of a Nobel Prize.

  All the stations were a big hit, a credit to Mr. O’Hare’s excellent judgment. Pinsky had favored a station featuring caviar rather than roast beef, but O’Hare had argued that beef was important to the men and boys and only goddamn snobs like Pinsky wanted fish eggs. He was right.

  In the center of the room was a vast table of artfully arranged cru-dités, a concession to the anorexic women, always well-represented at bar mitzvahs. In the midst of it all, waitresses carried trays with the various hot and cold hors d’oeuvres: phyllo pastries with spinach, potato knishes, stuffed mushrooms, and so forth. There was also, of course, an open bar, around which the Brooklyn Katzes had congregated.

  The general impression was of a cornucopia of culinary delights—the kind of thing that non-Jews, unaccustomed to what was possible in the way of hors d’oeuvres, tended to find mind-boggling. Indeed, it was a general rule of thumb that it was best not to dwell on the prospect of the meal to follow, since this was liable to inhibit the pleasure of gorging unrestrainedly on what was at hand. Besides, everyone knew that however good the bar mitzvah dinner, it would never hold a candle to the hors d’oeuvres.

  As the congregation retired to the cocktail area, much congratulation ensued. Uncle Sid made a point of kissing all the women.

  Mark’s parents, Charles and Rose, quickly commandeered several of the small cocktail tables in order to hold court for their Florida friends. After some preliminary mazel tovs, they all settled down to gossiping about those who hadn’t come.

  Dr. Samuels and his wife sashayed through the throng, pressing the flesh. At any gathering in the Cherry Hill area, there were always sure to be a lion’s share of Samuels’s patients present, giving him the status of a foreign dignitary at a state dinner. Although the event was not, strictly speaking, about him, he always felt he could take a certain credit for its success. Carla had briefly pigeon-holed him after the ceremony to report triumphantly that Jessie was now back to normal—the whole Shakespeare mishegoss dissipated.

  “I told you,” said Samuels, waving a baby lamb chop for emphasis, “she just needed to find another outlet.” He looked across the room to where Jessie had her head close to Saul Millman’s as they surveyed the phenomenon of the mashed-potato sundae bar. “And love is certainly the best outlet. Still, it’s a shame in a way,” he added, taking a bite from the lamb chop and ruminating on this for a second. “That was one gold-plated fantasy she cooked up about being Shakespeare’s girlfriend. Can’t say I won’t miss it.”

  “It certainly made life more interesting for a while,” said Carla doubtfully. Whatever Margot thought, Carla was more than relieved to have her mother give up her fantasy life for something more down to earth.

  “And your daughter put one hell of a spin on it in her D’var Torah,” said Samuels.

  “The speech was very profound,” interjected Sylvia Samuels. “It reminded me of the philosophical ideas of Jacques Derrida.” Sylvia was known to be cutting-edge not only in art but in everything intellectual—a compensation, presumably, for her culinary incapacity.

  Carla thanked them both. Secretly, she did think Stephanie’s speech was profound and that it had helped explain her mother’s foray into irrationality more fully than anything anyone else had said.

  During the hors d’oeuvres, Margot had been busy with relatives—or at least pretended to be busy with them, making a concerted effort to avoid Hal.

  He, meanwhile, had been surprised, immediately after the ceremony, to have Anish take him aside to discuss his revised opinion of Ulysses: “An astonishing feat of a book; Shakespearean in ambition!” Anish exclaimed, shaking Hal’s hand as if congratulating him for having stood by Joyce. “I stand corrected in my judgment.”

  Before they could discuss this revisionary perspective further, however, Hal was spirited away by Jessie to meet her relatives. Jessie had not lost her feeling for Hal, though she had forgotten most of the details that precipitated it. He was now, quite simply, her granddaughter’s English teacher, for whom she felt an intense maternal affection. He was duly introduced to the sedate Westchester Lubenthals and the rowdier Brooklyn Katzes. Hal found himself quite at home with the latter, who bore a striking resemblance to his mother’s side of the family (in which lurked the alleged Jewish blood). Although the Dellons (a name of dubious ethnic provenance if there ever was one) hailed from northeast Philadelphia and the Katzes from Brooklyn, the general tenor of their talk, which revolved around the plight of labor unions and the great buys to be had at BJ’s, was the same.

  Every once in a while, Hal’s eyes darted about the room, settled on Margot, and darted away again. He had a very nervous, excited feeling that he tried to subdue but that kept returning, despite his best efforts.

  Perhaps the most eccentric interaction during the cocktail hour was between Felicity Gardencourt and Jill Rosenberg. Seeing Felicity standing alone near the mock-sushi station, Jill immediately descended to rescue her—an operation that was akin to saying that a raptor rescues a mouse when it swoops down upon it. Jill had discerned in Felicity’s dowdy, uptight appearance an implicit cry for help. After a brief interrogation into Felicity’s background (the idea that she was a scholar of Renaissance history interested her about as much as if she were a window washer), Jill determined to introduce her to a distant cousin on Long Island who, she said, also did something with books (though whether he wrote them, sold them, or took bets in them was not clear). She would first, of course, have to do a complete makeover on Felicity, who seemed surprisingly accommodating to the idea. Such was Jill’s Svengali-like effect on certain people; others, of course, fled her like the plague.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Finally, Moishe’s EMISSARIES MADE THE ANNOUNCEMENT that dinner would now be served. The partition was removed with all the flourish that a five-hundred-pound folding wall allows, and the guests, suitably weary from trying to make sure that they had grabbed a sampling of hors d’oeuvres from the trays before the miniskirted waitresses had passed on to the other side of the room, stumbled to their designated tables.

  Carla had worked very hard to arrange the tables so that like-minded people would be seated together. In some cases, this posed definite strategic problems. The Brooklyn Katzes, for example, could not be seated with previous spouses for fear of a scene. At one family member’s bar mitzvah a few years back this had involved the throwing of a baked potato by Murray Katz’s ex after she referred to his new wife as “that chippie.”

  “A little of the chippie wouldn’t have done you any harm,” Murray had said, after which he turned to the table as a whole and asked: “Twenty years with this battle-ax and who wouldn’t want a chippie?” At whic
h point, the potato had been thrown.

  Other seating arrangements were easier. There was a Florida table, a doctor’s table, a nurse’s table, a table of Stephanie’s former baby-sitters, a table of Mark and Carla’s college friends, and a table of their present friends, presided over by Jill Rosenberg, where Mr. Pinsky and Susie Wilson were also seated, under the assumption that Jill, for whom everyone was viewed as an extension of herself, would assimilate them into the general tenor of the company.

  The “Shakespeare table,” as Carla called it, was smaller than the others and consisted of Hal, Anish, and Felicity. Dr. Samuels and Sylvia were also placed here, as Carla thought that they would appreciate the intellectual banter. Indeed, Sylvia proved an adept literary critic and was soon pontificating on Joyce’s “modernist aesthetic.”

  A last-minute addition to this table was Carla’s cousin, Natalie Katz, whom they hadn’t expected to attend and who didn’t seem to belong with the rest of the Katz clan (“a stray Katz,” as Mark put it). Natalie Katz was an assistant professor of women’s studies at Montclair State College, and though one might have expected putting her at the table with Anish to cause problems, the results turned out to be surprising. As Natalie pontificated on the necessity of purging all “DWEMS” from the literary canon (DWEMS, as Sylvia explained to her husband, referred to Dead White European Males, whom academic feminists felt ought to be jettisoned from the college curriculum so that society could be free of the legacy of patriarchal oppression), Anish made no strong effort to oppose her. He was, quite simply, enthralled, whether by Natalie’s bushy locks, flashing dark eyes, or substantial cleavage, it was hard to say. “Not Shakespeare,” he finally pleaded, after listening to her argument for some time in a state of bedazzlement: “Leave us Shakespeare, at least. Shakespeare is really a feminist. I can prove it.”