by Zev Chafets
MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE
A Bantam Book / October 1988
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to
reprint lyrics from “We Reserve the Right to Refuse
Services to You” by Kinky Friedman. Copyright ©
1973 by Ensign Music Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1988 by Ze’ev Chafets.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chafets, Ze’ev.
Members of the tribe.
1. Jews—United States—Social life and customs,
2. Jews—United States—Politics and government,
3. Judaism—United States, 4. Jews—United States—
Identity, 5. United States—Ethnic relations.
I. Title.
E184.J5C43 1988 305.8′924’073 88-47647
eISBN: 978-0-307-79920-3
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: The Secrets of the Jews
Chapter One: Macy B. and the Dixie Diaspora
Chapter Two: The Great Iowa Jew Hunt
Chapter Three: Succah in the Sky
Chapter Four: Jews with the Blues
Chapter Five: Hard Core
Chapter Six: Outside Looking In
Chapter Seven: ‘Overweight? Impossible!’
Chapter Eight: Life Cycles
Chapter Nine: The Promised Land
Glossary
Dedication
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
THE SECRETS
OF THE JEWS
I was fifteen years old when I first met Vernon and Mary Lou. One Friday night they simply turned up at our temple, sat down in the front row of the sanctuary, and joined in the Sabbath service. In our congregation, which had the social pretensions of a country club and the interlocking family connections of a Berber village, outsiders stood out; outsiders like Vernon and Mary Lou stood out a mile.
People like them usually came to Temple Beth Jacob to fix something, or as gaping guests at the annual Baptist-Jewish Brotherhood Week service. That first Friday night, Vernon wore a black Robert Hall Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, a lurid floral tie that choked his throat and turned his moonpie face purple, brown shoes, and, inevitably, white socks. His wife was dressed in the Bess Truman mode, with accessories by the Beverly Hillbillies. They couldn’t have been more conspicuous if they had come dressed in white sheets and carrying a flaming cross.
After services that first time, Vernon and Mary Lou wandered around the social hall, self-consciously speared a few cookies off the hospitality table, and then left. But they came back the following Friday night, and every one thereafter. They always sat in the front row, sang the hymns with fervor, and joined the responsive reading in a modified Tennessee holler. After services they sought out fellow worshipers, he pumping hands (“Hey there, Brother Horowitz, how you doin’ this Shabbes?”), she calling the Hadassah ladies “hon.” After a month or so the entire congregation knew that Vernon and Mary Lou had decided to become Jews.
The temple was split over the issue. Its president, board of directors, and general membership were adamantly opposed to the conversion of Vernon and Mary Lou, while the pro-conversion camp consisted of me and my friend Ackerman. We delighted in the consternation of the establishment and adopted the couple as heroes. One of our favorite pastimes was putting them in imaginary situations. Vernon on Jewish history: “Whoo-ee, them Maccabees shore did whomp the shit out of ole Antiochus!” On religion: “Rabbi, what ain’t kosher, the ham or the eggs?” On the family: “Y’all know my boy, Morris Bob? We’re havin’ his bar mitzvah at the Indy 500.” And so on.
Under pressure from the congregation, the rabbi tried to discourage the prospective converts, but they were determined to become Jews. For months they attended temple activities with a fanatical ubiquity. And then one day, mysteriously, they disappeared.
Ackerman and I speculated on their whereabouts. “Boys, we decided to hook up with them Chasidics. They got that ole-time Yiddishkeit.” We laughed at the picture of Vernon in a strimel and blue suede shoes, Mary Lou warning customers at the truck stop not to mix up the milk and meat dishes. We laughed, but in truth we missed them.
Then one day Ackerman spotted Vernon downtown, coming out of the Kresge’s on Saginaw Street. “Hey Vernon, you old Yid, where you been hiding?” he shouted. Vernon turned and regarded him sadly.
“Well, tell you the truth, me and the missus decided to quit.”
“What do you mean quit?” asked Ackerman. “I thought you liked it at the temple.”
A look of grievance passed over Vernon’s round face. “We quit because nobody would tell us the secret,” he said.
“What secret?” Ackerman demanded, sensing something great.
“Come on, now, you know what I’m talkin’ about. The secret. The secret of how you all get so rich.”
I laughed when Ackerman told me the story, but a part of me understood what Vernon meant. I knew from my own family that not all Jews were rich by any means; but I also suspected that there was some sort of Jewish secret, something that nobody had let me in on. It was a suspicion I had harbored for a very long time.
I was raised to regard myself as an American who happened to be Jewish. Judaism, as taught to me at Sunday school and at home, was simply another American religion, theologically boring and socially respectable. My parents encouraged me to invite Christian friends to our Reform temple, and to attend their church services in return. It was a nothing-up-our-sleeve approach, open and midwestern. We were like Christians who didn’t believe in Jesus, and what was the big deal about that?
And yet, I had the feeling there were undercurrents I didn’t understand; something a little mysterious about being a Jew.
Somehow this feeling was connected with Passover. Every year we would leave our non-Jewish neighborhood in Pontiac, Michigan, and drive to my father’s parents’ home in Detroit, half an hour away. And there, at the ritual Passover Seder, I witnessed a peculiar transformation. My uncles, greengrocers and petty merchants, reclined on pillows and chanted strange Hebrew incantations. They proclaimed that they had once stood at Mount Sinai with Moses, flung open the doors of the small apartment to greet Elijah the prophet, flicked drops of sweet red wine on their plates to commemorate the plagues in Egypt, and implored God to pour His wrath on their enemies. In my grandparents’ living room I was suddenly no longer an American boy. I was not even in America. By some magic I had been transported to the table of fierce desert strangers.
It was always a shock when the Seder ended and we drove home. Suddenly I was back in the USA, listening to rock ’n’ roll on WXYZ as my father and mother lapsed back into their American personae. We whizzed by crowds at the Dairy Queen and the A&W, and I thought: They don’t know where I’ve been tonight, they don’t know who I really am. The deception thrilled me, and puzzled me. I wasn’t sure who I really was myself.
Once on Chanukah a fr
iend of mine named Jimmy came over to play. As far as I knew his family was originally from Mexico, although his parents spoke American English. Our families didn’t socialize but they knew one another, and when Jimmy’s father came to pick him up, my parents invited him in for a drink in the small-town midwestern way.
Jimmy and I went on playing, uninterested in the adult conversation going on a few feet away in the living room. Then, suddenly, I heard a sob and turned to see Jimmy’s dad with his eyes full of tears. My father put an arm around his shoulder and led him into the den. A few minutes later, he emerged dry-eyed and took Jimmy home.
“Why was Jimmy’s father crying?” I asked. “Is something the matter?”
My father explained that Jimmy’s father had choked up when he saw the candles burning in our Chanukah menorah. “The man is a Jew,” said my father with barely controlled emotion. “He remembered his grandmother lighting candles, but she never told him why.”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had told me that Willie Mays wore a yarmulke under his batting helmet. “He’s not Jewish, he’s a Catholic,” I said with certainty.
My father explained that Jimmy’s family had once been Jewish in Spain, but long ago they had been forced to convert to Christianity. “It happened five hundred years ago,” my father said in an awestruck tone that reminded me of Passover. “His family has been Christian for five hundred years, but he still has a Jewish heart.” How do you get a Jewish heart? I wondered; and how do you get rid of one? The incident with Jimmy’s father became another part of the Jewish mystery.
My father’s family was from Europe, but I could never figure out exactly where. Whenever I asked my grandmother, she would frown and say, “the old country,” without specifying which old country she meant. When I got a little older I once brought her a map of Europe and asked her to point out the place where she had grown up. She peered at the map for a moment and gestured vaguely in the direction of Russia. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It isn’t there anymore. Hitler wiped it out. Anyway, America is better.”
My mother’s family, on the other hand, was American. She was born in Milwaukee, and her mother—my grandmother—was born in Sterling, Illinois. But although she had been a suffragette and knew nothing about the “old country,” my American grandmother had her own thing—Jewish cartography.
Pontiac never had enough Jews for a Jewish neighborhood, but from the time I was a small boy I was aware that it had a special Jewish geography, and my grandmother was its da Gama. She would point out an unremarkable brick home on a leafy street and confide, “That’s a Jewish house.” Downtown she would pause near a certain store and say, “This is a Jewish business.” Occasionally, when we passed a parking lot, she would point out a Chevrolet or Plymouth and say, “There’s a Jewish car.” None of these cars, shops, or houses impressed me as being especially Jewish, but I was prepared to take her word for it.
At first I thought that mastering Pontiac’s Jewish geography was some sort of Sunday school lesson, like memorizing the Hebrew alphabet or the kings of Judea. But as I grew older, I realized that my grandmother mapped out the town reflexively, more for her benefit than mine. Jewish houses, stores, and offices were safe havens, places she could count on if, for example, she needed to use a bathroom, or was being chased through the streets by a sex-crazed cossack rapist.
There were very few Jewish children in my school, and only one other in my class, a girl named Beverly. Like me, she had only the slightest Jewish education. All we knew in Hebrew were a few scattered prayers, but occasionally we would show off our erudition by turning them into conversation. “Baruch atah adonai (Blessed art thou, O Lord),” I would say casually, and she would reply, “Eloheinu melech ha’olam (Our God, king of the world),” just as coolly. “What are you talking about?” the other kids would ask, and one day Jesse Stephen, the son of a black preacher, came up with the answer. “They speakin’ the secret language of the Jews,” he informed the class.
It was Jesse who put me into a special racial category. One day, during a break from a half-court basketball game, he turned to me and, imitating his father’s delivery, intoned, “Noah had three sons—Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Now Ham, he was the black boy. Japheth was the Gentile boy. And Shem, now he was the Jewish boy, and he was red. That’s what you are, baby—you red.”
And there was another mystery—my relationship to other Jews. Once, on a family trip to northern Michigan, we stopped at a country inn for lunch. The restaurant was crowded and we stood in line waiting for a table. While we waited, my father idly ran his fingers over the keyboard of an upright piano that stood near the door. “Da da da da DA da, da da da da DA,” he played, picking out the first notes of “Ha-Tikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.
We were halfway through lunch in the bustling dining room when another patron stopped in front of the piano. “Da da da DA da, da da da da dum,” he completed my father’s tune and, without turning to look at us, walked out the door. I felt like I was in the underground.
So there I was. I had a color I couldn’t see, a secret language I couldn’t speak. I had uncles who hurled ancient curses across the centuries and then settled back to watch the Stanley Cup finals on television, aunts who worshiped America and spit superstitiously every time they passed a Christian cemetery. I had an invisible geography and a family that came to the United States out of thin air. No one wanted to explain anything, and yet everyone seemed proud when I figured something out by myself.
It wasn’t until I came to Israel at the age of twenty that things began to fall into place. Gradually my American self became intensely curious about these small mysteries. The Jewish aspect of my life was trivial and the Judaism I knew in Pontiac seemed to be a relatively innocuous kind of modern religion. And yet, I knew that for two thousand years my ancestors had been persecuted and tortured, even murdered, for practicing it. What, I wondered, did Temple Beth Jacob of Pontiac, Michigan have in common with Auschwitz? How was I, an American kid more or less like my non-Jewish classmates, related to the mythological figures of the Bible? What was really Jewish? What was really Jewish about me?
These questions eventually led me to Israel, where I went to spend my junior year of college. And it was there, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that things began to make sense. My first glimpse of the country was like emerging from Plato’s cave. Jewishness, an elusive shadow in Pontiac, became a clear, tangible reality. It was in Jerusalem that I found what my ancestors had once had but failed to pass along—the attitudes and skills, spirit and substance of a distinctive, self-contained Jewish civilization.
I stayed in Israel, and gradually I came to understand and adopt its way of looking at Jewishness. Although most Israelis are not Orthodox, people tend to see Jewish life in traditional terms. Holidays are celebrated when and how they always have been; and synagogues look and feel pretty much the way they have for generations. Children are taught what Jewish children need to know—Hebrew, the Bible, and Jewish literature, history, and customs—as a matter of course. The concept of Jewish people-hood is implicit in Israel’s attitudes and explicit in its laws and policies. Even the rebellion against religion is carried out in a Jewish language and intellectual tradition. Israel’s daily life and underlying assumptions would be understandable, if outrageous and offensive, to any eighteenth-century rabbi.
As I came to understand Jewish reality through the prism of Israeli life, and to acquire the skills necessary to participate in it, a strange thing happened; perversely, I became curious about American Judaism. I left the United States when I was a college student, and although I had been back for sporadic visits, I had never lived there as an adult. I began to wonder what it was really like to be a Jew in America.
I heard differing and, to me, confusing reports about the state of Jewish life in the United States. Some experts argued that Jews were disappearing; others claimed that things had never been better. I read articles proclaiming America a Jewish wasteland;
other articles called it a center of Jewish culture. Friends told me that anti-Semitism was dead; other friends spoke fearfully about Louis Farrakhan or the radical right. It was hard to know who or what to believe.
On another level, I was fascinated by the lives of individual Jews in America. I wondered if they were confounded, as I had been, by a sense of their own mysteriousness. I was curious about how they lived, how they were different from other Americans—and other Jews. My interest was partly the product of Zionist concern about the Jewish future; but it was at least as much a personal curiosity about what my own life might have been if I had stayed at home.
In the fall of 1986, I decided to take a trip through Jewish America. I had no itinerary and no special agenda. I wanted to meet as many Jews as possible, talk to them, and see their lives up close. I had no intention of writing an “objective” study, or a comprehensive report. I didn’t look for representative samples or worry about giving every aspect of the community its proper weight. I avoided experts, spokespersons, and superstars. I wanted to see and experience things for myself.
For almost six months I traveled randomly, visiting more than thirty states. I was fascinated by the variety and complexity of American Jewish life, and the unpredictable ways it affects individuals.
In many places I had a contact—a friend, a local journalist, or someone active in the Jewish community. In others, I simply picked up the phone or walked in and introduced myself. It didn’t matter. Jews understand books, Americans are open and friendly, and the combination made it possible to go places and see things I hadn’t expected or imagined.
Some of the customs I encountered during my trip seemed strange, even exotic; there is a do-it-yourself flavor to much of American Judaism that can be disconcerting. And many of the people I met along the way were far from the stereotypical Jews I had expected to find. But no matter where I was—in a Jewish farm town in New England or a black synagogue in Queens, in a gay temple in San Francisco or among the Jews of the Louisiana bayou—I always felt at home. I came to the United States feeling like an Israeli; I left reminded that I am also, as a friend in Detroit put it, an MOT—a Member of the Tribe.
