Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  But then, the residents of Century Village are not traditional Jews; they are the first generation of American Old Jews, people like Laura and Jake.

  Laura is a crisp, rosy-cheeked woman of about sixty-five who left Brooklyn after forty years as a union clerk. Jake, a few years older, came down to Florida after selling his small clothing shop in Queens. A ferret-faced chain smoker, he has the teasing patter of a neighborhood retailer. Neither one lives within a thousand miles of their children.

  “I came down here not just for the sunshine,” Jake said. “I came down for a new life, a brand new start. Sure it’s hard at first, but you meet friends, you forget about the street you lived on. As far as kids are concerned, it depends. Lemme tell you, a lot of people here created monsters. Plenty of them don’t even come down for a visit.”

  Laura disagreed. She is a placid woman, and she discussed the issue with the detachment of a pop psychologist on Donahue. “It’s true to some extent that we created takers. We never taught our children to give, but that’s our fault, not theirs. Don’t forget,” she said, turning to Jake, “our generation was raised the same way. We were brought up on doing our own thing, only they didn’t call it that in the old days. Our parents came from Europe and they gave us what they didn’t have. They taught us to take care of ourselves first. And that’s the way I still feel today. You have your own life. I don’t want to live near my kids. I brought them up to feel the same way I do. I love ’em, and I love those grandchildren, but I’ll tell you, I don’t want them calling me every time the baby has a stomachache.”

  It was a perspective I had never considered. The people at Century Village are not Portnoy’s mother but Portnoy himself—selfish, individualistic, pleasure-oriented. Their accents are Flatbush or Jersey City, not Minsk or Vilna. Their furniture isn’t covered with plastic slip covers. Their kitchens have only one set of dishes (and that rarely used; they prefer to eat the half-price early bird special at the nearby mall). There are no kugel bakers, minyon makers, or cheek pinchers here—just guys and gals having a blast at summer camp.

  “These people are in such good shape that you can’t even tell how old they are,” said Angela Varone, the clubhouse director. But they can easily tell how old you are, and visitors under fifty feel a certain amount of hostility. “They tend to be a little defensive with outsiders, especially younger people,” Angela explained. “A lot of people treat the elderly like they were retarded or something. But their attitude here is, ‘Hey, I’m no dummy, I’ve been around. I want some respect.’ We try to keep them from feeling inferior just because they’re getting older, but sometimes that feeling of inferiority comes out in a basic dislike of younger people.”

  Age is the great common denominator at Century Village; it creates a sense of solidarity against the outside world. The Italians occasionally complain that the Jews dominate the entertainment schedule, but there is very little friction. “Age gives them more in common than ethnic differences divide them,” Angela told me. “And they do have a lot in common. There isn’t that much difference between a Jew from Brooklyn and an Italian from Brooklyn. They’re all just people. There are even Italians in the Yiddish club.”

  Lou Steiner confirmed this when he joined Laura, Jake, and me at the clubhouse. A spare, dapper man who still works as a union organizer, Steiner came down to Florida after the death of his wife and immediately began trying to raise Jewish consciousness among his fellow Villagers. One of his pet projects is the weekly Yiddish sing-along. “Sure we have gentiles,” he said. “Why not? Most of the Jews down here don’t know Yiddish any better than they do.”

  Steiner led us to the sing-along—sixty or so senior citizens in shorts and alligator shirts sitting on folding chairs in a large rec room. On the stage in front of them, a flabby, middle-aged man with an Israeli accent sat at an upright piano and went over the words of a song. I wasn’t surprised that the conductor was Israeli; increasingly, American Jews, even elderly ones, need to import Israelis to help them carry out Jewish activities.

  Someone handed me a mimeographed sheet with lyrics written in English transliteration. Laura, who is the head of the Yiddish speakers group, doesn’t read the language; most of the group’s members can barely speak it. They repeated the words of a Purim song—“Hynt is Purim Brider”—in tentative voices, and then sang the song in powerful American accents.

  “Sixty years ago I heard the great Yiddish entertainer Tomaschevsky sing this song,” Jake said to me in a loud whisper. “Now listen to it.” He waved his hand in disgusted dismissal. “Feh!”

  Lou Steiner, who was standing nearby, caught the gesture and waved his own hand. “I’ve been trying to raise money for a synagogue down here,” he said. “You think it’s easy? These people don’t care about being Jewish anymore. We’ve got a little Conservative congregation, meets in one of the buildings here, but we need a real place of our own.”

  “How many people attend services, usually?” I asked. A grim look came over Steiner’s face. “I won’t even tell you. The truth is, it’s a shame before God. You need a minyan here? After all, we got a lot of people need to have a minyan from time to time. You go in the clubhouse, they’re playing cards. You even mention a minyan, they say ‘Leave me alone.’ Sometimes they even tell you, ‘I’m not Jewish, I’m Spanish.’ ” He looked around and lowered his voice to a confidential tone. “You won’t believe it, but there are men here, right in this room, who refuse to say Kaddish for their own wives.”

  Jake stubbed out his cigarette with an angry gesture. “It’s just assimilation. That’s all it is, nobody’s Jewish anymore. Believe me, sometimes I cry at night just to think of it.” He nodded at the group, singing now in their flat, broad American accents. “Just listen to them,” he said plaintively. “Tomaschevsky is spinning in his grave.”

  The Century Villagers are the first generation of Eastern European Jews to run all the way through the American experience, from birth to retirement. They have the memories of immigrants’ children and these memories matter; but the real influence on their lives has been America—its language and rhythms, culture and ethos. They are charter members of the first Jewish generation taught, in Laura’s phrase, “to do its own thing.” And here, in Florida, at the end of the cycle, in the twilight of their lives, who can blame them if that thing has turned out to be mixed doubles, early bird dining, and the fox-trot.

  * In December 1987, less than a year after my visit to Miami, Emmet Frank passed away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE PROMISED LAND

  Shortly after I began my trip to the United States, Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work commemorating the Holocaust. Jews, including Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin, had won the prize before, of course. But Elie Wiesel is the closest thing America has to a secular chief rabbi, and his selection was a source of pride and excitement to Jews all across the country.

  Other Jewish news was less upbeat. Revelations about Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past continued to surface. New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor visited Israel, snubbed its leaders on orders from the Vatican, and was given a televised dressing-down by the heads of some Jewish organizations. Susan Miller, a Reform convert from Colorado, won Israeli citizenship in a landmark Supreme Court decision in Jerusalem—and proceeded to leave the country the next day. On the cultural front, borscht-belt comic Jackie Mason scored a Broadway triumph with a one-man show composed largely of Jewish put-downs.

  By far the two biggest Jewish news stories of the year were the Boesky scandal and the Pollard affair. Both made headlines far beyond the Jewish community and both were particularly disturbing because they recalled long-discredited anti-Semitic stereotypes.

  Ivan Boesky a Wall Street speculator who was caught in an illegal, multimillion-dollar insider trading scam was a former head of the New York Jewish federation. But despite his high profile, the fallout from the Boesky scandal was surprisingly mild. Many of Boesky’s fellow Jewish leaders feared that the affair
would conjure up old images of crooked Jewish business practices; but the grass roots reacted with a shrug. A generation before, when John Kennedy was assassinated, six million Jews had the same simultaneous thought—I hope the killer wasn’t one of ours. But Ivan Boesky didn’t shoot a president, and American Jews are no longer so insecure.

  Not long after Boesky was caught, I spoke at a Hadassah luncheon in Chicago. I shared the dais that day with a sweet, blue-haired lady who gossiped through lunch about her garden, her grandchildren, and her many trips to Israel. But when I mentioned Boesky, she paused with a fork full of Palmer House chef salad halfway to her mouth and fixed me with a flinty look. “If they start counting up the Jewish crooks,” she said, “I start counting up the Jewish Nobel Prize winners … and screw ’em.”

  Of all the Jewish news that broke during my months in America, no story was more dramatic or discomforting than the Pollard affair. Jonathan Jay Pollard was an American naval security officer who was caught stealing and selling U.S. military secrets to Israel and was sentenced to life in prison. Like Boesky, Pollard conjured up an old anti-Semitic charge—that Jews give their first loyalty not to their countries of residence, but to one another.

  The Jewish establishment was clearly spooked by the Pollard case. Some of its leaders loudly applauded the harsh sentence, and a delegation came to Jerusalem to publicly denounce Israel for having recruited an American Jew. They had a point; the operation was stupid and irresponsible. But there was also no mistaking an undertone of fear, a hint of the ancient ghetto question: What will the goyim think?

  Judging from public opinion polls, they didn’t think much about it one way or the other—a New York Times survey revealed that eighty-two percent had no idea whom Pollard had been spying for. And, as in the Boesky case, there was surprisingly little concern among the Jewish grass roots. I could almost hear my Hadassah luncheon partner: “If they count up the Jewish traitors, then I count up the Jewish patriots … and screw ’em.”

  Most Jewish news stories in America have one thing in common—they relate to other times and other places. Since World War II, the energy and imagination of the American Jewish community have been outer-directed—toward Israel, the Holocaust, the plight of Soviet Jewry, and other causes and concerns. During my trip in America, only the Boesky scandal was strictly a domestic matter. The others reflected the centrality of Israel (the Susan Miller case, Cardinal O’Connor’s trip to Jerusalem, the Pollard affair) and the Holocaust (the revelations about Waldheim, Wiesel’s Nobel Prize).

  This obsession with the Holocaust and Israel (and, to a lesser extent, Soviet Jewry) is understandable—they are major historical events. But it also clouds and distorts American Jewish life. Both the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel posed challenges that the American community failed to meet. All the memorials and UJA banquets cannot obscure the central fact: America’s Jews did almost nothing to save Hitler’s victims, and they haven’t shared the real burdens of building the Jewish state.

  The Holocaust poses a particularly vexing problem. If an event so unique may be said to have a lesson, it is clearly that anti-Semitism can happen even in a “civilized” Western country. But this notion pits history and logic against the present realities of American life.

  Very few American Jews, especially those born since World War II, have personally experienced anti-Semitism more virulent than a curse or a snowball. Tell them that there is a latent hatred of Jews that could turn ugly and you are accused of paranoia or Zionist alarmism. On the other hand, assert that there is no anti-Semitism and these same people seem almost offended. The paradoxical fact is that most American Jews feel both very much at home and not quite safe. This ambivalence was obvious everywhere I went, but nowhere did I encounter it more starkly than in Colchester, Connecticut.

  Colchester is the hometown of Jonathan Broder, the former Jerusalem bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune. Like most friends who meet in adulthood, he and I swapped stories about our boyhoods, giving them, in the process, a kind of mythical aspect. But even allowing for his formidable dramatic powers, Broder’s hometown seemed a unique and intriguing place—a New England Jewish farm shtetel halfway between Chelm and Hartford.

  Colchester was incorporated in 1699, and during its first two centuries it was an unremarkable Yankee hamlet whose economy was based on agriculture and the Hayward Rubber Company. But in 1895, the factory closed and Colchester was plunged into a depression. Three years later, a fire wiped out most of the downtown business district and, according to local historian Adam Schwartz, the town’s existence was threatened.

  Salvation came from an unexpected source. At about this time, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants were crowding into New York’s Lower East Side. Several enterprising realtors began offering farm properties at bargain prices to Jews who wanted to escape the urban squalor. Within a decade, there were more than a thousand Jews in Colchester, and by World War I they made up about half the town.

  In some ways, Jewish Colchester was like any other rural New England hamlet. The grown-ups scratched livings out of thin soil and raised poultry and dairy cattle. The kids won blue ribbons at the Hartford agricultural fair, joined the 4-H Club, and played baseball on the village square. And when America entered World War I, like thousands of other rawboned farmboys, they joined the Army.

  But Colchester was different, too. Grange meetings were conducted in Yiddish. The local dry goods store stocked Shabbes candles and prayer shawls along with the usual farm implements and calico. And there weren’t too many Yankee farm towns with a mikvah ritual bath, two Orthodox synagogues, and a kosher slaughterhouse.

  Among the early Jewish settlers was Aaron Schwartz, who came to Colchester from Russia and established the S&S Leather Company. Today the firm is Colchester’s major industry and its owner, Steve Schwartz, Aaron’s grandson, is the leading man in town.

  There is nothing rustic about Steve Schwartz. He is a sophisticated businessman in his early forties, a Brandeis graduate who met his wife, Carla, in college. A big-city girl from Brooklyn, Carla wanted to live in New York, but Steve was intent upon returning to his hometown. The Schwartz family is to Colchester what the Fords are to Detroit or the DuPonts to Wilmington. Steve had a sense of obligation and so he came home.

  It is almost impossible to get to Colchester by bus. I took a Greyhound as far as Hartford, where Steve and Carla met me. We drove half an hour to reach Colchester, and when we arrived—at nine-thirty on a Friday night—the town was already asleep. The only signs of life were at the state police barracks on the road leading into town, and at a small pizza parlor off the main square. “Tomorrow I’ll show you the sights,” Steve promised.

  Steve and Carla live in a large modern house with a swimming pool just outside of town on Route 2. They also have a place in Vermont. In Colchester they keep kosher; in Vermont, they do not. “Some people have two sets of dishes; we have two sets of houses,” Steve joked.

  The Schwartzes have two sons. The younger one was enrolled in a prep school in Hartford; the older one, Adam, was away at Harvard. Some weekends Steve and Carla drive up to Cambridge in the Jaguar that Carla gave him for his fortieth birthday. But Steve rarely drives the sports car in Colchester. “This is a working-class town,” he said. “It’s not Aspen or Stowe. We don’t want to seem conspicuous. This isn’t a Jaguar kind of town.”

  Before turning in, Carla proudly gave me a paper Adam had written about the town for his freshman history course. I read it in bed that night, and I could hear his father’s pride in Colchester in the paper’s concluding sentences. “Jewish farmers and their families were welcomed into the town, and eventually became an important part of it,” Adam wrote. “Although they no longer make their living off the land, Colchester’s Jews are tied to it, as inextricably as the oldest Yankee family, in this quiet New England town.”

  We got up early the next morning. Although it was Saturday, Steve wanted to go to his office for a few hours, and he
volunteered to drop me off at the synagogue. On the way he gave me a tour of the town. Colchester is no longer an isolated hamlet—some of its residents commute to jobs as far away as Hartford—but it has retained its rural feeling. It is so far in the country that TV reception is a problem; so small that Steve and Carla can speed-walk from one end to another in half an hour; and so old-fashioned that the Old Market Ice Cream Parlour is the hottest spot in town.

  There are still about eight hundred Jews in Colchester, but most of the old Jewish institutions are now historical landmarks. Steve pointed them out as we drove—a frame building that once housed the mikvah, a sprawling shingle mansion that used to be the Cohen Hotel, and the workshop of Levine & Levine, FAMOUS MAKER OF WOMEN’S SHOES, FOUNDED 1922. Only two synagogues are left; next to the one I attended that morning is Walter’s Kosher Bakery, which Steve claimed has the best onion rolls north of Flatbush Avenue. And Walter isn’t even Jewish.

  The synagogue itself turned out to be a barnlike building, much larger than Colchester’s depleted Jewish population now requires. Its fixtures are a written record of the congregation’s history—virtually everything in the place is covered with a donor’s plaque. These include a CHANDELIER IN MEMORY OF MR. AND MRS. ISAAC HOROWITZ; ETERNAL LIGHT IN MEMORY OF DR. AND MRS. HEYMAN; DOOR IN LOVING MEMORY OF HYMAN ALPERT; and my favorites—AIR CONDITIONER DONATED BY MR. AND MRS. MORRIS SCHULMAN and THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (a statue, not the original) DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF ISIDORE BROUNSTEIN.

  It was Succot, the Feast of Tabernacles, and I was interested to see how the Jewish farmers of Colchester celebrated the agricultural festival. But the service that morning was unremarkable. Following the prayers, everyone gathered in a small ceremonial booth outside the synagogue, toasted the holiday with wine, and talked about their coming winter migration to Florida. “There aren’t many Jewish farmers left around here anymore,” Rabbi Scheindlin told me. “Most of them are retired. It’s not easy to make a living in agriculture anymore.”