Through the Children's Gate Page 8

  What was left of overt, nameable Jewishness was the most elemental Jewish thing, and that was a style of joking. My grandfather, who ran a small grocery store in a black neighborhood, lives in my memory, apart from Sunday-morning fish, mostly in his jokes, a round of one-liners as predictable as the hands on a clock, and yet, weirdly, getting funnier by the year: “Joe Banana and his bunch? The music with appeal.” And “I used to be a boxer. In a shoe store.” And “I used to sing tenor, but they traded me in for two fives.” And “Feel stiff in the joints? Then stay out of the joints.”

  The first time I had a sense of Jewishness as a desirable state rather than as background radiation, humming in a Christian cosmos, was when I was thirteen and, turned on to the idea of New York, saw that it was made up of Jewish comedians; of jokes. I discovered the Marx Brothers and then Woody Allen. I bought a book of old comics’ routines and learned the telephone spiels of Georgie Jessel. (“Mom, why did you cook that bird? He was a valuable bird; he could speak six languages!” “Oh … he should a said something.”) The Ed Sullivan Show fascinated me: Corbett Monica and Norm Crosby and Jackie Vernon, and, hovering above even them, Myron Cohen, the mournful storyteller, and Henny Youngman, genuinely the funniest man, who looked exactly like my grandfather, to boot. The greatest generation. I read interviews with obscure Jewish comedians, old and young—really obscure ones, Ed Bluestone and Ben Blue—and noticed with a rising thrill that none of them talked about “jokes” that you “told.” Instead, they talked about “bits” that they “did”—and killed “them” doing them. That, for me, explained everything, life and art: Life was stuff that happened, art was bits you did. It was the first religion that had ever made sense to me.

  I came to New York to practice that faith, do bits, be a Purimspieler, only to find that world was gone. Sometime in the decade after my arrival, the Jewish comic culture dried up. The sense, so strong since the beginning of the century, that New York was naturally Jewish and, by an unforced corollary, naturally funny had gone. Of course, there were stand-up comics, many of them Jewish, but the particular uneasiness, the sense that talking too fast might keep you alive, the sense that you talked as a drowning man might wave his hands, the whining, high-pitched tone and the “R”-less accent: All that had gone. Paul Reiser, Jerry Seinfeld, much as I enjoyed and even identified with them, were as settled and as American as Bob and Ray or Will Rogers. This was an event with a specific date, marked in the work of the last great New York Jew comedian. Between 1977 and Annie Hall, in which being a Jewish comedian is a slightly weary and depressing obligation to be rebelled against, and Broadway Danny Rose, just seven years later, when the black-and-white world of the comics shpritzing at the Carnegie Deli is frankly presented as a Chagall world, a folktale setting, the whole thing vanished. Even Jackie Mason, a rabbi in training and ostensibly a master of the style, was quite different; in the eighties, when he returned from obscurity, his subject wasn't the unsuspected power of being a loser but the loss of power in the face of all those new immigrants.

  New York Jewish comic manners were still around, only they were no longer practiced by Jews, or were practiced by Jews as something learned rather than as something felt. What had replaced the organic culture of Jewish comedy in New York was a permanent pantomime of Jewish manners. The fly doing the backstroke in the soup was part of a kind of chicken-soup synchronized-swimming event, as ordered and regulated as an Olympic sport: Jewish New York manners were a thing anyone could imitate in order to indicate “comedy.”

  One sensed this at Sable's, where Jewish traditions of shpritzing were carried on by non-Jews, and in television commercials, where New York taxi drivers were still represented as wise guys, even though they had not been for a generation or more. But it was true in subtler ways, too. On Seinfeld, which I had missed while living abroad but now could watch in reruns every night, everything is, at one level, shockingly Jewish, far more than Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks was ever allowed to be, with mohels and brisses and whining fathers who wait all week for their copy of TV Guide—but the unstated condition is that there be absolutely no mention of the “J” word, while the most Jewish character, George, is given an Italian last name, Costanza. This is not because Jewishness is forbidden but because it is so obvious. Jewishness is to Seinfeld what the violin was to Henny Youngman: the prop that you used between jokes, as much for continuity as for comedy. The Jewish situations are mimed by rote, while the real energy of the jokes lies in the observation of secular middle-class manners. In the old Jewish comedies, it had been just the opposite: The manners of the middle class were mimed by rote—the suits and ties, the altered names, Jack Benny's wife called Mary—while the energy of the jokes lay in the hidden Jewishness. (The comedy of Phil Silvers's great Sergeant Bilko almost scandalously derives from the one thing that no one on the show is allowed to mention, which is that Bilko is a clever New York Jew dominating a kind of all-star collection of dim Gentiles.) New York Jewishness was now the conscious setup rather than the hidden punch line.

  One Sunday morning, Luke and I walked over to Sable's and bought even more than usual; we were having company. But the Cambodian cashier and the Chinese slicer were unimpressed. The cashier looked over our order.

  “How many people you having?” he asked.

  “Eight.”

  “From out of town?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “Me, I would be ashamed to put this on the table.”

  “You would?”

  He looked at the ritualized bits of cured sable and salmon and shrugged again—my grandfather to the life!

  “This is not worth putting on the table. I would be ashamed.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Get a pound of herring salad. Pound of whitefish salad. Pound of bluefish salad.”

  I did. “Now I proud to put this on the table,” he said. “Now I no longer ashamed for you.”

  He had learned to do it at Zabar's, I realized as I left—the permanent pantomime of Jewish manners with wings on! Though it cost me nearly a hundred dollars, it was worth it for the lesson. The combination of an Asian sense of face with a Jewish sense of guilt may be the most powerful commercial hybrid in history.

  So, see, I have an Esther in my family, too. The matriarch of my family. She dominated her sisters, in a grasping way, and then came to die of emphysema in my grandparents’ apartment in Florida. We went to see her in—this is in about 1993, I guess. Wheezing and pained, she said, ‘People tell me you are doing well, but I lie here in bed at night and worry, oh, I worry about you. How I worry. So now tell me, tell me, so your aunt won't lie here as she is dying and worry … tell me … how much are you really making?’ ”

  “You can't possibly tell that story,” Martha said. “It's anti-Semitic.”

  “It's true,” I said.

  “Of course it's true,” Martha said. “It's just not appropriate.”

  I was trying out possible spiels on the more Jewish of our many Jewish friends. We have a certain number of friends who, though coming from backgrounds not unlike my own, have recommitted themselves to Jewishness in a serious way. While Yiddishkeit as a practice had nearly disappeared from New York, one of the things replacing it, paradoxically, was Judaism. A number of our friends are what I have come to think of as X-treme Jews, who study Kabbalah or glory in the details of the lives of Jewish gangsters and even like to call themselves “Hebes,” in the manner of young black men calling each other “niggas.”

  I envied my friends the seeming clarity of their Jewishness, just as I envied, a little, the clarity of the family of observant Jews who live down the hall from us. On warm Friday evenings, one or two of the adolescent boys in that family will come knocking at our door, galumphing in heavy shoes and with pale faces, and, looking woeful, say, “Could you come and turn on the air conditioner in our apartment? We can't, 'cause we're Jews.” I admired the simplicity of their self-definition: “We can't, 'cause we're Jews.” We are unashamed o
f our essence, even as it makes us sweat.

  But whatever the appeal of that plain faith, I can't say I was inclined to follow them. It seemed to me that my contemporaries, in contrast to the boys down the hall, had chosen Jewish—they were majoring in Jewish, just as my father had majored in English—when the force of the tradition was that it was not elective. And since the choice of what to consider properly Jewish was always interpretive—nobody except the very simple or very faithful actually believed or followed it all, seven days of creation and the rules of animal sacrifice in the temple—there were only competing styles of Alexandrianism, of Jewishness rather than rote Judaism, some recognizing themselves as such.

  I decided to sit down and read what I imagined was the Bible on the subject of New York Jewishness, Alfred Kazin's memoir New York Jew, a book that, over the years, I had neither read in nor read past but simply not read, thinking, unforgivably, that I already knew its contents. (The forties, boy! The fifties, joy! The sixties, oy!) In fact, it's an unpredictable, rhapsodic, uncontentious book—but for all the stark-ness of its title, its premise is that Jewishness is the board from which one springs, rather than the ground one must dig. To be a New York Jew is, for Kazin, like being a New York tree. It is what you are.

  Reading Kazin, I became a little impatient with my own apologetic attitude toward the poverty of my Jewishness. Wasn't it the invigorating inheritance of the self-emancipation of my parents? My father had done the deracinating, to become a devotee of Pope and Swift, Molière and Shakespeare, and to reracinate was to be disloyal to him, to the act of emancipation from tribal reflexes that, with a considerable effort of will and imagination, he had pulled off. What is bracing about Kazin is not his Jewishness but that he makes no effort to pretend he is something else. His liberation lay in not pretending to be Van Wyck Brooks; the liberation for us surely lies in not pretending to be Alfred Kazin.

  In the midst of these bitter-herb thoughts, Luke came in.

  “Here's the new version,” he said. “Man says to a waiter, ‘What's this fly doing in my soup?’ ‘Shhh,’ the waiter says, ‘everyone will want one.’ ” It broke me up. Whether or not there are Jewish essences, there are surely some essentially Jewish jokes. That was one, and I was in the middle of another.

  I was about to call the Jewish Museum and give it all up when a friend suggested, “Go see Rabbi Schorsch. He's the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He's a terrific guy, and I'm sure he'd be glad to help you out with the spiel thing.” I vaguely remembered hearing Rabbi Ismar Schorsch on the radio once or twice, so I made an appointment—it felt like making a date with a dentist—and on the day I took the subway up to 125th Street.

  The rabbi's secretary showed me into his office, and after a couple of minutes, there was Rabbi Schorsch.

  “Rabbi,” I began, “I was not raised as an observant Jew, but I am nonetheless of a Jewish background, and I am naturally concerned to show some grasp of a tradition that, though familiar in spirit, is still alien to me in many ways.” I don't know; that's how I thought you ought to talk to a rabbi. Anyway, I eventually explained that I couldn't make head or tail of the Book of Esther.

  “It's a spoof, a burlesque, really,” he almost mumbled. He picked up my Bible, riffled through it as though there were a kind of satisfaction just in touching the pages, and then frowned. “This is a Christian Bible,” he said, genuinely puzzled.

  He was the kind of hyper-alert elderly man who, instead of putting on weight around the middle, seemed to have drawn all his energy upward into his eyes and ears, which gleamed, outsized. “Yes. It's a kind of comic chapter, not to be taken entirely seriously,” he went on, holding my King James Version in his hand as though it might be loaded. “It's a light book with a serious message. You see, Scripture, the Bible, one of the remarkable things about it is that it contains a chapter about every form of human experience. There's a book of laws and a book of love songs. A book of exile and a book of homecoming. A skeptical and despairing book in Job, and an optimistic and sheltering book in the Psalms. Esther is the comic book, a book for court Jews, with a fairy-tale, burlesque spirit.”

  You could see my whole skeleton underneath my jacket; my hair stood on end; I turned into a pile of black ash, smiling sickly as I slowly crumbled.

  “It is?” I said.

  “Yes. You see, Mordecai is a classic Jew of the Diaspora, not just exiled but entirely assimilated—a court Jew, really. It's a book for court Jews. Why doesn't he bow down to Haman? Well, it might be because of his Judaism. But I think we have to assume that he's jealous—he expects to be made first minister and then isn't. Have you noticed the most interesting thing about the book?” He looked at me keenly.

  “I hadn't even noticed it was funny.”

  “It's the only book in the Bible where God is never mentioned,” he said. “This is the book for the Jews of the city, the world. After all, we wonder—what does Esther eat? It sure isn't kosher. But she does good anyway. The worldliness and the absurdity are tied together—the writer obviously knows that the king is a bit of an idiot—but the point is that good can rise from it in any case. Esther acts righteously and saves her people, and we need not worry, too much, about what kind of Jew she was before or even after. She stays married to the Gentile king, remember. This is the godless, comic book of Jews in the city and how they struggle to do the righteous thing.”

  I was stunned. This was, as they say, the story of my life. A funny book about court Jews … I had been assigned to burlesque it when the text was preburlesqued, as jeans might be preshrunk.

  We talked for a while longer, about the background of Haman as a Jew hater, and of how the most startlingly contemporary thing in the book was the form of anti-Semitism; even twenty-five hundred years ago in Persia, the complaint against the Jews was the same as it is now. In the end, the rabbi gave me a signed copy of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, the Tanach. (Signed by him, I mean.)

  We got together a couple of times after that, and eventually I decided to try and go ahead with the Purimspiel. He said, “Why not? What have you got to lose?”

  What have you got to lose? It was, I reflected, like the punch line of a Jewish joke.

  In the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of people in dinner jackets and sequined dresses were wearing masks, although this made them look less festive than vaguely embarrassed, as though they were worried about being seen by their friends. I had forgotten the look and feel of a New York benefit: the ballroom made to look like a gym; the chicken stretched out, mortified, on its plate, with the Indisputably Classy Ingredient—the quince, or sun-dried tomato, or preserved lemon—laid on top of it; the fiftyish women, sexy and intimidating in sports clothes, wilting in their fancy gowns. The only difference was that at this benefit, there was a giant video-projection screen at either end of the hall and one above the podium, and the speakers—who included Rabbi Schorsch, saying the blessing—were projected on them. I gulped. I had thought it would be like a nightclub, where I could play with a microphone in the manner of Rodney Dangerfield. This was more like a political convention. I was an impostor, even though I had bits to do. I heard my grandfather's voice: Feel stiff in the joints? Then stay out of the joints!

  At last, just before dessert, I got up and went to the podium. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my own image on the giant screen.

  What did I tell them? Well, I did the “New York as Persia, Donald, and Ivana” bit, and then I did a bit I'd made up that afternoon on Haman. That got a modest laugh, and, encouraged, I went on to do the “man goes to see a rabbi” bit. I said that, once I'd thought of transposing the story to New York, I had gotten stuck on Mordecai. Who could Mordecai be in the modern city? I had gone to see a rabbi, and the rabbi had told me that the Book of Esther was in part a spoof, a burlesque: a comedy in which worldly people took risks and did unworldly things, and that Mordecai, if he was anyone, was us—the assimilated court and city Jews. And this was sort of amazing to me, since the i
dea that the man of the world might be the honest man was an idea that was central to the comic tradition I revered—Molière says it, for instance, just like that—but was not one that I had known had a place in the Jewish tradition. The Jewish tradition, I had always thought, proposed that the honest man was the man out of the world, the prophet crying in the wilderness. But I saw now that there was a connection between a certain kind of comedy, the comedy of assimilation, and a certain kind of courage, the courage to use your proximity to power, bought at the price of losing your “identity,” to save your kinsmen. The real moral center of the story, I saw now, lay in the tiny, heartbreaking, and in many ways comic moment when Esther—trayf-eating, dim-witted, overdressed, sexy Esther—appears before the king, who hasn't found her particularly sexy lately. I could see her in her Lacroix pouf dress, gulping for breath and showing up, so to speak, at Donald Trump's office in the middle of a busy day, saying that she had to speak to him. But she did, and the Jews were saved, for once.