Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  “Girlfriend, if this problem rings true for you—if you can’t find a man, or you settled for some bad-news black dude because that’s all that was left in your neighborhood, or you took a fallback position with a white guy who might be perfectly nice but not quite in synch with your soul—give us a call. We’ll be back right after these messages.”

  Zach whisked the shoe brush back and forth, watching the leather became a richer, darker, more gleaming version of its former self. So thoroughly did the polish cover the old scuff marks that he imagined slathering some of it on his face so when she came home, he could give Cleo the black man she wanted. It had never occurred to him that he was just her fallback, a placeholder for her bashert.

  ON THE FIRST night of Passover—after he’d mentioned that he had no invitations to anyone’s seder that year—Cleo surprised Zach with chicken soup, matzoh balls, and haroses, the recipes she’d learned from Sophie Bergman.

  “I’m really touched,” he said.

  Cleo smiled. “Don’t get excited. I’m not converting.”

  If only, Zach thought. It wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. She was a preacher’s kid but not a Bible-thumping salvationist, and while she could quote scripture with the Holy Rollers who came on her program to proselytize, her religion had never presented any awkward moments in their relationship. Except once, when he asked her if she considered Jesus to be her personal savior.

  “Just curious,” he’d added, quickly.

  Cleo had replied unemotionally, “The Son of God walks with me.”

  Zach wasn’t sure if she was kidding but he didn’t ask because, if she wasn’t, he didn’t want to know.

  Other than that brief exchange, her Christianity looked to Zach like the mirror image of his Judaism. Culture without ritual. Connection without community. Yet, having been raised in the black church played a major role in Cleo’s black identity while Zach’s years in synagogue or Hebrew school seemed irrelevant to his whiteness. Race came up between them with an overlay of humor when Cleo once told him she’d booked a diverse panel for an upcoming show, “a white, a black, and a Jew,” and Zach had protested. “We’re not a separate race, Cleo. Jews are a religion and a people, but we come in many colors. I, for instance, consider myself off-white.” By which he’d meant to say, “You could be Jewish, too.”

  But she couldn’t. The sermons, traditions, and spirit of the black church were the strands with which she had rewoven her self-esteem after her father died. Knowing that she was African American, the daughter of a charismatic pastor and a powerful mother, was intrinsic to everything she felt about herself. Besides, she knew far more about her heritage than Zach did about his and she was eager to share it with him. Occasionally, a novel by Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison would appear on his side of the platform bed. She’d introduced him to lectures at the Schomburg Center, plays by the Negro Ensemble Company, Harlem jazz clubs, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. She’d told him all about the chitlin circuit—black vaudeville’s borsht belt—and exposed him to music he’d known little or nothing about: ragtime, spirituals, gospel, African work songs, rap. She’d decoded the black oral traditions of “call and response,” “talkin’ and testifyin’,” and “lyin’ and signifyin’,” and helped him appreciate the subversive comedy of Moms Mabley.

  Conjuring Jewish parallels to black culture wasn’t easy for Zach. Of course, he could have plied her with books by Marx, Freud, Arendt, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, or Grace Paley, but Cleo had already read most of these authors and, beyond the big names, what Zach knew about the Jewish canon, Israeli novelists, or Hebrew poets wouldn’t fill a term paper. Kabbalah was a mystery. His Talmud study had been cursory. His exposure to Israeli dance and filmmaking began and ended with the special events calendar at the Eames Place Synagogue where Wednesday night was hora night and the film series might feature a documentary about Israel’s hydroponic cultivation of tomatoes.

  That Zach could convey to Cleo so little of the Jewish heritage he had vowed to perpetuate was both ironic and disquieting. Without mastery of his tradition or a substantive grasp of his people’s history, all he could offer her were boyhood memories, a fondness for bagels and lox, a superficial sense of his parents’ past, a reasonable familiarity with the Sabbath prayer book, and a recording of cantor Richard Tucker singing Kol Nidre. The essence of his Jewish identity, he realized, was his obsession with Jewish identity.

  IT WAS A SCOTT family tradition to buy their Christmas tree on the Friday after Thanksgiving and spend the rest of the long weekend decorating it. Cleo usually traveled to Memphis for the holiday but this year the radio station assigned her to broadcast from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, so she and Zach ate their turkey dinner with friends. At breakfast the following morning, she told him she was going out to buy a bunch of Christmas decorations—this being the first year she’d be setting up her own tree—and later in the afternoon, if he felt like it, he could go with her to pick one.

  His English muffin was stuck in the toaster. “I can’t get the damn thing out,” he bleated. Since the year Bonnie chose Thanksgiving night to announce the death of their marriage, it had not been an easy holiday for him. Now Cleo was irritating him with early Christmas preparations.

  “Don’t use a fork or you’ll electrocute yourself,” she said, and came over to pull out the plug. “You don’t have to go with me. I can manage the tree by myself.”

  “Let me think about it,” Zach replied, buttering his mangled muffin. He had never bought a Christmas tree, much less lived with one, and given what happened when he was in the fifth grade, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  AT PS 76 IN 1960, every student was expected to help decorate the school for Christmas. Some wove red and green ribbons through the stair rails, others festooned the tree, baked Christmas cookies, rehearsed Christmas carols, or took on roles in the nativity play. That year, Zach Levy boycotted Christmas. It was unfair, he decided at age ten, for Jewish students to be pressed into service for someone else’s holiday, indefensible to force Jews to sing about someone else’s savior. “Dear Miss Shawn,” he wrote in his note to the principal:

  Every Christmas, I feel like an alien in my own school because I am Jewish and all the holiday activities are Christian. This year, I would like to be excused. I do not think I should be expected to celebrate the religion of the people who killed all my relatives during the Second World War.

  You may think Christmas trees are just winter decorations but a Catholic friend of mine told me they are Christ symbols. The tree stands for the wooden cross, and the red berries and shiny red balls symbolize drops of Jesus’s blood, and the star on the top is supposed to be the star in the East. I believe these things should not be displayed in school because they remind people of the crucifixion, which Jews keep getting blamed for, even though the Romans did it. I don’t think Jewish students should be forced to celebrate Christmas.

  My father agrees, so he is signing this letter, too. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Zachariah Levy ________________________

  Nathan Levy __________________________

  Zach’s penmanship was perfect and he’d purposely used a ruler to make the signature lines but when he presented the letter to his father, Nathan wouldn’t sign it; he was afraid it would mark Zach as a troublemaker, get him ostracized, maybe even expelled. “Years from now,” Nathan warned, “your name might turn up on some blacklist of subversive Jews and no one will hire you.” Stunned by his father’s timidity, Zach insisted it was more un-American for an American to have to celebrate a religious holiday he didn’t believe in. Nathan held firm until Zach flatly refused to go to school at all without the signed letter. That did the trick. But getting his father’s signature and Miss Shawn’s permission were easy compared to what he went through with his peers: the Irish kids called him a “kike,” the Italian kids stuffed dirt balls down his pants, the Polish kids stole his notebook and returned it with a great big swastika on the cover. Worse
yet, none of the Jewish kids joined his resistance. While he sat out the Christmas pageant in the library, everyone else proceeded to the auditorium with their frankincense and myrrh and took their places in the straw-strewn manger where the baby Jesus was a rubber doll donated by Sarah Mandelstam, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors.

  ZACH’S CHRISTMAS BOYCOTT was his first act of civil disobedience, the first pebble whose ripples actually altered the current in a majoritarian stream. Later, he would go on to defend the Rastafarian cop who sued for the right to wear dreadlocks on the job, the Muslim student who sued to be allowed to keep her head scarf on in school, the son of atheists who declined to pledge allegiance “under God,” the incarcerated Jew who wanted kosher food in prison, the imam accused of noise pollution for broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer five times a day (though the church across the street rang its bells every hour with impunity). Miss Shawn’s permission slip excusing him from Christmas hung in a frame on Zach’s office wall alongside his Harvard Law School diploma and his certificate of admission to the Supreme Court of the United States.

  By the time Cleo invited him to shop with her for a Christmas tree, his fifth-grade protest had long since been vindicated. In New York City, at least, wherever a school, store, bank, doctor’s office, apartment, or office building displayed a Christmas tree it displayed a menorah, usually an electric candelabra with orange bulbs. And the sound of people wishing one another “Happy Holidays” instead of the exclusionary “Merry Christmas” made him feel less like an outlier in his home town.

  Zach finished his English muffin with his second cup of coffee. He read the paper, worked on a brief. For lunch, he made himself scrambled eggs. When Cleo came home, dragging shopping bags full of red and green Christmas decorations and announced that she was going right back out to buy a tree, Zach said he would come with her.

  Every November, even before the first turkey carcass was turned into soup, instant pine forests, as transient as Brigadoon, materialized on the sidewalks of New York, thanks to the many intrepid tree farmers who drove down from New England with truckloads of fir and spruce and sold them, day and night, braving the frigid outdoor temperatures until, on December 26, they just as magically vanished. At the corner of Columbus Avenue and Ninety-Sixth Street, a row of trees trussed up like fat women in girdles stood tilted against a wire that had been strung between two streetlamps. A Vermonter as massive as Paul Bunyan unsheathed six or eight fragrant specimens before Cleo decided on a white pine with a nicely tapered top. Zach carried it back to the apartment on his shoulder and they spent the rest of the day hanging shiny balls, stringing tiny lights, draping tinsel, making cranberry garlands, and choosing the right branch on which to hook each miniature Santa, reindeer, snowman, angel, icicle, and candy cane.

  “Almost done!” Cleo said. “I’ll spread the snowflakes around the base, you stick the star on top.” By then, night had fallen, so when she flicked the switch, the tree, decorated to within an inch of its life, twinkled like a sequined gown, and Cleo, bathed in its shimmering lights, looked as luminous as every little girl Zach had ever seen in a Christmas movie. Her excitement was contagious.

  They celebrated with eggnog and fruitcake (her family recipe), followed by a few puffs of Acapulco gold, a rather ceremonial removal of one another’s clothes, item by item, and a stoned delight in the patterns the tree lights splashed across their naked skin. Zach turned on his side to cradle Cleo’s head on his arm and found himself eye to eye with the Holy Family, three Magi, four camels, and a sheep. Zonked on pot and rum, he realized there was no getting away from it: Christmas wasn’t about Santa Claus and candy canes, it was about the Nativity scene, and Cleo’s need to display and celebrate the babe in the manger and the creation story of her faith. Another difference that made all the difference.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE LAST PICNIC

  ZACH SURVIVED CHRISTMAS AND SMOOTHLY NAVIGATED through the first ten and a half months of 1986, none of which presented him with any religious challenges. That March, when Althea, Clem, and Josie visited New York, Cleo took them to some Harlem church on Easter morning. Zach joined them in the afternoon for the Easter Parade, schlepping down Fifth Avenue amid women in huge flower-decked hats and crazy costumes, dogs in straw boaters, men dressed as everything from Ronald Reagan to flamingos, small children lugging baskets of pastel-colored eggs. The evening of April 15, after he and Cleo mailed their tax returns, they had dinner at the Rainbow Room to celebrate the second anniversary of the day they met, steering clear of the conflicts which threatened to derail the Black-Jewish Coalition that had brought them together in the first place.

  Just before Passover, they attended Rabbi Kahn’s “Freedom Seder,” which was jointly sponsored by Reverend Birmingham’s church—everything cozy and ecumenical. In July, Zach and Cleo rented a beach house for weekend getaways in a remote Fire Island community that had no churches or synagogues. Yom Kippur fell on Columbus Day, which made it perfectly natural for Zach, at Herb’s invitation, to spend the three-day weekend in Boston and for Cleo to fly south to be with her family.

  Throughout the fall, picnicking by the lake in Central Park became a Sunday ritual. Today, however, they got a late start because Cleo had heaved up last night’s dinner and slept past noon. Though she claimed to feel fine when she woke up, she called Marcus and told him she wasn’t going to do a live show that night; he should replay an old tape. By the time she was finally ready to face food, it was nearly two in the afternoon. They packed the picnic supplies and set off for the park, the handles of the wicker basket stretched between them.

  The weather was unseasonably mild for mid-November, the trees aflame in fiery reds and speckled yellows, the sky a blue dome overhead. Rowboats dotted the lake and the stolid apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue and Central Park South stood like coastal rock formations lending the tableau its only sharp silhouette. At the grassy slope abutting the lake, their favorite picnic spot, Zach felt a deep serenity he could only call bliss.

  Cleo shook out the checkered cloth, billowed it to the grass, and unpacked the Tupperware containers while Zach uncorked the wine. When he leaned toward her to fill her glass, she covered its rim with her palm.

  “Stomach acting up again?” he asked.

  “Nope.” Cleo tucked her denim skirt under her thighs. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh, sweetheart!” Zach, stunned, grabbed both her hands. In the future, when he revisited that moment, he would see the white swan gliding along the shore and farther out, two boats rowed by teenaged boys, colliding on purpose, as if they were Coney Island bumper cars. The metallic glare of the autumn sun would come back to him, too, how it sparkled on the surface of the water, transforming the lake into a field of shattered glass.

  “Cleo,” he began, dry mouthed. He glanced at the waistband of her denim skirt. Her belly was as flat as a girl’s.

  She anchored her gaze to the far shore. “I’m having the baby.”

  Zach’s voice stuck in his throat.

  “Don’t ask me not to,” she added. “You know how I feel about that.”

  Actually, how she felt was a matter of public record. A recent guest of hers, a militant fundamentalist, had bullied Cleo into admitting—on the air—that, despite being ardently pro-choice, she would never have an abortion herself.

  A sudden downdraft showered them with autumn’s confetti. Zach raised her hands to his lips, kissed them, and spoke into the cage of her fingers. “Please, Cleo. I can’t do this. You know that.”

  She took back her hands. “I’m not asking you to do anything.”

  “Telling is as good as asking.” Zach picked at the crabgrass at the border of the picnic cloth, hesitated, looked up, and shook his head. “I thought you said you were on the pill.” He yanked out another clump of weeds.

  “I was on the pill. Obviously, it’s not foolproof.”

  Zach’s jaw tightened. “Shouldn’t I have a say in this?”

  “You just had your say
.” She twisted her napkin. “You said you don’t want it.”

  “It’s not that simple, Cleo.” He gouged out another line of crabgrass. Half-moons of dirt frowned from his fingernails. “How am I supposed to go through life knowing there’s a kid of mine out there?”

  Her smile vanished before he was sure he’d seen it. “Millions of men do it every day.”

  “You’re not thinking this through, Cleo. It’s tough to be a single parent. You have no idea how hard it is to go it alone.”

  “Actually, I know exactly how hard it is,” she replied, coolly.

  Of course she did. After Ifs died, her mother raised two daughters alone. Her sister Clem raised Josie on her own ever since her no-good husband walked out on them years ago claiming he had to “find” himself.

  Zach, desperate now, grasped at the only straw he had left. “Why would you bring an unwanted child into the world?”

  “It won’t be unwanted,” Cleo said. “I want it.”

  She opened the container of chicken and without asking, put a leg and thigh on his plate, then served herself the breast. After two and a half years together, each of them knew the other’s preferences on practically everything—his penchant for dark meat, hers for white, his for charred steak, hers for pink, his to sleep in a dark room, hers to awaken with the morning light streaming through the windows. By now, they also knew every detail of one another’s family histories. Zach remembered that Cleo’s mother, Althea, was an only child because her mother couldn’t hold a pregnancy; that Althea had three miscarriages between the birth of Clem and Cleo, accounting for the sisters’ twelve-year age difference; and that Clem needed in-vitro fertilization to conceive Josie. For the Scott women, there was no such thing as an unwanted child.