The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  CREATIVE SOLUTIONS TO the erosion of Old World ways are evident also in the Indian community. It is an older, more middle-class group whose initial settlers in the late 1960s were doctors, chemists, and academics admitted under special American visas offered to take advantage of the availability of well-schooled English-speaking Indians at a time of shortages in those professions. Bypassing the tenement stage of immigration, the Indians settled in the modest apartments of Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Flushing in Queens. Many have now done well enough to establish thriving Indian enclaves in suburbs such as Edison and Woodbridge in New Jersey. The 2000 census counted 454,686 Indians living across the New York metropolitan area. The Indians have left behind bustling shopping and dining districts including Seventy-fourth Street in Jackson Heights and Lexington Avenue near Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, where dozens of Indian-owned stores sell saris, gold jewelry, and Indian spices and chutneys. Visiting Indian enclaves, I found wonderful examples of inventive approaches to blending old and new.

  Dr. Bodh Das, a courtly cardiologist at Lincoln Hospital and Medical Center in the Bronx, saw the power of age-old Indian traditions fade with each of his three daughters. When he came here in the late 1960s, he planned to have his daughters find their husbands the old-fashioned way—within the Hindu caste into which he was born. But he found his success diminishing the longer the daughters were exposed to America's freewheeling mating rituals. With his eldest daughter, Abha—the one who had spent the least time growing up in America— he hit the jackpot, getting her to return to India in 1975 to wed a man she had never met but who hailed not only from the same Kayashta sub-caste but also from the same obscure offshoot. With his second daughter, Bibha, he was less successful. She married a Kayashta, but from a different branch. “So there was some transgression in this marriage,” the silver-haired Das told me with a wry stoicism worthy of another father who struggled with three modern-minded marriageable daughters, Tevye of Fiddler on the Roof.

  Das' third daughter, Rekha, the most Americanized, strayed even farther. She refused to return to India to find her mate and married a man outside her father's caste whom she met in school. It was what Indians call “a love marriage.”

  As Das' experience shows, the peculiarly Indian system of stratifying its people into hierarchical castes—with Brahmins at the top and Untouchables at the bottom—has managed to stow away on the journey to the United States, a country that prides itself on its standard of egalitarianism. The excruciatingly complex caste system dates back thousands of years to the origins of Hinduism. As I learned talking to some experts, Hindus tell of a deity who morphed into an entire society of humans grouped by categories of work and in a sharply defined pecking order. The deity's head turned into the Brahmin caste of priests and scholars, his hands into the Kshatriya caste of warriors and administrators, his thighs into the merchant and landholding Vaishyas, and his feet into Shudras, the skilled workers and peasants. An underclass rung was reserved for the Untouchables, known as Dalit, or downtrodden, who worked in the most “polluting” jobs, such as cleaning streets or toilets. Whatever its economic and religious foundations, the caste system— which in time sprouted more than 3,000 jati, or subcastes, tinged by geography, language, and employment—became ironbound. Until recent decades, village Untouchables would step out of view whenever a Brahmin walked by, and tea stalls would reserve separate dishware for the Dalit. Not surprisingly, the Dalit were breathtakingly poor.

  After India gained independence from Britain in 1947, the legal forms of caste were abolished, and Untouchables and other lower castes began benefiting from favorable quotas that reserved certain percentages of jobs in government and admission to college for their members. By the mid-1960s, the social aspects of the system were also slackening among urban and educated sectors of Indian society, precisely the groups that furnished most of the doctors and engineers coming to the United States. It could have been expected that notions of caste might have withered.

  Yet, even in this country, not just marital but business arrangements too are still sometimes colored by caste. Indians can easily tell one another's caste by characteristic last names or by hometowns, and if that doesn't do it, asking a few innocuous questions usually solves the riddle. Arun K. Sinha, a member of the Kurmi caste, whose roots are in land cultivation, is owner of the Foods of India store, a shop on Curry Hill at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan. He complains that wholesalers from a higher Gujarati caste insist that he pay cash rather than extend the credit they give to merchants from their own clan. E. Valentine Daniel, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, says some Indian executives will not hire Untouchables, no matter their qualifications. “It's even more than a glass ceiling; it's a tin roof,” he said. Daniel, former director of Columbia's South Asian Institute, told me of the resistance he faced among upper-caste Indians on an academic committee when he wanted to name an endowed chair in Indian economics after a noted Untouchable, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a Columbia graduate who helped draft the Indian Constitution. Others told of Indians they know who cold-shoulder members of the lower Dalit caste and won't invite them to their homes.

  But the caste system is withering here under the relentless forces of assimilation and modernity. Education seems to erode such traditions, and Indians may be America's most educated immigrant group: 66.7 percent of adults over twenty-five hold a bachelor's degree compared to a national average of 27 percent. Indeed, vestiges of the caste system often seem more a matter of sentiment than cultural imperative. Upper-caste Indians here insist they do not bother to probe someone's caste, and few Indians would admit to refusing to eat in a restaurant because its food was cooked by an Untouchable, something upper-caste Indians might have done fifty years ago.

  Mostly caste survives here as a kind of tribal bonding, with Indians finding kindred spirits among people who grew up with the same foods and cultural signals. Just as descendants of the Pilgrims use the Mayflower Society as a social outlet to mingle with folks of familiar backgrounds, a few castes have formed societies such as the Brahmin Samaj of North America, where meditation and yoga are practiced and caste traditions such as vegetarianism and fasting are explained to the young.

  “Right now my children are living in a mixed-up society,” said Pratima Sharma, a fortyish software trainer with two daughters who heads the New Jersey chapter of Brahmin Samaj. “That's why I went into the Brahmin group, because I wanted to give my children the same values.”

  Ads in New York City's Indian newspapers testify to the persistence of caste, with one family advertising for a “Brahmin bride” and another seeking an “alliance for U.S.-educated, professionally accomplished” daughter from the Bengali Kayashta caste. Madhulika Khandelwal, director of the Asian American Center at Queens College, thinks that the influx of less-educated relatives of Indian immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s has tended to revive caste distinctions. “The underlying hope is that you have a woman or man from the same caste,” Khandelwal said. “That way the marriage supports the family tradition. You are assuring, to the best of your ability, that the couple live through those traditions expressed in food, dress, vocabulary, and other things.”

  Hariharan Janakiraman of Queens is a mid-thirtyish Brahmin from the Vadama branch, which emphasizes teaching. Choosing to become a software engineer, not a teacher, was his one rebellion. But he intends to let his parents select his wife from his caste. His parents will consult his horoscope and that of the bride and make sure their planets and attendant moods are aligned. They will ask the prospective bride to prepare some food, then sing and dance, the latter activity to make sure all her limbs work.

  “If I get married to a Dalit girl, the way she was brought up is different from the way I was brought up,” he said. “If I marry people from other castes, my uncle and aunt won't have a good impression of my parents, so I won't do that.”

  Ranjana Pathak too maintains many Brahmin traditions. When she and I had lunch near her Long
Island office, where she is a quality-control chemist, she was eating only fruit to mark an Indian festival. But she has found other traditions painful. She agreed to an arranged marriage, but her in-laws never quite warmed to her because she comes from a lower subcaste of Brahmins.

  “Until today it has left a bitter taste in my mouth, and those are things you never forget,” she said, the hurt audible in her voice. “That's why I won't do it to my children.”

  FLUSHING

  WHERE TO GO

  Hindu Temple Society of North America (ORNATE HINDU TEMPLE) 45-57 BOWNE STREET; (718) 460-8484

  Kouchi Supermarket (AFGHAN MARKET AND DEPARTMENT STORE) 75-01 PARSONS BOULEVARD; (718) 380-7670

  Masjid Hazrat-I-Abubakr Sadiq (DOMED TEMPLE OF A MOSQUE AND THE ORIGINAL) 141-47 33RD AVENUE; (718) 358-6905

  WHERE TO EAT

  Afghan Kabab Palace (AFGHAN FOOD IN A NATIVE SETTING) 75-07 PARSONS BOULEVARD; (718) 591-8700

  Chapter 10

  A Kosher Kingdom in Midwood

  IN THE LATE AUTUMN OF 2004, THE CITY'S ORTHODOX JEWS WERE in a tizzy.

  Just six months before, a rabbi in the new heart of Orthodox New York—a neighborhood in central Brooklyn known as Midwood—had spotted a tiny crustacean swimming in the city's tap water. Jews, of course, are forbidden to eat crustaceans such as shrimp and lobster by the portentous decrees of the Five Books of Moses. Yet rabbis long ago realized that only those creatures that were visible could be prohibited, since water everywhere in the world contains all manner of microscopic organisms—shrimplike creatures included—and the Torah would never have barred Jews from drinking water. The problem in Midwood was that this Sherlockian rabbi had spotted the crustacean with his naked eye.

  At first, the ensuing dustup about whether the crustacean rendered the city's water unkosher seemed like an amusing but arcane case of hairsplitting in a particularly exacting Jewish enclave. Rabbis here and in Israel began handing down sometimes-contradictory rulings on whether New York's water needed to be filtered. As with the original Talmudic debates, the distinctions rendered for various situations turned out to be superfine, with clashing judgments on whether unfiltered city water can be used to cook, wash dishes, brush teeth, even shower, and whether Jews could filter water on the Sabbath since such an activity might constitute an obscure form of forbidden work.

  Rabbi Yisroel Belsky, a leader of the Torah Vodaath rabbinical seminary and an important voice on kosher matters, told me there was no requirement to check for things that were impossible to see before there were microscopes. “If everybody goes around thinking that whoever doesn't filter water is actually eating things that are treyf,” he said, using a word for unkosher, “there will probably be all kinds of disputes between individuals and marriage problems that can cause a cleavage.” Nevertheless, he went along with the recommendation—as a recommendation, not a prohibition—so that communal uniformity and peace could be sustained.

  The discovery changed the daily lives of tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews across the city. Jews worried that they might violate the kashruth laws—or worse, that they might cause their guests to sin— summoned plumbers to install water filters. Dozens of restaurants and food shops such as Negev Home Made Foods in Midwood did the same, and posted signs in their windows trumpeting their water as filtered. In Brooklyn, a landlord started a firm overnight that he called Eshel Filters, and the company adopted as its slogan “The bug stops here.” One September, just before the Sukkot holidays, when many Jews invite neighbors over for a light meal, the company installed thirty filters a day ranging in cost from $99 to $1,150. Many homeowners held off, but in time the communal pressure became insurmountable. Even if you thought the water issue was a tempest in a teapot, what if your friends, relatives, or guests took it seriously and might not eat at your table? As a result, an entirely new standard was now being set for what constitutes a kosher kitchen. “I don't want people in the community to be uncomfortable in my home,” Laurie Tobias Cohen, an Orthodox Jewish woman who is executive director of the Lower East Side Conservancy, told me, explaining why she put a filter on the faucet of her apartment in Manhattan's Washington Heights.

  The dispute charmed me in its particular details but did not surprise me. As a yeshiva student I grew up in the Orthodox world, and as a journalist for almost forty years I have periodically covered controversies within its colorful if sometimes esoteric culture. In writing about immigrants in New York, I was drawn to Orthodox Jews because they are an expression of a group that over the generations here has steadfastly rejected many—though far from all—of the trappings of assimilation while maintaining an identity with many similarities to that of their ancestors who came over from Russia and Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s. While other Jews who shared the same immigrant ancestors embraced secular American life with full-throated enthusiasm, they kept the faith, and one contemporary expression was the filtering of water. “In a society where people feel via the Internet and television their very values are under attack, there's a need for people to reassert their level of religiosity,” William Helmreich, the professor of sociology and Judaic studies at the City University of New York, told me. “And one way this is done is by discovering new restrictions which give people the opportunity to demonstrate their adherence to faith.”

  Just a year before the crustacean brouhaha, I had written about another startling and seemingly anachronistic tempest—a book banning, in this case the rabbinical banning of an obscure tome called Making of a Godol: A Study in the Lives of Great Torah Personalities, which had become the Lady Chatterley's Lover of the Orthodox world. It was not an erotic potboiler but rather a respected Talmudic scholar's affectionate biography of an esteemed Lithuanian rabbi who had the good fortune to meet up with some of the most revered Torah scholars of his time. What made the book so controversial was that its portraits of rabbis were not typical saintly idealizations. The Lithuanian sages—a godol is a great sage—are shown wrestling with the lures of secular life and with their own sometimes crusty personalities. Even as they display remarkable analytic powers in tackling Talmud, they read Tolstoy, have relatives tempted by communism, write love letters to their fiancées, are mercurial and moody. The response by other sages was Deuteronomy-like. The head of a yeshiva in Brooklyn said that it would be better to buy a crucifix than to read the book, and twenty-three leading American and Israeli rabbis issued an edict condemning it. The author eventually softened the portraits.

  As with the controversy on filtering water, it dawned on me that something bigger was going on in the Orthodox world, something that seemed to testify to the increasing self-confidence of more zealously observant Jews. They had a right to be assertive because they are becoming a larger proportion of the city's remaining Jews. The number of Jews has been declining since 1957, when 2 million New Yorkers, or one out of every four, was Jewish. In a 2002 survey by UJA-Federation of New York, the number had dipped below 1 million. New York still had the world's largest Jewish population—more than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv— but it was half of what it had been fifty years earlier. Prospering Jews, like prospering Americans of all kinds, were moving to the suburbs, and the New York metropolitan area—as a whole—has roughly the same number of Jews it did decades ago. But far fewer live within the city's boundaries. The Bronx, once practically a shtetl, with large colonies along the Grand Concourse and Pelham Parkway, now has only about 45,000 Jews, mostly in an enclave in the northwestern Riverdale section and in aging numbers in Co-op City. That figure is scarcely more than the number of Jews in Staten Island.

  The study's figures suggested tectonic shifts in an ethnic and religious group that had shaped the culture, music, language, politics, and very accent of the city itself. The proportion of Jews who call themselves Orthodox continued to grow over the previous decade, and by 2002 there were 331,200 Orthodox Jews, a third of the city's Jewish population. Although the earlier, 1991, survey did not specifically count the number of Orthodox Jews within the city's bound
aries, the proportion of Orthodox in a region encompassing the city's five boroughs and three suburban counties was measured in both surveys, and that increased from 19 percent to 27 percent. One impressive yardstick of the ascendance is the increase in the number of yeshivas in just a decade, from 172 in the city in 1991–92, with 58,959 students, to 221 schools with 68,604 students in 2001.

  With growing self-assurance, the Orthodox have become far more conspicuous and forceful about their beliefs. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Manhattan and the Bronx, a time when the brutal consequences of anti-Semitism were fresh in Jewish minds, a Jew in a yarmulke was a rare sight in all but a handful of neighborhoods. Today, Orthodox Jews not only wear yarmulkes on the subways, in theaters, and at work in white-shoe law firms, but on the Sabbath they can be seen walking along sidewalks with prayer shawls draped over their shoulders, an open—and detractors might say brazen—declaration of arrival. On Simchat Torah, the holiday celebrating the start of another year's cycle of Torah readings, observant Jews all over the city take their Torahs out into the streets to dance and revel in frenzied abandon.

  In the bustle and clamor of a Manhattan workday, at the most prestigious law firms, brokerages, and banks, thousands of Jewish New Yorkers now take time out from their jobs to say the required afternoon and evening prayers with one another. At the global law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges in the General Motors Building, Jewish men from around the neighborhood gather just before sunset in the twenty-eighth-floor office of one of the firm's partners. There, beside tall windows overlooking the groves of Central Park and the swirl of its ice rink, prayer books are passed out, skullcaps are put on, and the men murmur their obligatory prayers. There are two daily services in General Motors and two in the Empire State Building—one in a garment manufacturer's conference room on the fiftieth floor, in Sephardic style, and the other on the sixth floor, in Ashkenazic style. Such profusion seems to illustrate the old joke about the Jew stranded on a desert island who builds two synagogues because the second is “the one I won't go to.” Indeed, a web-site known as GoDaven.com lists 195 places in Manhattan where Jews can find an afternoon minyan, the quorum of ten preferred for prayer.