Ai yi yi. Zeta Beta Tau. What have they done to my little Yiddish boy?
I sent my son to college to learn to read and write and now he’s dating shiksas on Yom Kippur night.
The Himalaya-climbing Jewish mother’s motivation for so arduous a trek, however, is also to scold her son, to heap guilt on him for leaving his faith, yes, but likely even more for leaving her! This, like the joke about the grandmother complaining about a lost hat after her grandson has nearly drowned, is essentially all about a satirized image of maternal “Jewish” traits.
Two Jewish mothers see each other walking down a street. The first gives the second an effusive mazel tov on the engagement of her daughter. “How did you know my daughter was engaged?” the second woman asks the first, who says, “I read the announcement in the paper. And she’s marrying a doctor!” “Yes,” the proud mother says. The other woman goes on, “And wasn’t this the same daughter who was married once before to a lawyer?” “Yes,” says the mother of the bride-to-be. “You have a good memory. That marriage, unfortunately, didn’t work out.” The first woman adds, “And this is the same daughter who was married to an accountant, no?” “Yes. You’re right again,” says the mother, sighing and adding, “That, too, didn’t work out.” Whereupon the first woman enthuses, “From one daughter such naches!”
The joke begins with celebration and ends with the Yiddish word naches, a word used to describe the joy and pride a parent derives from a child’s accomplishments—apparently in this case, at least to the well-wisher, one unmarred by divorces. Embedded in that Yiddish word is a whole panoply of Jewish cultural values unto the generations. Naches is central to bubbies, too, of course, in the line about the Jewish grandmother who says to another Jewish woman of her vintage, “So if you didn’t want me to show you photos of my grandchildren, why did you say hello to me?” My brother Victor reported to me that he saw a Jewish grandmother carrying an enormous purse with large-sized photos of her grandchildren pasted on the outside. Curious as to what she might have been hauling in the large handbag, he asked her. Her quick response: “Nothing. I carry it so everyone can see my grandkids.”
Naches often goes back to accomplishments. Jewish mothers or grandmothers can be masterful at mentioning a son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter’s achievements—especially if they are academic (“He happens not only to have graduated with honors, but is also in a special club called Phi Beta Kappa!”) or professional (“She just finished her residency. I can’t remember the specialty, though I know it’s a very very important one”). Naches comes, of course, in many forms and varieties, including who (or what, as in career or vocation) a child or grandchild marries. When Michael Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, ran against George W. Bush and Jews found out his wife, Kitty, was Jewish, they spoke about “naches from Dukakis.” The highest form of naches for a Jewish American mother or grandmother, obviously, would be to have a child grow up to be the first Jewish leader of the free world.
A Jewish mother is sitting at her daughter’s inauguration as the nation’s first Jewish president. At the inauguration, a stranger leans over and whispers in the mother’s ear, “You must be so proud. Your daughter is the president of the United States!” Whereupon the Jewish mother responds, “Yes. But her brother is a doctor!”
For a daughter to marry a doctor was, for many years, for many Jews, the highest form of naches short of having a son who managed to become one. Just as there often appears to me to be a greater number than there used to be of Jewish alcoholics—recall the old adage “the shicker is the goy,” meaning “the drunk is the non-Jew”), there has also been a decrease in the number of Jewish doctors. Is this loss of Jewish identity? Assimilation? Lower physician pay?
If you ask the question at what stage a fetus becomes viable for Jews, you still hear the answer “after med school.” Yet the novelist Amy Tan told me she heard the same joke told about Chinese Americans. You could also probably, in today’s world, update the naches joke to a Jewish woman congratulating another on the engagement of her son to a doctor of the same sex.
Jackie Mason delivered a line about how Jewish male children were hounded by their mothers to become doctors; and, if they couldn’t become doctors, they could, according to Mason, at least become lawyers; and if they couldn’t become doctors or lawyers and were, in his word “retarded,” they could become accountants.
Could Jackie Mason get away without giving offense with a word like “retarded” in today’s politically-sensitive-to-language world? Racial jokes also fall into that category.
The great short story writer Grace Paley, a proud Jewish mother, spoke glowingly to me of having a black grandchild. She, like many Jewish mothers of her generation and beyond, who were political activists and strongly sympathetic to civil rights issues, got naches from children they brought up as nonbigoted and progressive, who married someone black. By contrast, there were other Jewish mothers who went into a how-can-you-do-this-to-me-or-us howling response. This joke is all too revealing of an attitude among some urban and suburban Jews (and whites in general) of the pre—and even post—Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner era, a film in which a young daughter brings home the man she has fallen in love with, a black doctor, played by Sidney Poitier.
A husband of a different religion was all too often seen by Jews as being bad for the Jews and, until recent years, even a shanda (a shame or a scandal), especially among the more religious. When a Jewish guy in my Cleveland neighborhood, where I grew up, married out of the faith, his parents sat shiva and mourned him as dead. My mother told me of another Jewish mother who snuck into the church to see her son bowing down with his bride at the altar before the priest who was marrying them. My Yiddishe momme solemnly told me how that Jewish mother died on the spot from a heart attack, a tale she had heard from other Jewish mothers. Of course, years later, I found this story to be untrue, since the mother had simply moved away to another neighborhood and was still very much alive.
A boy’s mother takes him to his first day of school and reassuringly says, before dropping him off, “Please, bubbeleh, have a wonderful day at school. Enjoy! And, bubbeleh, please be sure to eat all of the lunch I packed for you. I’ll be waiting to pick you up as soon as school is over. I love you, bubbeleh!” When school is out, the mother is there. She kisses her son and eagerly asks, “How was school, bubbeleh?” “Fine,” the boy answers. “And what did you learn in school, bubbeleh?” The boy answers, “I learned my name is not bubbeleh.”
The meaning behind the obvious humor of a boy knowing himself only as “bubbeleh” speaks volumes. That Yiddish word is derived from “bubbe,” the word for grandmother. Like mameleh, the word my father called his first granddaughter, my niece Sheryl (named for her grandmother Sarah), bubbeleh is a word of tenderness and adoration. It is a word redolent of naches and it unites generations etymologically and across genders. I have an odd stray memory of the singer Neil Diamond calling Henry Winkler (the Fonz in Happy Days) bubbeleh. I have another of a Jewish friend proudly announcing to his young son, while the two were watching Happy Days, that “the Fonz is Jewish.” That naches derived from the fact that there exists association with fellow Jews that can actually go nearly as far as maternal naches. Adam Sandler built a number of versions of his famous Hanukkah song around it. But naches and its connection to loving Jewish mothers and grandmothers is but one side of the equation. Jewish mothers, especially, are often portrayed in Jewish jokes as overly critical, impossibly demanding nags who are the bane of their children’s lives.
Before I get to that other side—a side that has produced much material for jokes, parody, satire, cartoons, and all varieties of hyperbole—I want to relate a true Jewish mother story my older daughter told me. The story is about a friend of hers, let’s call her Amy, who met a stylish, older Jewish woman at a luncheon. After starting a conversation with Amy, the older Jewish woman determined that Amy was single and the same age as her son. She began to rhapsodize about her son
. How charming and intelligent and charismatic and accomplished he was! But, above all, how incredibly handsome. “A twin to JFK Jr.,” she insisted. She went on: “In fact, you would not believe how much those two look alike. Like identical twins. You couldn’t possibly tell them apart. When I saw the photos of JKF Jr. after he died I nearly fainted. My son looks just like him. I warn him against, God forbid, becoming a narcissist. But not to worry. He is kindhearted. Tall, dark, handsome, and kindhearted. Can you do any better than that?”
So the two are fixed up. Amy is excited. She goes to the door expecting to see a JFK Jr. doppelgänger, a living incarnation or replication of the scion of our thirty-fifth president and Jackie O. “Instead,” she tells my daughter, “he was the size of a jockey. With a sunken, caved-in chest, acne, and a nose that nearly took over his face.”
When I heard this story from her, my daughter asked me, “How could this mother have been so blind, Dad? Do you really think she believed her son looked like JFK Jr.’s twin?”
“Well,” I said. “She is a Jewish mother.”
The other side of the equation is with the Jewish mothers and grandmothers who are often portrayed, even those with free-flowing love and naches, as putting enormous and guilt-heavy demands on their children and grandchildren, smothering them, and even being relentless and ruthless. The object of a lot of that kind of behavior, much Jewish humor reveals, is (drumbeat) naches! The maternal desire for naches can be tied to incessant disapproval of nearly everything, including mate choices.
A young Jewish man is in a synagogue at a Friday-night service. The rabbi cannot help but notice from the pulpit that the young man looks sad and unhappy. When the service ends, the rabbi goes to him. “You look so sad,” the compassionate rabbi says. “What’s eating you?” The man frowns and proceeds to tell the rabbi how he has been romantically involved with a number of women, how he took each home to meet his mother, and how she disliked every one of them. The rabbi has a suggestion. With the Internet the young man can find someone who has interests in common with his mother. Couldn’t that make a difference? The young man is grateful and promises to follow the rabbi’s advice. When he appears at services weeks later, the rabbi notices a countenance on him even more doleful. The rabbi goes over to him after the service ends and asks, “What happened? I thought you were going to follow my advice?” “I did,” says the young man. “I found a woman who not only had interests like my mother. She looked like my mother, spoke like her, even cooked like her.” The rabbi is puzzled. “So what was the problem?” The young man says: “My father disliked her.”
A woman friend of mine, married for decades to her cardiologist husband, tells the tale of being at her in-laws’ fiftieth anniversary party. Her husband, her often abrasive mother-in-law, and she were conversing by themselves when, unexpectedly and utterly out of character, her mother-in-law said, “I don’t know how she does it, but every year your wife gets better looking.” Almost in shock, my woman friend blurted out, “Why, Mom. That’s the nicest thing you have ever said to me.” At which point her mother-in-law snapped, “I wasn’t talking to you!”
A young Jewish man tells his mother he plans on marrying and invites her to meet his chosen bride-to-be. He asks the bride-to-be and two other attractive women friends of hers to stand in a row, and after his mother arrives, he asks her if she can pick out the woman he plans on marrying. Without hesitation, his mother goes right to the bride-to-be and says “Her!” The son is dumbfounded and wants to know how his mother could possibly have selected the right woman so quickly and unerringly. His mother answers: “She’s the one I didn’t like.”
Jewish mothers and Jewish grandmothers are as often portrayed as being as disapproving and difficult as they are overbearing, impossible, martyrlike, and petty. They are seen as insufferable, even though they are also overly loving and protective, with over-the-top naches bragging and incomparable mother hennishness.
A Jewish man goes to see his psychiatrist and tells him, right off, that he had a dream the night before that the psychiatrist was his mother. “Okay,” the psychiatrist says. “Let’s find out what this means. Tell me everything you did from the time you woke up this morning until you came here. Everything!” The Jewish man begins, “Well, let’s see. First I got out of bed, then I showered and shaved, combed my hair and got dressed, and went downstairs and had a doughnut.” Whereupon the shrink fires back at him, “You call that a breakfast!”
The guilt-heaping Jewish mother can be seen in the now classic comic dialogue between the landmark duo of Elaine May and Mike Nichols. May plays the archetypal Jewish mother and Nichols plays her son Arthur, a rocket scientist. Their phone conversation is built entirely on the mother’s haranguing her son for not calling. At the beginning of the skit, the mother says: “It’s your mother. Remember me?” and, later, when her son tells her he feels “awful” for not calling her, she says, “If only I could believe that. I’d be the happiest woman in the world.” Think of the paradox. A child’s guilt for not attending to the need of his Jewish mother equals her supreme happiness.
And speaking of archetypal guilt-inducing mothers, Philip Roth definitely put a premium on them with Alexander Portnoy’s mother, Sophie.
Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was a shocking novel when it first appeared back in 1969, with all of its emphasis on masturbation and horniness (“Did Roth’s character really have sex with a piece of liver?” a Gentile woman friend of mine asked me). A story I enjoy telling, which I told Roth in one of the interviews we did on air, was about the time I went into a local public library with my then teenage daughter to look for books for her to read. There, in a section marked books for teens, was Portnoy’s Complaint.
Portnoy’s Complaint gave new meaning to the word “phallocentric,” but it also took on the caricature of the Jewish mother in Sophie, who, holding a knife while her son refuses to eat, appeared to be threatening him with literal castration—possibly even murder. This was the same mother who knew no limit in praising her darling.
A long monologue full of shtick, the novel includes Portnoy ranting to his psychiatrist about his Jewish mother telling him that she met another Jewish mother on the street and heard the other Jewish mother brag about her son. This son, with the Yiddish phallic name of Seymour Schmuck, is a world-famous surgeon with an incredible home and gorgeous, brilliant daughters who gives his parents bountiful, inestimable naches.
“Do you remember Seymour Schmuck, Alex?” she asks me, or Aaron Putz or Howard Shlong, or some yo-yo I am supposed to have known in grade school twenty-five years ago, and of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. “Well, I met his mother on the street today, and she told me that Seymour is now the biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere. He owns six different split-level ranch-type houses made all of fieldstone in Livingston, and belongs to the boards of eleven synagogues, all brand new and designed by Marc Kugel, and his two little daughters . . . are so beautiful that they are already under contract to Metro, and so brilliant that they should be in college . . . And how happy he makes his parents!” Alex concludes to his shrink, “And you know, the implication is, when are you going to get married already. In Newark and the surrounding suburbs this is apparently the question on everybody’s lips: WHEN IS ALEXANDER PORTNOY GOING TO STOP BEING SELFISH AND GIVE HIS PARENTS, WHO ARE SUCH WONDERFUL PEOPLE, GRANDCHILDREN?”
Roth does not limit his skewering of Jewish mothers in Portnoy’s Complaint to the guilt-heaping, naches-hungry Sophie. He also has his main character, Alex, tell of a young boy named Ronald Nimkin, a good, obedient Jewish boy who has always been totally compliant with his mother’s demands, and who commits suicide. Ronald hangs himself from the shower head. A dutiful boy right to the end, he has a note pinned to his chest that reads: “Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mahjongg rules to the game tonight.”
A poignant scene. A man is on his deathbed with his loving daughter by his side. It is clear he is fading fast and his death is drawing n
igh. With his voice weak and barely audible, he suddenly tells his daughter he smells kugel. “Yes,” she says. “Mom is making a kugel.” Could she, he asks his daughter, get him a piece so, before he dies, he could have a final taste of his wife’s delicious kugel? “Of course, Daddy,” she says as she bounds over to the kitchen to fulfill her father’s dying wish. In the meantime, her father is barely hanging on, and when she returns she sits down again at his bedside and folds her hands but says nothing. Barely able to utter the words, he asks, “Where’s the kugel?” His daughter answers, “Mom says it’s for after.”
We can substitute the last two words, “for after,” in the kugel joke with “for the shiva.” The real point of the joke is the Jewish mother being so practical-minded and harsh that she denies her husband’s deathbed wish just to taste the kugel she is preparing for the company who will visit and pay their respects after he is gone.
This could easily be categorized as a Jewish-wife joke. But the word “mom” appears in it twice, and as we saw with Sophie Portnoy, food for the traditional Jewish mother can be a matter of life or death. The Yiddish phrase ess, ess, mayn kind, meaning “eat, eat, my child,” is central to the role of the archetypal Jewish mother who is both nurturing, wanting her child to eat for growth and health, but also commanding, ordering the child to eat lest (God forbid!) growth be stunted or health be affected. As a boy, I would hear Jewish mothers, including my own, talk about their children being “good eaters” or “bad eaters.”
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