I’m not even sure they knew what Hillel House was (a Jewish campus organization). But I deliberately chose those wry words. My feelings of exclusion may have had as much to do with class as with being the lone Jew in a clique of WASPs.
A young Jewish man escapes the Holocaust and makes his way to England, where he manages, through sheer entrepreneurial genius, to make a fortune. His old widower father remains behind in the Warsaw ghetto and the young man is able to pay for an incredible, daring, and expensive airlift to rescue him. Once his father is safe in England, the young man tells him he must think of himself as an Englishman. “That is what I am now, Papa,” he explains to the old man. “This land has given me refuge and a haven and I have succeeded here. I am, by God, an Englishman and you must think of yourself as one from now on, too.”
He takes his father to Bond Street and has him fitted for and dressed in a brand-new expensive suit in a haberdashery there. Then he takes him to a fancy tonsorial place where the old man is put in the barber chair and the hair cutter begins cutting the old man’s payos, the locks of hair worn by religious Hasidim. The father is suddenly sobbing convulsively and his son, with deep compassion as he watches his father’s hair locks tumble to the floor, sympathetically asks: “What, Papa? Are you crying because you feel you are losing your Jewish identity?” The old man shakes his head, sniffs, and, with another convulsive sob, says: “No, son. I’m crying because we lost India.”
In 2005, I told that joke on the air to the Indian author Vikram Seth when we discussed Two Lives, the memoir he wrote about the marriage of his England-based uncle to a Holocaust survivor. I also told it off the air to Salman Rushdie, who was born in India and then lived in England. Both Seth and Rushdie seemed to relish the joke and so do I. It is clearly an assimilation joke but one rendered by a cultural contrast that humorously, and painfully, shows how fast assimilation can take place for Jews, especially in the wake of something as catastrophic as the Shoah. Yet there is also a recognition of an ability Jews have possessed over centuries to adapt to and even embrace other cultures—especially those that provide opportunities to succeed without being discriminated against, put into a ghetto, or murdered.
I taught a course in the 1970s on Jewish writers. A leading minister of a major local church attended all of the classes. In the last class he surprised all of us by announcing that he had been born in Holland, raised a Jew, and, along with his entire family, converted to Christianity following their escape from the Nazis. When I asked what drew him to take a class in Jewish authors, he smiled and said, “I kind of got tired of being around all those goyim.”
Mice are running rampant all over the synagogue. Women are frightened, children are racing for cover, and the men have no notion what to do.
“Don’t worry,” the rabbi announces. “I’ll take care of it.”
The next day the mice are gone. The people in the synagogue are amazed! Finally, an older man stands up in the middle of a service and asks, “Rabbi, how did you do it? How did you get rid of all those mice?”
“Easy,” the Rabbi answers. “I bar mitzvahed them. And as everyone knows, once they’re bar mitzvahed, they never come back.”
Creating humor out of Jews leaving their religion is yet another way of lamenting assimilation and the escape from a Jewish life, in this case one anchored in the shul (temple or synagogue). Truth be told, many young Jewish boys, especially if they are from a Reform or secular-leaning family background, scurry off from religious involvement once they have a bar mitzvah, the party, and have been showered with money and gifts. I inevitably think of the joke about the boy on the day of his bar mitzvah who is told he is now a man and will be connected from that day forward, for the rest of his life, to all previous generations. The kid responds: “Today I am a man. Tomorrow I return to the seventh grade.”
I heard the joke about the rabbi getting rid of the synagogue’s mice many years ago, and I saw it retold by Marlo Thomas in a tribute she wrote following the death of Sid Caesar, the great Jewish comedian of Your Show of Shows. It was, she said, a favorite joke of Caesar’s. Thomas is the daughter of Danny Thomas, a Lebanese American comedian who, like Garry Marshall of Happy Days fame, was constantly mistaken for a Jew.
I need briefly to get off the main topic because Marlo Thomas reminds me of a story I tell that has nothing to do with Jews or Jews and generations or Jews and assimilation or Yiddish, all of which I will get back to. The story, told to me by the award-winning fiction writer Tobias Wolff at an annual authors and ideas festival in Pebble Beach, was about Ronald Reagan, when he was president of the United States. President Reagan was getting a briefing by the Lebanese ambassador to the U.S. Those in attendance could not get over how attentive he was as the ambassador went into details with a set of maps showing the difficult geopolitical turmoil Lebanon was facing. They all claimed they had rarely seen President Reagan look so rapt and intense. When the ambassador’s briefing ended, Reagan went running up to him exclaiming, “Do you have any idea how much you look like Danny Thomas?”
An old Jewish man is about to testify in a courtroom trial and the examining attorney asks him to state his name for the court. He answers: “Isadore Rubin.” Then the attorney asks him to state his age. “Kenahora. I’m ninety-three,” says Mr. Rubin. The judge says to the attorney, “Please tell Mr. Rubin simply to state his age.” He asks the lawyer to redirect and the lawyer obligingly asks, “Mr. Rubin. Would you kindly state your age for the court?” Mr. Rubin responds: “Kenahora. I’m ninety-three.” The judge is immediate in his response, saying, “Mr, Rubin. You must simply answer the question directly and not add anything. If you do so again, I will be compelled to find you in contempt.” A young Jewish lawyer who is seated in the courtroom and has been observing all this, suddenly, boldly comes forward and faces the judge. “Your Honor,” he begins. “I believe, if you will permit me, I can solve this problem if you will allow me to question the witness.” The judge looks at the young man with skepticism, but says, “This is highly unorthodox but I will allow it.” Whereupon the young Jew turns to the old Jew and says: “Mr. Rubin. Kenahora! How old are you?”
This famous story, a version of which is told by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish, is really about the use of the Yiddish word kenahora, a word traditionally used to ward off evil, such as the father or mother of a newborn saying, “We have, kenahora, a beautiful, healthy baby.”
Think, too, of the great stand-up comic Myron Cohen telling the joke about an older Jewish man in Miami who suffers a heart attack right on Collins Avenue and is helped to a stretcher by a young Jewish physician, who puts a pillow under the elderly man’s head and asks: “Are you comfortable?” The old Jew responds, with a Yiddish inflection, “I make a living.”
That joke, too, has its obvious charm. Aside from showing how financial status takes precedence in the old man’s view of the world, the joke links an old Jew and his Yiddish idiom to a young Jew who is there to assist and care for him. It is no accident that Myron Cohen’s joke and the kenahora joke feature a doctor and a lawyer as members of a younger generation of Jews coming to the assistance of older Jews.
An elderly lady on a plane gets up from her seat and asks a young male passenger in a seat farther up in the plane if he is Jewish. “No, ma’am,” he responds, and she goes back to her seat, only to return a few minutes later and ask the same stranger again if he is Jewish. Once more, he tells her he is not and she returns to her seat. When she gets up a third time and asks him, he shrugs his shoulders in frustration, looks to those seated next to him as if to say “what the hell,” and says to her, “Yes. Yes, I am.” The old lady says: “Funny. You don’t look it.”
My mother, Betty Krasny, loved telling that joke. It has a quaintness to it that seems to be connected to her generation and yet it still holds up like fine wine.
And speaking of fine wine, did you hear about the merger of Manishevitz and Christian Brothers? They are calling the new company Manishaygetz. Only those yo
unger generationals who know the word “shegetz” means a Gentile male would be able to understand that joke without an explanation.
Two men are arguing heatedly over how to pronounce the name of America’s fiftieth state. One man says it’s “Hawaii,” the other insists “Havaii.” They argue. They make a large wager. Then they see a long-bearded rabbinic-looking figure who seems like a sage, and one of the men points to him and says to the other, “Let’s have him decide.” They agree that the bet will be settled by the older man and they put the question to him. Hawaii or Havaii? The old man stares off contemplatively into the distance, tugs at his beard, and then quickly pronounces, “Havaii.” The winner of the bet is ecstatic. He says, “Thank you!” The old man responds: “You’re velcome.”
Just a silly joke based on a Yiddish accent and pronunciation, right? Yes. Or so it might seem. A simple joke based on a Yiddish accent would be more like the one about the Jewish immigrant taking an oral exam in his English as a Second Language class who is asked to spell “cultivate,” and spells it correctly. He is then asked to use the word in a sentence, and, with a big smile, responds: “Last vinter on a very cold day, I vas vaiting for a bus, but it was too cultivate, so I took the subway.”
A rabbi, as was often customary in the world of the shtetl, listens as two men present to him their individual versions of a money dispute. As the two men relate their conflicting narratives, the rabbi’s wife stands nearby, within earshot. When the first man is done with his side of the story, the rabbi exclaims, “You’re right!” But then, after the second man concludes his side, the rabbi also exclaims, “You’re right!” Overhearing all this, the rabbi’s wife speaks up and says, “How can they both be right? They are in total disagreement.” The rabbi turns to his wife and says, “You’re right, too!”
Is the joke saying that the rabbi is a pushover, inclined simply to agree with whoever is presenting a specific point of view? Or is it simply funny because of the impossibility of all three being right? What I believe is really going on in this joke may be a lesson for all of us from a rabbi, who, remember, is first a teacher (the word “rabbi” itself means teacher). Embedded in the joke are centuries of rabbinical commentary on religious arguments, all included in the Midrash—or Jewish commentaries. Midrash, like the Thomas Aquinas question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, is essentially about interpretations of biblical text, also called hermeneutics. The first time I heard that word I was in a graduate seminar, and half-asleep from my prof’s droning voice. I asked him to please repeat Herman’s last name. The message of the joke, then, is the impossibility of truly interpreting Midrash, notwithstanding all of the tomes of rabbinic commentaries. No angels can dance on the head of a pin, or one can, or an infinite number can. Every answer is “right,” so the joke, like the Hawaii/Havaii one, reveals the ambiguity of truth and connects us back to Jewish tradition. Why does a Jew answer every question with another question? The answer (preferably voiced aggressively) is: Why shouldn’t a Jew answer every question with another question?
I learned Hebrew as a boy with Ashkenazi pronunciation and then had to switch to Sephardic when that became customary and accepted. Can we really say Sephardic pronunciation is correct, especially to those who continue to use Ashkenazi? The switch confused me as a kid. I asked the rabbi if God was as apt to hear prayers in Sephardic as he had been in Ashkenazi. Many years after, I noticed that my father, in the Jewish home, was still saying prayers with Ashkenazi pronunciation. When I asked him why, since, like everyone else, he had been praying for years in Sephardic, he said, “You always remember to pray in the first language you learn.” In those later years, he had also gone back regularly to reading the Bible. When I asked him why, he said he was studying for his final exams.
An older Jewish woman on a bus says to a younger woman, “If you knew what I had, you would give up your seat to me.” The conscience-stricken younger woman does so and the older woman sits down as the bus rambles on until she gets up and says to the bus driver, “If you knew what I have, you would come to an immediate stop at the next intersection.” Even though it is not a regular stop on his route, the bus driver, a compassionate man, defies the rules and brings the bus to a halt. As he opens the door for the woman and courteously walks her down the steps of the bus, he asks her, “Could you, please, tell me what it is you have?” Stepping down and leaving the bus, she loudly responds, “Chutzpah!”
“Chutzpah” means gall or brazenness—some used to say you couldn’t really possess it if you didn’t pronounce it right. The definition of “chutzpah”? A kid who kills both his parents and pleads to a judge for leniency because he is an orphan. This and other Yiddish-word-based jokes culminate in a single Yiddish-word punch line, as in the joke ending in goyishe kop. The Yiddish is what separates the woman from the other characters. The punch relies not only on the dramatic-sounding word but also on its manifold associations.
An old Jewish man, Teitlebaum, is on his deathbed. His entire family is with him at his side as he lies at death’s door. He has lived the life, his entire adult life, of a shayner Yid, a beautiful Jew, a life of rectitude, trustworthiness, honor, and respect, never missing a Friday-night or a Saturday-morning service and praying, davening piously, every morning and evening. His family is bewildered and frankly horrified when he asks, as his dying wish, to go through a conversion to Christianity. He tells them to get a priest or a minister, it doesn’t matter, he simply must be converted to the faith of Christ before he passes on. Knowing him to be unwavering in his decisions and also wanting to honor his deathbed wish, the family finds a Christian reverend who performs a deathbed conversion. The reverend leaves. The family cannot believe what has occurred. “Why, Pop?” his oldest son asks. “Why, after being a religious Jew all of your life, did you want to convert?” The old man smiles faintly and says, with the last breaths of his life, “Better one of them than one of us.”
Loyalty to one’s Jewish identity is a strong and enduring Jewish value. What the joke is also telling us is that Teitlebaum’s Jewish identity, even with conversion, cannot be altered. Jewish identity can be tenacious, inescapable (like the old joke about the Jew who tells his friend he has completely shed his Jewish identity, when the two see a man resembling Quasimodo and the friend says, “And that guy says he’s not a hunchback”). Teitelbaum is a good Jew his entire life, and being a good Jew, in the end, means loyalty to the tribe.
Tribal (and I don’t mean Navajo or Apache) loyalty was tied for over a millennium to mamaloshen, the Yiddish word for the mother tongue. It was the native language for most European Jews until the Holocaust.
Ephraim Kishon, one of Israel’s great humorists, who escaped the firing squad in a concentration camp because of his ability to play chess, once described Israel as “the only place on earth where the people read English, write in Hebrew, and joke in Yiddish.” The ranks of Yiddish speakers, or even those who understand Yiddish, have, of course, thinned to meager numbers—though many Yiddish words have become part of the English lexicon. Yet the values of the tribe remain even after the language has nearly disappeared.
I remember watching Woody Allen’s Love and Death back in 1975, at a matinee in a small movie theater in the town of Novato, California. Few people were in the theater, and at one point, the character played by Woody takes the hand of a woman clearly cast for her less-than-fetching looks. He kisses it and tells her it is a pleasure to meet “the Countess Mieskeit.” The Yiddish word for a homely woman, mieskeit, was one I hadn’t heard in years. An admittedly sexist and politically incorrect word by today’s standards, it caused me to laugh out loud and the few other matinee goers to look at me in bewilderment. Though they had no idea why I was laughing, I was experiencing, courtesy of Woody Allen, a communal memory.
Cultural, social, even political differences between Jews and Gentiles (an old adage about American Jews is they earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans) are satirized, but ultimately it is Yiddish, a l
anguage few young Jews now know or understand, that separates not only the Jew from the Gentile but generations of Jews from each other.
When my friend Michael Murphy, the cofounder of the Esalen Institute, went to Hollywood in 2009 to work on the script of the film based on his novel Golf and the Kingdom, he assured me that he was doing what he needed to do to make the movie a success—he was learning Yiddish. I told Michael that Yiddish is no longer the mother tongue in Hollywood. There are still a lot of Jews there, but most are too young to know much, if any, Yiddish.
A tough New York Jew is captured by cannibals. The cannibals take him into their village, where they also have, tied and bound, a Frenchman and a German. A cannibal leader in a loincloth steps forward and says to the trio, in fluent English, as he points to a huge boiling cauldron of vegetables, “Gentlemen, we are going to cook you in that giant pot you see over there and eat you. But before we do, we will strip off your skin and build a canoe from it. The canoe will be in our tribe for generations. But first, since I was educated in the West before returning to my tribe, I must tell you we are humane cannibals and under my leadership we will let each of you choose the manner in which you will die.” Rapidly, the German, assuming they do not have a luger, asks to be shot by one. The chief cannibal sends one of his fellow natives to fetch a gun and they kill the German with it. Then the Frenchman, assuming they do not have a guillotine, asks for death by that device. The chief cannibal quickly lops off the Frenchman’s head. Then it is the tough New York Jew’s turn, and he asks, in a thick New York accent, for a fork. The head cannibal, puzzled, repeats, “A fork?” and the tough New York Jew says, again, “Yeah. A fork.” Whereupon, surprisingly, the cannibal leader pulls a fork out from his loincloth and hands it to the tough New York Jew—who proceeds to stab himself deeply and repeatedly in the chest, angrily shouting, “HERE’S YOUR FUCKIN’ CANOE.”
Let There Be Laughter Page 10