by David Rakoff
It’s hardly a maverick position to take; any revolution that includes a good carbonara is an awfully easy rampart to storm. It certainly helps that pork chops are so delicious, just one of the heavenly foods that come from what Homer Simpson calls “a wonderful, magical animal.” But that’s not the whole story. Attendant to all of this is the politically romantic and also very real notion that every part of a pig “but the squeal,” as they say, can be eaten and used. Pigs have sustained countless cultures throughout history. The proletariat-nourishing utility of the pig made it the ideal animal for fiery young utopians (back before such activism also comprised the emancipation of other species). Pork served as the ultimate demarcation from the hidebound small-mindedness and superstition of the shtetl. Let Him show Himself and strike them down for eating treyf, if He was so g.d. tangible. Jewish radicals of the Bundist labor movement used to hold Yom Kippur Balls. The gatherings featured music; dancing; mocking Yiddish parodies of Kol Nidre, the penitential prayer at the heart of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar; and most transgressively, food. One such ball in 1890, organized by Russian Jewish anarchists in Philadelphia, was to pointedly include “pork-eating.” At the eleventh hour it was called off, in deference to Sabato Morais, that city’s Orthodox rabbi who had that year successfully mediated a strike by the cloak makers. In his Holocaust memoir, I Shall Live, Henry Orenstein reminisces about how before the war in his Polish town a small but vocal contingent of “nonbelievers,” no more than fifty, would commit the ultimate sin by eating pork on Yom Kippur. Every autumn, the gentile butcher, Mr. Krasnapolski, would ask the author, “Tell me … when is it, this day of the year when Jews are allowed to eat ham?”
Here would probably be a good place to say a brief word about crustaceans because, with the possible exception of the Cajuns, no one loves shrimp as deeply or as truly as the Jews (almost nothing fills me with a twingier regret than my recently determined allergy to the creatures). But the avid consumption of shellfish has its relatively recent roots in the New World Jewish habitat of the beach, and the country-club-striver weddings of the PhilipRothoisie. Among the many tenets of kashrut, it is the proscription against pork that sticks in the mind, for both Jews and Gentiles. Shellfish is nowhere near as freighted as pork. Many a Dungeness devotee would never dream of touching swine. Rabbi X has a colleague, also a prominent and respected cleric, who explains himself with, “I’ll eat shrimp. No Jew ever died refusing to eat shrimp. But pork, never. Shrimp is treyf, but pork is anti-Semitic.”
True enough. When I try to look up jokes about Jews eating pork, I am directed to an embarrassment of neo-Nazi sites, each boasting an exhaustive page of racist humor, with comic gems like: “Why don’t Jews eat pork? Because the Bible forbids cannibalism.” In a few keystrokes, I find myself at another website called www.nukeisrael.com (“exposing the Zionist lobby”), which has a page titled “Jewish Stars Over Hollywood: A look at the hundreds of filthy heb [sic] swine that control the U.S. entertainment business,” listing noted Hebrews like Ellen DeGeneres, who I think is a nice Christian girl from Metairie, Louisiana, and Allen Ginsberg, who probably never set foot in a movie studio in his life and whom they identify, despite his mongrel-hood, as the “all time greatest American poet.”
And yet, with all of this, I almost never feel more Jewish than in that moment just before I am about to eat pork. Allow me to horrify kosher readers when I draw a parallel between that instant and the custom of the breaking of a glass at a Jewish wedding, the perfect illustration of the Jewish worldview. In this somber evocation of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. is a reminder that all joy houses the Newtonian capacity for an equal and opposite sorrow. As a Jew Who Eats Pork, extolling the boundless perfection of the baby pig at NY Noodletown at the corner of Bowery and Bayard necessarily requires a simultaneous split second of silent acknowledgment along with my blithe rhapsody that this is meat ineluctably bound up with my grim history. Otherwise, I’d just be a guy eating pork.
Granted, the Judaism I feel connected to has always been more cultural than religious, but both are predicated on a spirit of dissent, of voluble, welcome disagreement, and an institutionalized and fiercely protected duty to question authority.
(Forgive me, one more: A grandmother playing with her five-year-old grandson on the beach is horrified when a wave comes up and swallows the child whole, dragging him out to sea. Falling to her knees, she addresses the heavens in a state of near hysteria. “Oh God, please return my beloved grandson to me and I will be your devoted supplicant forever and always.” Her entreaty heard, the sky spontaneously clears, a second wave washes up on shore and belches forth the child, returning him unscathed, dry even. The grandmother, elated, faces the horizon once more, and says with the merest trace of impatience, “He had a hat!”)
We are all enfolded, from the protest-too-much anarchists of the nineteenth century at their Yom Kippur Balls, up to the present day with our ever-growing ranks of Buddhists, even including, heaven help us, Republicans (who really ought to know better). We are all Jews. We are the true Big Tent. It is this that I taste: the fact that I do not have to be “on the bus.” I can, in fact, stand by the side of the road with a sign that says DOWN WITH BUSES!—or, more authentically phrased: BUSES? FEH!—and still be able to claim full and proud membership. Which I do, emphatically.
Even when it is an identity foisted upon me by others. A few years back, my first book was translated into German and I was flown over for a tour. I don’t kid myself: the primary reason for their interest in me was precisely because I am Jewish, our extirpated culture being somewhat fetishized in Germany today. I was a phantom talisman, like an ivory-billed woodpecker willingly visiting the strip mall that used to be his swampy habitat, or the walking illustration of that rueful old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chopped down all the trees and then named the streets after them. I spent a week as a Professional Jew.
The fetishization cut both ways. With as much Stockholm syndrome as the next guy, I am not without my own febrile fantasies of racial purity and historical redress (known in the common parlance as a Thing for Blonds). My friend Dan, Catholic but with the handsome Black Irish dark hair and eyes of a hot yeshiva student, filled my head with stories of his many conquests when he lived in Berlin. Conquests he didn’t even have to work at. Apparently the merest possibility that they were bedding down for some restitutionary, penitential face-sucking with a genuine Jewish American boy had German men throwing themselves at him. My charms, such as they were, seemed more historical than erotic. The Germanized Yiddish I spoke to make myself understood to hotel clerks and taxi drivers was met with what can only be described as delight, and a kind of wistful nostalgia for a time no one really remembered anymore, which invariably led to the time none of them seemed capable of forgetting. Every conversation I had began precisely the same way: “How does it feel for you to be here?”
I told them that I was very happy to be in Germany, and indeed I was, although a distinct impediment to comfort never left me, as if I were spending my time walking in shoes of slightly different heights. In the Berlin Zoo, for example, even I, who could not be described as an animal lover, was unnerved by attitudes that seemed to have been barely updated since 1844, when they opened the place. The enclosures and structures were small, rickety, and archaically anthropomorphic. The animals were housed like the humans of their respective countries, the prey adopting the customs of the local predators. The wild boars lived in a small thatched cottage, much like the people who hunt wild boars might have had in the Vienna Woods. The rams made their home atop a fake mountain in a little Tyrolean cabin with latticed windows. It looked just like the kind of place where Heidi and her grandfather might have lived, if Heidi and her grandfather had been curly-horned ungulates who shit indiscriminately all over their schloss.
Strangest of all, however, was the fur rug on the floor of the vulture cage. I swear it, a fur rug in shades of mottled brown and gray with a deep, ragged
, sexy pile that Barbarella might have favored. It seemed an odd choice for an outdoor space, especially an outdoor animal enclosure. Approaching the bars, it became clear that this luxurious carpet was actually a large pile of dead rats and weasels. Some caring zookeeper had pre-killed a multitude of the critters, thoughtfully splitting them open from stem to sternum. A bald-headed bird eyed me casually as he picked at one of these rodent tacos. Giving his beak an upward jerk, a tenacious rat tendon stretched and finally snapped: the bored cashier with her chewing gum.
Morally neutral and completely natural though the food chain may be, and perhaps I’m overestimating the fame of Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece Maus, where the Jewish mice were represented as precisely the vermin the Nazis described them to be, but I can’t help feeling that if I ran the zoo—to quote Dr. Seuss—especially the Berlin Zoo, I would be extra careful about not leaving a pile of corpses lying around.
I take the U-Bahn, the efficient (duh) subway out to Hallesches Tor, to the Jewish Museum or, as it seems to be known, Architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. All around the basement level, which is a series of off-kilter hallways dedicated to the Holocaust, are small notice cards printed with explanation for why Architect Daniel Libeskind designed things in the way that he did. Statements along the lines of, As you travel the Axis of Exile, Mr. Libeskind hopes that through disorientation comes insight. His desire to justify his choices seems reasonable: this was a lucrative and very public gig. But the thinking behind the oddly funhouse atmosphere down here is completely opaque to me. I’m hard-pressed to see why the Holocaust needs to be gussied up with corridors from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s fairly terrible and gripping all on its own. And there’s a creepy celebrity-chef quality to Libeskind’s omnipresence. Mr. Libeskind hopes you can detect the top note of Tahitian vanilla in the beef cheeks with razor-clam foam.
Libeskind might have saved the architectural bells and whistles for the upper floors, which cover the roughly thousand-year history of the Jews in Germany before the late unpleasantness of the 1930s and ’40s. The display about what keeping kosher means, for example, could have used a little spice, although I do come upon an interesting interactive display: a computer with two large buttons: green for “Yes,” red for “No.” On the screen is the question: “Do you think it is all right to tell a Jewish joke in Germany today?” I’m assuming by “Jewish joke” they mean a joke told about Jews, i.e., “Knock, knock, who’s there? Usurer,” as opposed to a joke told by Jews, like I have done here, and will continue with these two, both of which were originally told to me by my Jewish parents, and both of which involve medicine and long-term-care facilities for the aged, which solidifies their Semitic bona fides beyond any doubt:
A doctor in an old folks’ home is visited by his patient Max Goldfarb, ninety-two years old. Max has come for his checkup and to announce that he is about to be married to fellow resident May Koussevitzky, age eighty-nine. The doctor says to him, “You know, Max, I don’t feel this is a violation of doctor-patient privilege because you’re going to marry her, but I’ve examined May Koussevitzky and I have to tell you she has acute angina,” to which Max responds, “You’re telling me!”
Here’s the second joke: Two psychiatrists meet on the street and say hello. “How are you?” asks one. “Eh, not so good,” says the other. “I had a stupid misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue. I was visiting my mother out at the old folks’ home. We were having lunch and I asked her to pass me the salt, but instead I said, ‘You fucking bitch you ruined my life.’ ”
It’s not that I hadn’t been mightily impressed with the honesty that I’d encountered while there. The explanatory text at the house at Wannsee where the Final Solution was first drafted, and at some recently excavated bunkers where the SS conducted torture on dissidents, was written exclusively in German. These were not displays of contrition for my benefit. But jokes? I just wasn’t sure. We still didn’t seem thick enough on the ground for the familiar contempt of jokes, so I pressed “No.” The computer told me the tally so far: 76 percent of those who responded agreed with me.
I experienced only two moments that might be described as fear and they were not even Jewish in nature: one when the ice-blue-eyed German shepherd that lived near the reception desk of my Berlin pension showed up, unaccompanied and growling, outside my door, and the other in a brick-vaulted rathskeller in Cologne when a group of football-jersey-wearing men broke into very martial-sounding, beer-soaked song. Maybe it was the claustrophobia-inducing basement aspect, because the spontaneous male chorus that erupted one evening in Munich in a famous beer garden didn’t faze me. The garden, at the foot of a huge pagoda in a huge park in the middle of the city, was apparently Hitler’s favorite, and even that seemed harmlessly distant. Sitting with my German publisher, I drank a pale, lemony beer in a tall trumpet of a glass, and ate a Schweinshaxe, a Renaissance-looking joint of silky pork with crackling skin.
After supper, we walked through the park to the nearby Haus der Kunst, a massive museum with brutalist columns, a building erected for Hitler. It was in the Haus der Kunst that the Nazis opened the three-year-long exhibit of degenerate art, a show that essentially included every major movement of modern painting and sculpture: the cubists, the expressionists, you name it. If it wasn’t a painting of some Rhineland mountainscape with billowing Wagnerian clouds and a mighty stag in the foreground, or else a sanctioned portrait of der Führer himself, chances are it was considered the physical manifestation of the decayed morals of a subhuman race.
But that night, in a bit of wry symmetry the Reich would have shuddered to contemplate, I was giving a reading. The Jewish homosexual writer: the ultimate degenerate. I was welcomed without reservation despite the history, because of the history that lay thick as incense in the air and escaped no one’s notice, neither mine nor my hosts’.
In his highly entertaining cultural history of the Yiddish language, Born to Kvetch, Michael Wex shows how Yiddish “arose, at least in part, to give voice to a system of opposition and exclusion.” Jewish language and, by extension, Jewish culture was, perforce, based in a disdain for Christians, a disdain born of some very legitimate fear and mistrust. “Eating treyf signals a cessation of disgust for the Gentile world,” says Rabbi X.
Eating pork, then, is a Jewish joke I feel licensed to tell. Unlike most subversive humor, though, it doesn’t have its roots in transgression, at least not for me, while for one friend, a woman well into her adulthood, it decidedly does. Yet she eats it with gusto and frequency. She still feels that she is getting back at her mother with each bite, much like the Shangri-Las and their defiant love for the Leader of the Pack. This is what is known as an underlying motive, and I would respectfully submit that she would have neither the words nor the tools to understand such things if Jews hadn’t begun eating pork, psychoanalysis and the interrogation of the unconscious being just one of the many exciting things with which newly secular nineteenth-century Jews replaced religion in their quest for greater existential meaning. No longer confined to narrow lives defined solely by liturgy, they were free to pursue all manner of spiritual fulfillments, filling their time with street theater, socialism, anarchism, movies, and jazz.
I know bacon has become something of a ubiquitous cliché of late (“a little too pleased with itself,” as my friend Patty says), but when I eat a piece, aside from its preposterous, heart-stopping deliciousness, I taste all of that: all those years and all those migrations that brought me to that museum in Munich, to that privileged place in space and time. I taste Max Beckmann lithographs, Freud case histories, Emma Goldman exhortations, the tunes of Irving Berlin and his Tin Pan Alley chums. Just behind the bacon’s bracing jolt of salt and its comforting embrace of fat and smoke, even more than its shattering crispness and tenacious, leathery pull, I taste the World.
On Juicy
Bomb Shelter was designed to teach us nuance and compromise; a welcome departure from the usual bombast of the Bosses-Bad, Workers-Good, Kibbu
tz-Best-of-All indoctrination of Socialist summer camp. A game of musical chairs with lethal consequences, the counselors would dress up as characters vying for salvation and we campers would make our selections for the limited places in the hypothetical bunker (in the summer of 1976, the premise still seemed entirely plausible). Each candidate was a flawed archetype: Construction Worker was young and strong and able to sire offspring, but he was also a meathead; Old Philosopher might have been the ideal choice for spiritual leader of the New World Order, but his advanced years meant that he was frail and probably shooting blanks; Young Woman, her obvious fertility notwithstanding—she was sporting an advanced pregnancy of a sofa cushion under her peasant blouse—lacked education or abilities … You get the picture.
Their presentations made, the contenders then walked around the room to address each team directly. It was like the Iowa caucuses if the Iowa caucuses had been attended solely by Jewish children with a collectivist bent from Canada. When we asked Chaya, the drama counselor who was portraying Aging Schoolteacher—very smart but old, barren, and weak—how she proposed to teach in a post-nuclear world bereft of school supplies, she answered with a vehement, “I can fashion pencils from twigs!” This struck us all as somewhat desperate. One should want to escape the fiery apocalypse, certainly, but one shouldn’t be seen as actively campaigning for it. That was just vulgar.
Young Woman approached and I, elected team spokesman, voiced our concern that she seemed too tiny for safe childbirth in the hospital-free moonscape of the future. It’s such an odd thing for us to have focused on, since we were all similarly small-boned. Moreover, it seems unsporting that we should suddenly hold Young Woman to the physical standards of genuine adulthood, given the pretend nature of the exercise. It was like doing an ultrasound of her “belly” and being troubled that her fetus appeared to be made of foam, or asking Old Philosopher how he planned to stay geriatric once he ran out of baby powder for his hair. How did a bunch of kids even know about pelvic width or childbearing hips, anyway?