That phrase itself, by the way, is an example of how much better everything is going to be when the French language finally loses out completely to English. In the French translation, it would mean people literally sticking to their guns—a bunch of people standing there with no one left to shoot but still unable to remove their hands from their guns. Getting rid of that sort of awkward and embarrassing image is going to be a big relief to the French, once they get used to it.
1989
BAGELS, YIDDISH, AND OTHER JEWISH CONTRIBUTIONS TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION
“In Kansas City, where I grew up, Calvin Trillin is a very common Jewish name. My full name is Calvin Marshall Trillin. Marshall is an old family name. Not our family, but an old family name.”
Seder Splitsville
For us, the saddest news of the spring holiday season was that our old friends the Levines decided to get a divorce, citing irreconcilable differences over what kind of Passover seder to attend. It seems only yesterday that we were all together at the Levines’ for a Freedom Seder—asking that all people oppressed by antidemocratic dictators be freed as the Jews were freed from Pharaoh’s grasp, debating the issue of whether the Pharaoh’s daughter was trying to co-opt Moses by hauling him out of the bulrushes, and tucking away some of Linda Levine’s superb gefilte fish done with a simple béchamel sauce. But when Richie Levine and I had a drink together to talk about the split-up, he reminded me that the Freedom Seder was almost twenty years ago. Since then, he told me, the Levines have observed Passover at dinners that included an Environmental Seder that emphasized the effect the parting of the Red Sea might have had on marine life and a seder done entirely in Reformation dress. It shows you how time flies.
When we had our drink, Richie was in a reflective mood, talking about the seders he used to go to as a kid in Detroit at the home of his Uncle Mo the Gonif. Richie happened to have two uncles named Mo—one of them a failed actor who lived off his relatives, the other a prosperous businessman who had once been accused of embezzlement by his partner—and to keep them straight, the family called them Uncle Mo the Schnorrer and Uncle Mo the Gonif.
“Those were the days,” Richie said. “My sisters and I would get a little tipsy on the Passover wine and kid Aunt Sarah about the matzo balls being kind of rubbery: ‘I’ll just save this one, thanks, Aunt Sarah; we’re going to play jacks a little later, and it’ll make a good ball.’ ”
“Simpler times, Richie,” I said. “Those were simpler times.”
It was an acquaintance of ours we call Harold the Committed who organized the Freedom Seder at the Levines, but Richie didn’t seem to blame him for anything that followed. “Hal the C’s okay,” Richie said. “Sure, I got a little bored when he went into that long spiel comparing Moses’ brother Aaron to Ché Guevara, but I figured it wasn’t much different from when I got restless waiting for Uncle Mo the Gonif to stumble through all that Hebrew so that I could have another go at the Manischewitz burgundy. Times change.”
I nodded, and looked into my drink for a while. “So what went wrong, then?” I finally said.
“Well, nothing right away,” Richie said. “Harold the Committed wasn’t in town for Passover for a few years there; that’s when he was going to Sweden every spring to do that ecumenical Unilateral Disarmament Seder with the schismatic Lutheran peaceniks. Josh and Jenny weren’t old enough then to know what was going on, so I guess we just skipped Passover for quite a while, except for that Interfaith Seder at the Mohlers’ where we saw you—the one where the priest got blotto and the Methodist minister fainted into the chopped liver.”
I remembered the occasion well. The priest polished off the Passover wine supply so quickly that the last two blessings had to be said over apple juice. The Methodist minister started in on the chopped liver with considerable gusto—having had up to that moment no way at all of knowing that he carried in his bloodstream antibodies that would set off a violent chemical reaction to schmaltz.
Apparently, when the kids got old enough to understand what Passover was—Josh was about six and Jenny four—Richie assumed there would simply be a regular family seder every year, but Linda, who had always been intense about causes, was convinced that a seder had to be a statement. After she lost interest in national liberation and gourmet cooking, the Levines went to the Environmental Seder, which Richie remembered as having been “mostly about microorganisms.” That flowed into a Natural Foods Seder, whose symbolism irritated Richie. “I mean, let’s face it,” he told me. “The mortar that the Jews made in Egypt didn’t look anything like mung beans, and it’s silly to pretend it did.”
“So that’s what did it?” I asked. “The mung beans for mortar?”
“Oh, no,” Richie said. “That was years ago. After that—let me see—we had a seder at a radical feminist collective, where they refused to recognize the killing of the Egyptians’ firstborn sons as a curse, which made Josh feel a little uncomfortable, of course.”
“So you said you wouldn’t go back there the next year?”
“No, no. The next year we went to a seder where the guest of honor was an Indian holy man Linda’s pals were very big on at the time. He went on and on about whether plain matzo had inner peace. Finally, I told him I’d promise to stay away from his ashram if he’d stay away from my seders—sort of a reverse interfaith arrangement.”
“So that did it?”
“No. What did it is when Linda got involved in finding her roots, and we started going to seders every year in Brooklyn with Hasidim who pray in Hebrew for six or eight hours before you can have a bite of gefilte fish. I have a lot of respect for those people, but they’re not the sort of crowd that goes for matzo-ball jokes. So this year, I told Linda that if we’re searching so hard for roots, my roots are in Detroit: I was going to seder at Uncle Mo the Gonif’s. So she said go. It was great. Uncle Mo the Gonif and Aunt Sarah are getting on, but one of my sisters helped with the cooking, and she even knows how to make those bouncy matzo balls. Uncle Mo the Gonif’s Hebrew hasn’t improved. He’s really a very sweet man, my Uncle Mo the Gonif—as long as you don’t leave him alone with the books.”
“I hope there’s no acrimony between you and Linda,” I said.
“It’s a very amicable separation,” Richie said. “The only problem we’re having is who gets custody of the kids on Passover.”
1983
Killer Bagels
I was surprised to read that bagels have become the most dangerous food in the country. I’ve lived in New York—which is to bagels what Paris is to croissants—for a number of years, and I’ve never been injured by a bagel. When I go back to Kansas City, where I grew up, old friends never say, “Isn’t it scary living in New York, what with the bagels and all?” My answer to that question would be that New Yorkers who were asked to name foods they think of as particularly benign would mention bagels as often as chicken soup.
They might talk about that morning in the park when nothing seemed to soothe their crying baby until a grandmotherly woman sitting on a nearby bench, nattering with another senior citizen about Social Security payments or angel-food-cake recipes or Trotskyism, said that the only thing for a teething infant was a day-old bagel. They might talk about the joy of returning to New York from a long sojourn in a place that was completely without bagels—Bangladesh, or a tiny town in Montana, or some other outpost in the vast patches of the world that New Yorkers tend to think of as the Bagel Barrens. They might talk about the days when people used to sit on their stoops and watch the neighborhood kids play roller-skate hockey in the street with a stale bagel as the puck—days spent listening contentedly to the comforting slap of hockey stick against bagel and the inevitable cries, when the action got too close to a drain opening, “Lost bagel! Lost bagel!” They might talk about picking up freshly baked bagels late at night and being reassured, as they felt the warmth coming through the brown paper bag, that they would be at peace with the world the next morning, at least through breakfast.
According to a piece in the Times not long ago about how dangerous kitchens have become, that brown paper bag could have been holding a time bomb. “We’re seeing an increasing number of bagel-related injuries in the emergency service,” Dr. Stephen Adams, associate medical director of the emergency department at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, told the author of the piece, Suzanne Hamlin. It isn’t that bagels are considered dangerous to eat in the way that triple bacon cheeseburgers are considered dangerous to eat. It’s true that in recent years some bakers in New York have been making bagels with some pretty weird ingredients—oat bran, say, and cinnamon, and more air than you’d find in the Speaker of the House—but not dangerously weird. Nor is there any implication that bagels are dangerous because they are easily flung at people in the close quarters of an apartment kitchen.
The danger comes with people trying to get at bagels. “The hand lacerations, cuts, gouges, and severed digits,” it says in the Times, “are caused by impatient eaters who try to pry apart frozen bagels with screwdrivers, attempt to cut hard bagels with dull knives, and, more than likely, use their palms as cutting boards.”
Ms. Hamlin found no increase in New York bagel injuries. Reading about the havoc that bagels can wreak in Illinois or California, a New Yorker might say, in the superior tone customarily used by someone from Minneapolis describing the chaos caused in Birmingham by a simple snowstorm, “People there just don’t know how to handle such things”—or, as the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue said to the Times, “Those people just aren’t ethnically equipped.” The Bagel Barrens have been shrinking rapidly—bagel stores have sprouted in the shopping malls of neighborhoods that baked-goods sociologists have long identified with white bread—so maybe it’s true that a lot of Americans are being given access to bagels before they know how to handle them, in the way that a lot of Americans are said to have access to 9-mm pistols or semiautomatic rifles before they know how to handle them.
But there is a more positive way to look at this. Twenty years ago, the bagels in Kansas City were accurately described by one of my daughters as tasting like “round bread.” It was impossible to conceive of anybody desperately going to work with a screwdriver to free up one of them for thawing. Could it be that outlander bagels have improved to the point of being something that people truly yearn for? If so, maybe what we’re seeing in Midwestern emergency rooms is the price of progress.
1996
So, Nu, Dr. Freud?
According to a quotation carried recently in The New York Observer, Jorge Luis Borges, the Latin-American fantasist, was asked during a visit he once made to the New York Institute for the Humanities what he thought of Sigmund Freud. “Never liked him,” Borges said. “Too schmutzig.”
I was among the readers who found that response surprising. When I was growing up in Kansas City, the few references to Freud that drifted my way gave me the impression that what he wrote was schmutzig, or dirty, and this is the first evidence I’ve come across that in those days I was thinking along the same lines as Jorge Luis Borges on any subject at all. Also, the fact that Borges would use a homey Yiddish word like schmutzig required me to make some adjustments on the image of him that I had been carrying in my mind. It was as if I’d been informed that distinguished literary personages who called on Henry James in his London drawing room were customarily greeted with a cheery “Hey, goombah!”
I should say that, now that I’m grown up, I no longer associate Freud’s writings with smut. These days, my views on Freudianism are virtually identical to my views on Presbyterianism: Some people believe in it, I was brought up not to be disrespectful of other people’s beliefs, and, for all anybody knows, it could turn out to be right on the money.
I was therefore not someone who took particular satisfaction in the discovery, made some years ago, that Freud had fudged the data in order to come up with his seduction theory, which is central to Freudian thought. I’ll admit that I was interested in the controversy provoked by that discovery, in the way I’d be interested in what Presbyterians would have to say if it were discovered that their belief in predestination was the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding at the printer’s in 1536.
Either case would bring up what I think of as the Davis Conundrum—how to deal with information that may call into question a tenet that is central to a system of belief. The Davis Conundrum takes its name from a wine-tasting test that I’m told is sometimes given at the highly regarded department of oenology at the University of California at Davis. It turns out that, under blind-test circumstances, the tasters, some of them professional wine connoisseurs, are often unable to tell red wine from white wine. That triggers the Davis Conundrum: Does the failure to distinguish red from white undercut all the learned talk you hear about body and vintage and integrity and which side of the hill the grapes came from?
I assume that there have already been any number of seminars on the question of whether the seduction theory’s being based on incorrect data invalidates the Freudian theories that followed. The recent publication of the first volume of The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi is likely to provoke even more seminars. In these letters to a trusted disciple, Freud, not surprisingly, has some critical words to say about his rival Carl Jung. You might expect him to write, “Jung, of course, is transferring to me his suppressed infantile homoerotic attraction for his Uncle Heinrich,” or words to that effect. Not at all. According to what I read in the Times Book Review, here is what Freud wrote to Ferenczi about Jung: “Jung is meshuga.”
Meshuga, of course, means crazy in Yiddish, and I must say that I was delighted to hear that Sigmund Freud as well as Jorge Luis Borges employed that dazzlingly expressive language, which many German-speaking Jewish bourgeois have scorned. This raises the possibility that Freud’s grandson—the renowned artist Lucian Freud, whose paintings of not altogether beautiful people were such a hit not long ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—may as a child have called the great doctor zayde. For some reason, contemplating that possibility makes me feel better about both of them.
On the other hand, could this actually be Sigmund Freud’s diagnosis of Carl Jung—“Jung is meshuga”? When the founder of psychoanalysis offered his opinions in a private letter rather than in a paper designed to be read by the profession at large, was this the way he talked? If that’s the case, his frank personal opinion of any of his most celebrated analysands might have been (translated from his vernacular to ours) “The man’s bonkers—off his squash, nutty as a fruitcake, a cuckoo bird.” If so, what’s all this talk about sublimation and Oedipus complexes and penis envy? As Borges might have put it, why did we need all that schmutz?
1994
Jacob Schiff and My Uncle Benny Daynovsky
“The silk-hat banker Jacob Schiff, concerned about the conditions on the East Side of New York (and embarrassed by the image it created for New York’s German Jews), pledged half a million dollars in 1906 to the Galveston Project, which helped direct more than ten thousand East European migrants through Galveston into the South and Southeast.”
—The Provincials: A History of Jews in the South, by Eli N. Evans
And who is Jacob Schiff that he should be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky? My father’s family certainly came to Missouri from eastern Europe around 1908 via the Port of Galveston, and, I’ll admit, that route struck me as rather odd every time we read in history class about how all the tired, poor, huddled masses swarmed into this country through Ellis Island. It never occurred to me, though, to explain it all by assuming that Jacob Schiff found my family not only tired and poor and huddled but also embarrassing. I always considered the Galveston passage to be one of those eccentricities of ancestral history that require no explanation—the kind of incident we hear about so often from people who have family trees concocted for themselves by wily English genealogists (“For some reason, the old boy showed up late for the Battle of Hastings and therefore survived to father the first Duke
, and that’s why we’re here to tell the tale”). I have always been content—pleased, really—to say simply that my grandfather (Uncle Benny’s brother-in-law) happened to land in Galveston and thus made his way up the river (more or less) to St. Joseph, Missouri, leaving only sixty miles or so for my father to travel in order to complete what I had always assumed to be one of the few Kiev—Galveston—St. Jo—Kansas City immigration patterns in the Greater Kansas City area.
To be absolutely truthful, it occurred to me more than once that my grandfather and Uncle Benny might have caught the wrong boat. I have never heard my mother’s views on the subject, but I have always assumed that she would believe that the use by my father’s family of a port no one else seemed to be using had something to do with the stubbornness for which they retain a local renown in St. Jo. As I imagine my mother’s imagining it, my grandfather would have fallen into an argument with some other resident of Kiev (or near Kiev, as it was always described to me, leading me to believe as a child that they came from the suburbs) about where immigrants land in the United States. The other man said New York; my grandfather said Texas. When the time came to emigrate, my grandfather went fifteen hundred miles out of his way in order to avoid admitting that he was wrong. My grandfather died before I was born, but my Uncle Benny is still living in St. Jo; he has lived there for sixty or seventy years now, without, I hasten to say, a hint of scandal. Stubborn, okay. But I simply can’t understand how anyone could consider him embarrassing.
Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 25