Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  The notion that the charm was to protect the feelings of anti-Semites annoyed me. “It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” I said. “Your grandparents had to wear Jewish Stars in Germany and now you’ve got yourself one out here in Grosse Pointe.”

  She nodded slowly, thinking it over. “I guess it is ironic, yes. But, to be honest, we haven’t had all that many problems out here. Nobody seems to care one way or the other. Now, sometimes in my law firm people let go with a joke, little remarks about Jews being cheap or sharp in business, something like that. I wonder about people who kid around like that, you know?” There was an angry edge to her voice that surprised me.

  “Does it really matter all that much to you?” I asked her.

  “Does what matter?”

  “What people say about Jews. I mean, you’re married to a Catholic, you live out here …” I gestured out the window in the general direction of the blond world of Grosse Pointe.

  “No, no, no, you don’t understand,” she said in a soft, emotional voice. “I can’t even tell you how strongly I feel about this. I’m not here on purpose. I never intended to marry a Christian. It just happened, that’s all.

  “See, when I was growing up I never dated Jewish boys—I was a jock and they weren’t. But I always planned to marry one. In college I dated a gentile boy for four years, and I broke up with him because I couldn’t handle his belief in Christianity.

  “Then I met Jeff in law school. On our second date I told him, ‘I won’t love you unless you promise it won’t be a problem raising our children Jewish.’ He cracked up. ‘Why don’t we get to know each other first?’ he said. I must have sounded like a nut. But it was that important to me.”

  Before the wedding, Jody took Jeff to Temple Beth El, Detroit’s upscale Reform synagogue, for ten weeks of classes on Judaism. The ceremony itself took place in the temple. “I told him that raising our children Jewish was a condition for getting married at Temple Beth El,” she recalled with a sour grin. “And then the rabbi told him it wasn’t. So I said, ‘Sorry, rabbi, I’m going to raise them Jewish anyway.’ ”

  She was torpedoed by her mother on another issue. “Jeff wanted a Christmas tree, and I just couldn’t deal with that, I couldn’t handle the idea at all. We had a discussion about it that turned into a real argument. And then my mother told us that when I was small, we had a tree at home. That ruined my opposition. So this year we put up Christmas lights and had a tree in the basement. Next year it’ll probably be upstairs. But it still makes me uncomfortable.

  “Listen, being Jewish is the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t know where the feeling comes from, but I feel it in my gut. I sometimes almost get sick. I’ll hear something on television about Jews, or maybe meet another person, another Jew I didn’t know was Jewish, and I get a hard lump in my chest, a feeling of pride and a feeling that I need to protect this other person.”

  Jody took a deep breath, and I looked around her living room. There was nothing there that gave even a hint of her attitude—not a single Jewish book, painting, or ceremonial object. Only the gold star dangling from her neck.

  “Where does this feeling come from?” I asked her, and she bit her lip in contemplation.

  “It’s strange, but I actually don’t know. It’s just something in me. Sometimes I even lay in bed wondering, would I give up my life to protect Judaism? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m going to keep the religion going and defend it. My son will have a bar mitzvah, he’ll know all the prayers and our history. He’ll be a Jew, I’m absolutely determined about that. When he gets older, we’re going to move to a Jewish neighborhood.”

  “Why a Jewish neighborhood?” I asked.

  “Why?” she said, and her clear blue eyes clouded. “So he can be with his own people. I don’t want him to be an outsider.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘OVERWEIGHT?

  IMPOSSIBLE!’

  On the shore of Lake Kiamesha, in the heart of New York’s Catskill Mountains, stands the Concord Hotel. Built in 1937, it is a monument to overstatement, the heavyweight champ of resort spas. The Concord has 1,200 rooms and a capacity of more than 2,000, three golf courses (one, known as “The Monster,” is 6,793 yards long), and five nightclubs, including the world’s biggest, the 24,000-square-foot Imperial Room.

  The Concord’s attitude toward food makes Henry VIII seem like Jane Fonda. The main dining room can accommodate 3,500 at one sitting and offers a style of service that the hotel describes as “instantaneous feeding.” Patrons annually consume 100,000 pounds of butter, 450 tons of meat, and 4 million fresh eggs, not to mention 10,000 pounds of cream cheese. The Concord is the Alamo of cholesterol, the place where animal fat has chosen to make its last stand.

  The hotel’s ideology of excess is designed to appeal to people with big appetites. For that reason it is the perfect venue for Singles’ Weekend, a Catskills institution that periodically brings together 1,800 of the hungriest-hearted young Jews in America.

  The Concord is exceptionally image conscious, and it does not want to be characterized as a Jewish resort. It would much rather be regarded as a plain old all-American Eden, nonsectarian and free of its one-time ethnicity. Its publicity, for example, does not mention the fact that the hotel is strictly kosher and that there are rabbis constantly on the prowl to make sure it stays that way. Instead, it discreetly informs guests that “any prescribed diet for adults or children can be arranged at the Concord.” There is a synagogue (but no church) on the premises but the hotel is not anxious to advertise it; its literature neutrally advises patrons to consult the desk for a schedule of religious services.

  Hotel personnel are encouraged to play down the Jewish angle, but if pressed they admit that perhaps two-thirds of the Singles’ Weekend guests are Jews. In fact, the proportion of Jews at these affairs is pretty close to the percentage of Muslims in downtown Mecca. Gentiles who come to a Concord Singles’ Weekend come on its terms—gefilte fish, kosher wine, and all. For them the hotel may be a cheap resort, or a good place to pick up girls. But for the Jewish singles of Queens and Brooklyn, the Bronx and Long Island, it is a kind of secular shrine, a borscht belt Lourdes that offers a cure for the most painful of all American afflictions—loneliness.

  To see this shrine in action I made my own pilgrimage to the shores of Lake Kiamesha, arriving on a snowy Friday evening. For weeks I had heard stories about the event from friends, some of whom refused to believe I would drive three hours through winter weather to a hotel full of single women just for the sake of research. “You’re not going to believe it,” one friend told me. “They jump you in the parking lot. You’re going to go wild up there.”

  I braced myself, but when I got to the lot there were no sex fiends anywhere; just a pimply teenage boy who welcomed me in a friendly way and pointed me in the direction of the lobby.

  “Lobby” fails to do justice to the foyer of the Concord. It is roughly the size of the Silverdome, and when I arrived it was the scene of mass chaos. Hundreds of young people stood in line for room assignments and hundreds more milled around the check-in counter or surged through the room in aimless patterns. I was a guest of the hotel, and Mike Hall, the Concord’s publicity man, went to the head of the line to get my key. Some of the others saw this favoritism, but no one objected. Standing in line is a part of the Concord experience. “It’s as good a place as any to meet people,” Hall said. “A lot of couples have found each other waiting in line for room assignments.”

  There are various ways to meet members of the opposite sex at the Concord, and few of them are subtle. On the other hand, there is no reason for subtlety. The hotel is a three-hour drive from civilization, and no one just drops in for a drink. People are there on purpose, and this makes them both bolder and more shy than they might normally be—torn between a fear of lost opportunity (not to mention wasted money), and the dread knowledge that if you make a fool of yourself with someone, you will undoubtedly keep bumping into each
other for the entire weekend.

  The most organized way to get acquainted is through the Meeters’ Digest. The Digest is the Concord’s contribution to fix-up journalism, a gazette of do-it-yourself personal ads, like the ones that appear in New York Magazine or The Village Voice. Submitted on Friday before dinner, the ads are numbered, collated by the staff in a frenzied, all-night effort, and distributed in the form of a thick computer printout in time for Saturday breakfast.

  To get in touch with another Meeter, you simply write a note addressed to his or her number and turn it in at the message center in the lobby, where it is filed. During the weekend people stop by every hour or so to check their mail.

  The instructions for placing the ad advise not to worry about cleverness, which is like telling Ronald Reagan not to worry about Communism. The singles, especially the veterans, know that the Digest is their one shot at reaching a mass audience, and many of them had worked on their entries for weeks in advance. Those who hadn’t sat in the lobby chewing pencils in nervous concentration, or stared helplessly into space in search of inspiration.

  Mike Hall invited me to fill out an ad, and I felt a twinge of competitive pressure. I was supposed to be a writer, after all, and I didn’t want to be outdone by a bunch of amateurs. But when the Digest came out the next morning, I saw that I was out of my league—many of the ads would have done credit to a Madison Avenue copywriter. In my own ad I settled for the truth—“Israeli author looking for information”—a formulation that made me feel virtuously above the fray. In the course of the weekend, however, I learned that “author looking for information” is one of the most shopworn ploys in the catalog of come-ons.

  Once the ad was placed, I went to the dining room for an instantaneous feeding. As a guest of the hotel I was seated at a specially reserved table with Mike Hall, a lugubrious widower named Joe who covers the nightclub scene for Variety, and a couple of fellow deadheads.

  My host, Hall, is a Broadway publicist with nightspots, starlets, popular authors, and fancy restaurants for clients. Hall’s is an anachronistic calling, but then the Concord is an anachronistic place. For all its computerized digests and nonsectarian pretensions, the aura of Marjorie Morningstar lies over the hotel like a latke on an empty stomach. Many of the singles began coming to the mountains, to this very resort, as children on family holidays; a number of their own parents met each other at the Concord. To these singles, residents of the great Jewish middle class of the outer boroughs, this is home, familiar turf, their place in the country.

  Hall introduced me to Jimmy the Celebrity Waiter, who instantaneously produced matzoh ball soup, gefilte fish, chopped liver, and other deli items. The meal was a shock. The Concord is justly famous for the quantity of its food, but the quality reminded me of holiday dinners in the Israeli army—kosher, bland, and overcooked.

  No one seemed to mind the food, though. Throughout the gigantic room, people sat at round tables of eight or ten and tried to eat while looking over each others’ shoulders. This kind of rubbernecking is the standard Singles’ Weekend posture, used in all conversations and other activities. The unofficial motto of the weekend is “Keep looking, there’s always somebody better.”

  Almost no one is brave enough to come to Singles’ Weekend alone. People arrive in pairs or threesomes and at Friday dinner they were still together. They talked among themselves but never stopped scouting the other tables, occasionally nudging one another to point out an interesting prospect.

  After dinner, the real action began. Eighteen hundred singles rose en masse and began to surge up and down the long indoor promenade that connects the dining room to the lobby. Some sat on the gray sofas that were arranged, living room style, on either side of the walkway. Young men dressed in expensive sportswear sauntered back and forth in boisterous groups, bottles of Budweiser in hand. The women, quieter but no less intent, cruised the corridor displaying the peripheral vision of NBA guards. It was still early, and people traveled in pairs or groups for protection, but here and there you could already spot couples coming together. Singles’ Weekend was now officially under way, a college mixer held in a suburban shopping mall.

  People who attend these events have a losers’ image, but the singles in the promenade seemed perfectly normal, even attractive. Most of the women were between twenty and thirty, although quite a few were close to forty, and a handful were in their fifties. The median age of the men was a few years older. Both the men and women appeared to be in very good shape; many had been dieting and working out for months to prepare for the weekend.

  A few months earlier, in Detroit, I had found out how important physical conditioning is on the Jewish singles circuit. While I was in town a controversy erupted when a disgruntled young woman wrote to a local paper complaining that she had been turned down by Lo-la, a private Jewish dating service, because she was too fat. She claimed to be a victim of weight discrimination and scorned the service’s proprietors—two Detroit grandmothers named Millie Rosenbaum and Claire Arm—for caring more about pounds and ounces than personality and character.

  Millie Rosenbaum, a kindly woman, was plainly distressed by the affair and eager to explain the realities of the Jewish singles scene. She told me that most of her customers were under thirty. The agency accepts only Jews (using the traditional rabbinical criteria to determine eligibility); and most of them are assimilated, Reform, or Conservative types.

  “They want partners who are culturally compatible,” Rosenbaum explained. “About half are willing to date people who keep kosher, but no one asks for it. Jewish values don’t mean much to them—mostly they’re just American yuppies, with a little Jewishness thrown in.

  “As far as that overweight girl is concerned, I really feel for her. She’s right. Personality, character, those things should be important. But today, the big thing—for both men and women—is physical fitness. They say, ‘I take care of my body, I want someone who takes care of his.’ That’s the attitude. The women want a professional, someone who can make a good living. Sometimes the men say they want a smart woman. But believe me, slender is the first requirement.

  “I was in Chicago not too long ago,” she continued. “I stopped in at the Jewish dating bureau there, just to compare notes. I got to talking with the woman who runs it and I said, ‘I want to mention just one word to you, to see your reaction. And that word is ‘overweight.’ And the woman looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Overweight? I can answer that with just one word: Impossible!’ ”

  The emphasis on good looks and good health is a national phenomenon, from the fathers of North Dallas who don’t want ugly daughters to the synagogue in L.A. that conducts aerobic Hebrew school classes, and the the crowd at the Concord reflected this preoccupation with fitness. Among the swirling throng it was hard to focus on individuals, but the overall impression was of attractive, robust people. On the other hand, I was surprised to find a large number of smokers. At first I attributed this to the pressure of the weekend, but later I realized that it was a class thing. The singles at the Concord dressed and talked like yuppies, but many were slightly downscale—legal secretaries and social workers, high school teachers and middle-level bureaucrats, optometrists and small-time CPAs. They were night-school graduates or the alumnae of subway colleges. The men sported last year’s Zapata mustaches, the women wore too much makeup and had overbites uncorrected by orthodontia.

  As I walked along the promenade I was stopped by three swarthy young men, brothers from Brooklyn. “Hey,” one of them called to me. “What are you, some kind of professor?” The other two laughed loudly. I could see their point. In a corduroy jacket and jeans, and wearing a beard, I did have a kind of sixties look that seemed incongruous among these people who were dressed sharp as a tack. There was an edge to the question, too, an aggressive challenge I recognized from Israel but hadn’t heard from American Jews.

  “Aleppo, right?” I guessed, and they looked at me like I was a magician. Actually, it was an easy call.
My Israeli eye told me they were Syrian Jews, my American ear that they were from Brooklyn; and Brooklyn is full of Jews from Aleppo. I explained to them that I was from Jerusalem, and was working on a book about Jews in America. “Maybe I’ll write about you guys,” I said lightly. “We can talk about the Jewish singles scene.”

  The brothers didn’t care for the idea at all, and they huddled closer together as if I had threatened them. “Forget it, we came up here to relax, y’know,” said one. He had a half-open shirt that revealed a large Jewish Star and a hairy chest. “We don’t have to come all the way to the mountains to get laid, y’understand?” The others nodded emphatically, three cool cats from Brooklyn—Huey, Dewey, and Louie at the Concord. “Go find yourself somebody else, professor, we ain’t washing our dirty linens in public.”

  It was cabaret time, and the crowd began to file into the World’s Largest Nightclub for a free show, which consisted of a black singer who did Tom Jones imitations and a stand-up comic named Jackie Eagle. His routine leaned heavily on ethnic jokes (“Anyone here from Brooklyn?” Loud cheers. “Brooklyn, home of the Chasidim. Thirteenth Avenue is called the Rue da la Payes”) and anti-Arab material (“Ever notice that the Jews eat prunes? Sure we do. Now, the Arabs, they don’t eat any prunes. That’s why they’re full of shit.”)

  The crowd laughed at the jokes and sang along with the Tom Jones imitator but their minds were elsewhere. The Concord’s PR kit claims that the resort “is to popular entertainment what LaStrada [sic] is to opera,” but Singles’ Weekend isn’t prime time. The hotel assumes that the crowd is more interested in socializing than being entertained, and the acts it books for the singles are mostly “middle-of-the-week” quality.

  After the show, the younger women went upstairs and came down wearing dancing outfits—loose-fitting tops over black tights—and joined the younger men in the disco. Next door the thirties crowd gathered in the lounge, which looks like a Manhattan singles bar, and danced to a Motown-style band. Other nightclubs featured a jazz combo that played pre-Elvis fox-trots, a magician-comedian, and a lady who sang Gershwin tunes and accompanied herself on a baby grand.