by Zev Chafets
“And?”
“And then it turns out that he’s not Jewish. Of all the guys up here, I have to get a goy. My mazel. He told me how his cousin is married to a Jewish girl, like that makes him half Jewish or something. Shit!”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“That’s just the problem. I didn’t tell him anything,” she said. “What was I supposed to tell him, that I don’t go out with goyim? That sounds totally prejudiced. So I just told him I didn’t want to go out with him tonight. I guess it hurt his feelings, but I just didn’t know what else to do.” She opened her purse and took out a dollar bill. “Listen, do me a favor. You’re going back to Jerusalem, give this dollar to tzedaka, help me do a mitzvah. I gotta change my luck around here.” I took the dollar and a few weeks later I gave it to a panhandler on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem.
At dinner that night I was seated with three still-unattached female social workers from Long Island, a fleshy young man from New Jersey who sold televisions, and the only black woman at the hotel. She told me she worked for a radio station in New York and had been given a free weekend at the resort as a bonus. “Looking for a husband?” I asked, and she laughed. “Not in this crowd, baby. I’m just here for the skiing.”
Dinner was an edgy affair, carried on through a hail of aggressively cheerful chatter that couldn’t obscure the central fact—no one at our table had found anyone yet. We were in the midst of a derisive analysis of the dining room’s Leif Ericsson decor when the oldest of the social workers suddenly burst into tears. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into coming,” she said bitterly to her friends. “I feel ridiculous. I don’t belong here. If my husband and I were still together …”
She fled from the table, followed by one of her friends. “No one’s said a word to her since we got here,” explained the other. I guessed she would spend the rest of the weekend alone in her triple-occupancy room, but I underestimated her resilience; after dinner I spotted her on the promenade, talking to a bald man in a powder-blue sports jacket and from time to time looking over his shoulder.
The show that night was a reverse of Friday’s—black comedienne and white singers. The comic’s act was a series of jokes about her Jewish husband, and it had the virtue of brevity. The singers were Lenny Coco and the Chimes, a doo-wop group that had a hit with “Once in a While” back in the early 1960s.
The Singles’ Weekend entertainment policy seems to have been set sometime around 1962. The Chimes, I was delighted to note, were still in fine voice. They sang standards of the doo-wop repertoire that the audience was, for the most part, too young to remember. But it didn’t matter. People applauded loudly, making a display of enthusiasm and high morale.
After the show, crowds once again surged through the hallways and mobbed the bars and lounges. There were fewer bottles of beer tonight, more hard liquor, and the women were drinking too. There was a feel of Las Vegas about the place—the same timeless rush of energy, people running on adrenaline, hope, and alcohol.
The finish line was in sight, but here and there people were beginning to fade. A thin, balding man sat on one of the gray sofas with his head buried in his hands. Nearby, two exhausted young women leaned against each other for support. In the abandoned game room, an overweight woman in a black dance outfit sat alone, glumly playing Pac-Man.
It was past two when I decided to go upstairs. A man about my age took the elevator up with me, his room key already in his hand. We rode in silence, but when we reached our floor he looked at the key, said “Fuck it,” and pushed the down button, an inveterate gambler determined to give it one last roll.
On Sunday morning at breakfast, the atmosphere was once again like a college dorm—this time on the day after finals. People sat at the round tables eating as much as they wanted and reading The New York Times—the first contact many had had with the outside world since Friday.
I had a date for breakfast, a woman I had picked out of the Digest. Her name was Sherri, but I knew her as No. 524: “Blond-haired, blue-eyed Zionist who is tired of short JAPs.” Hers was the only ad that mentioned Zionism or Israel, and I was intrigued. “What kind of people answer an ad from a Zionist?” I asked after we had introduced ourselves.
Sherri shrugged. “I don’t know, you’re the only one who answered it,” she said. “I mean, there aren’t a lot of people around here who even know what a Zionist is.”
I could see her point. There were eighteen hundred Jews at the Concord that weekend, but an outsider wouldn’t have guessed it. Most of them could have been any kind of ethnic Eastern Seaboard Americans—Italians, Greeks, even Irish. Their culture was the culture of the New York middle class, their language the dialect of the outer boroughs, their aspirations shaped more by the American dream than by any particular Jewish sensitivity.
They kept their distance like Americans, too. Throughout the weekend I met dozens of people, the men sizing me up as a competitor, the women as a prospect. But only Jeanie and, I realized with surprise, Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Brooklyn had related to me as an Israeli or a Jew. The only Yiddish words I heard all weekend were in Jackie Eagle’s stand-up routine; the only Hebrew, a few words spoken by the special education teacher in the nightclub on Friday night. There had been no Jewish songs, no Israeli dancing, not a single Jewish conversation that I hadn’t initiated. And there had been no feeling of intimacy, no hint of the peculiar mix of affection, aggravation, and curiosity that Jews normally evoke in one another.
Finding a Zionist among these people was a warming experience. Sherri spoke my language, the language of Jewish obligation and concern, and I was happy to discover a kindred spirit.
“It seems like half the people I know have married goyim,” she said. “It’s such a tragedy.… There won’t be any Jews left in this country in another fifty years. After all we lost in the Holocaust, when I hear about people who just drop out like that, it makes me want to break down and cry.…”
“Well, at least you won’t have to worry about that,” I said. “We have a lot of problems in Israel, but intermarriage isn’t one of them.”
She looked at me with genuine surprise. “Oh, I’m not planning to live in Israel,” she said. “I work with Young Judea and I think aliyah is very important; and if they ever needed me over there in an emergency, I’d be the first one on the plane. But I can’t live there. See, I’m engaged to this man who lives in Denver, and I’ll be moving out there in the spring.” I had been in Denver a few weeks before; it is the intermarriage capital of America, an estimated seventy percent, the perfect place for an American Zionist to raise her children. We chatted for a few minutes more, and then she wished me Shalom ve le’hitraot and went to an aerobics class.
By this time, people were already starting to assemble in the lobby for checkout. It is a part of the Concord’s lore that it is never too late—hundreds of couples have reputedly come together while waiting in line to pay their bills. But despite this legend, most of the singles seemed to have stopped trying. The mood was resigned, even mellow. They had given it their best shot, made the effort. The lucky ones had succeeded, but even the wallflowers seemed relieved to be getting back to their comfortable, everyday selves. For the first time all weekend I heard real, unconstrained laughter.
Near the checkout desk I saw Frank the Goy, tweedy and dejected, sitting on his suitcase and waiting for the valet to bring his car around. For a moment I considered going over and telling him the truth—that it was nothing personal, he had just picked the wrong Jewish girl. Statistics were on his side—probably not one woman in ten would have refused a date with a gentile on principle. He looked grimly at his watch, and I imagined that he had decided to take his next vacation in Vermont.
I was still debating whether to go over and cheer him up when I heard familiar voices. “Hey, Professor!” yelled Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and they surrounded me, grinning broadly. “Guess what? We got laid!” They gave each other exuberant high fives.
“Hey, that�
��s great. Who was the lucky girl?” I asked, but they were too flushed with success to take offense. “The boys from Brooklyn strike again. Put that in your book!” one of them said.
Near the door I ran into Carol, my Friday night dancing partner. She was with a dapper man in his early thirties, who held her arm possessively. She introduced us and, perhaps wary of one of the storied last-minute moves, he mentioned pointedly that they would be having dinner together in the city that night. Carol nodded happily and took me aside.
“How did it go?” I asked conspiratorially.
“Big weekend,” she said, beaming. “I met half a dozen guys, including Jeffrey. He’s perfect—Jewish, lawyer, no kids, the whole shot. We met this morning at breakfast. And that’s not all. You hear about that fire last night? There was some kind of little fire in a linen closet on my floor. Well, I even met a guy out in the hall in his underpants. I’m on a roll.”
Carol gave me a kiss on the cheek and then wrote her phone number on the back cover of my notebook. “Call me,” she said airily and went back to join her new boyfriend, a modern American-Jewish woman with numbers in her book and condoms in her purse.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LIFE CYCLES
In January I did what thousands of American Jews do every winter—I went to Florida. My final destination was Miami, but on the way I stopped at the University of Florida in Gainesville to give a Friday night lecture at the Hillel House. “You’re going to love the rabbi,” a friend of mine who knew the campus told me. “His name is Gerald Friedman, but everybody calls him Yossil. He used to be a Satmar Chasid. There aren’t too many people like him in northern Florida.”
That seemed like an understatement; it was hard to imagine a Williamsburg yeshiva bocher among the tan coeds and fraternity boys of one of America’s premier party schools.
I met Friedman in his office near campus on Friday around noon. He turned out to be a pudgy man in his late forties whose appearance didn’t betray his Chasidic origins. He was cleanshaven except for a neat little mustache, wore black framed glasses, and had a square, even-featured face that made him look a little like Steve Allen. On his head he wore a red knit yarmulke, which he took off when we went out to lunch.
I had been expecting to stay at a hotel, but Friedman wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted I spend the night with him and his wife, Dora, a concentration camp survivor. I could, he said, share a room with his twelve-year-old son, Akiva. It didn’t seem like the ideal arrangement and I tried to get out of it.
“I wouldn’t feel right smoking at your place on Shabbat,” I said, but he waved away the problem. “If you don’t feel right about doing it, don’t do it. But if you want to smoke, smoke. We’re not that strict, and I want you to feel comfortable.” I couldn’t think of any other objections. Cornered, I accepted his invitation.
After lunch, Friedman suggested that we go to his place to “freshen up for Shabbes.” Dora was preparing a kosher meal for the more than one hundred people who would be at the Hillel that night, but Yossil had nothing to do until sundown, when he was supposed to lead services. “Friday nights are sweet at our Hillel,” he said. “We make a real Shabbes. You’ll see.”
On the way to Friedman’s suburban tract house we talked about Israel, which he knew well. He was diffident and a little shy, and I wondered why my friend had thought I’d love him. To me he seemed like a more or less normal Hillel rabbi—intelligent, serious, and a bit ponderous. It would, I thought, be a long weekend.
When we arrived, Friedman pulled his car into the driveway and got out. The house next door had a basket mounted on its garage. A basketball lay on the lawn. Friedman took off his jacket, exposing a large potbelly, and picked up the ball. “Do you play basketball?” he asked. “I used to,” I said, recognizing the moment when the rabbi demonstrates that he is a regular guy by tossing up an awkward shot.
Instead he gave me a long, appraising look, whipped the ball around his back and, tie flying, faked a move to his right, dribbled gracefully to the left, threw a head fake and hit an eighteen-foot jump shot. “Bob Cousy!” he yelled, retrieving the ball.
For the next five minutes I watched, astonished, while Yossil Friedman of Williamsburg put on a show. He moved around the court, sinking jump shots and hooking with both hands, or charging the basket with leaping, grunting aggressiveness. He rarely missed, and although he was sweating heavily he didn’t seem at all tired. Finally he invited me to try to guard him.
I got between him and the basket, and he dribbled slowly. Suddenly he faked to the right, switched hands and flashed by me to make a lay-up. “How many Jewish guys you know can go to their left like that?” he crowed.
Friedman brought the ball out again, working toward the basket, with me following. “What are you, five-eleven?” he guessed with expert accuracy. “I’m five-eight. Watch this.” He pivoted and threw up a graceful hook that swished through the net. “Guys six-eleven can’t stop that shot,” he said with the pride of a high school letterman.
For half an hour Friedman and I bounded around the court. He played with the happy abandon of a teenager, and seemed disappointed when his son, Akiva, came out to tell us it was time to get dressed for services. He eyed the basket, yelled “Bob Cousy,” and hit a twenty-foot set shot. Grinning, he threw an arm over Akiva’s skinny shoulder and started walking toward the house. Suddenly he broke away, scooped up the ball, and tossed in a long running shot. “Bob Cousy goes in to dress for Shabbes,” he hollered, and broke into a Chasidic melody.
As we were dressing, Friedman, no longer shy, told me about himself and his voyage from Williamsburg to Gainesville. In Brooklyn his father had been a kosher butcher and his uncle, Lipa Friedman, had organized the Satmar sect politically. “He taught them how to vote, how to get poverty money, how to deal with America, the whole shmeer,” Friedman said.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Yossil spoke Yiddish at home and attended a neighborhood cheder and, later, Torah V’Das Yeshiva. As a boy he looked and talked like the other Satmar children, but he was different. Unlike Mendel the Chasid, he wasn’t satisfied with a single glimpse of Roy Rogers. Yossil Friedman wanted America.
“It all started with basketball,” he said. “I was crazy about the game.… Well, I guess I still am. But as a kid, I couldn’t get enough. I used to skip school and go out to playgrounds in other neighborhoods, dressed in a black suit and white shirt with tzitzes hanging down and my payes flapping. I might have looked a little strange, but I played on every tough court in New York—Bridge Park Plaza, Manhattan Beach, Avenue B in Brooklyn—you name it, I played there. In those days, I wanted to be a professional basketball player.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Friedman smiled, knotting his tie and slipping on a dark suit coat. “I didn’t become one. I became a Hillel director. Come on, let’s go to services. It’s Shabbes.” On the way to the car, Friedman, dressed in a suit, took an imaginary jump shot at the basket in his neighbor’s driveway.
There were more than a hundred people at the Hillel House when we arrived. Friedman threw a tallis over his shoulders with practiced ease and began to chant a Chasidic tune. The congregation of students and faculty joined in and within seconds the sanctuary was full of music. Friedman sang with his eyes closed and a dreamy half smile on his face.
As the service progressed, someone handed me a mimeographed sheet. It had the words to a couple of Chasidic tunes, and several short Chasidic parables that all began, typically, with variations of “One day Reb Moshe was walking in the woods near Vilna …” In America, Jewish stories usually take place someplace else.
When the prayers were over, Friedman invited the congregation to the roast chicken and kreplach soup dinner that his wife had prepared. The food was delicious and Dora, a curly-headed, vivacious woman, raced around the room to make sure everyone had enough. Every few minutes, Friedman burst into a melodic chant, keeping time on the table by banging his knife and fork. He seemed almost unaware that he was singing
, but people looked over at him and smiled fondly. “Yossil’s still a Chasid at heart,” Dora said to me as she sailed by with a tray of dark meat and baked potatoes.
After dinner I talked about Israeli politics. It was a speech I had given before, and it seemed to go over well enough. But later that night, after we got back to his house, Friedman took me aside and gently protested.
“You were very good, very informative,” he said, making the word a pejorative. “But on Shabbes, a Jew needs more than information. A Jew needs something for the ‘neshama,’ the soul. You can’t talk to Jews about Eretz Yisrael and just give them information. To a Jew, Eretz Yisrael is a sweet place, not just another country.”
I was stung by the criticism and began to argue that information—and not schmaltz—is exactly what Jews need to hear about Israel. Friedman cut me off gently, putting his hand on my arm. “Listen, I might be right, I might be wrong. Think about it, that’s all I’m saying. To another person I might not mention it at all, but I feel I know you. I know more about you than you think. After all, we played ball together.”
Dora came in, after supervising the cleanup effort at the Hillel. She is a warm, articulate woman who came to the States as a girl after World War II and was raised in an Orthodox home in Philadelphia. She gave Yossil an affectionate hug, went into the kitchen, and emerged a minute later with three cups of tea.
We sat in the Friedmans’ living room, talking quietly about Akiva’s upcoming bar mitzvah. Yossil had just received a letter, in Yiddish, from an aunt in Brooklyn, imploring him to make sure that the affair would be kosher. He was amused by the letter—it never would have occurred to him not to have a kosher party—and dismayed that his family has so little confidence in him.
“It must have been hard for you to get out of that world,” I said, thinking of Mendel and the chopsim patrol of Williamsburg. Yossil laughed and looked at Dora. “It wasn’t easy. In those days I lived a schizophrenic existence. By day I was a yeshiva boy, by night I used to get into regular clothes and hang out in the Village. That place was like magic for me back then, all the coffeehouses and the clubs. And then one summer I worked as a bellhop in the Catskills. That was the beginning of the end. I went to the Concord and drank a daiquiri and watched people dancing the cha-cha-cha. I promised myself I’d learn to dance, and when I got back to the city I began to hang around Killer Joe Piro. I got so good that I wound up as a Latin dance instructor at the Dale Institute in Manhattan.”