November 26, 2005--Saturday Story: "Turkey Wars"

Turkey Wars

It took a while for Jews to get used to turkey, much less Thanksgiving.

We are as you know a stiff-necked people. Actually, we are more a brisket and roast-chicken people. Especially if you throw in some nice gravy and a well-done piece of kuggel, a slice from the corner of the baking dish being preferable so that there are more burnt crispy noodle ends to pick at. Not to mention dessert! And though eager to assimilate in other ways, when it comes to food, there is a limit to what we are willing to sacrifice in order to be considered American. Thus Thanksgiving presented us with problems.

Yiddish we were prepared to jettison (though recently we are wanting to rescue it), yarmulkes and other religious garments could be put away except for weddings and funerals, and our shules would become synagogues before they became temples. But keep away from our gefilte fish!

Therefore, Rosh Hashanah and Passover were everyone’s favorite holidays because they both emphasized the food. The best versions of either were when the prayers get read at breakneck speed and the food arrived before anyone fainted. In my family this meant not stopping to answer any questions, even from the children, and not allowing either my father or Uncle Harry to get away with too much tummeling (translation—making side comments of a distinctly sacrilegious sort, which was a specialty of theirs) because that interrupted the flow of the chanting; and, if it got out of control, elicited a sneer or worse from the one of two huddled at the table for whom the ancient sounds (no one understood the meaning of even one word) evoked reverberations in their tribal DNA, and thereby delayed dinner.

“Hello, let’s eat,” could be heard from New World ghetto to ghetto--from East Flatbush to East New York, from Boro Park to Bensonhurst, from King Highway to Kings Point. There might be mortal disagreement about Eisenhower or Stalin or about the Rosenbergs or Roy Cohen; but about a good gedempter bris or a piece of rugulah there were only smiles and nods of agreement—to be able to put heaping portions of this kind of food on the table was why we came to America. Particularly for the children because in combination with the cod liver oil we were forced to swallow every morning, this would assure we would be big and tall and strong and smart, even if we might still pop out the womb with a beak for nose and kinky hair—both of which could be taken care of later in life in a variety of ways. In these ways we would become truly American while still devoted to our chopped liver.

But what to do about Thanksgiving, the quitessential American holiday, which the revisionists among us (the ones going to Columbia and CCNY) recognized as a Protestant, meaning Christian, holiday? And to make matters worse, did you ever have a piece of turkey that wasn’t so dry that you could choke on it? It only reinforced the view that the goyim knew nothing about food. True, they may have been in charge of the country and had the monopoly on old money, but what’s this with their cooking? No wonder they all looked liked skinny wretches. So to truly take on and embrace Thanksgiving was a challenge. We could deal with the Pilgrims and the Indians, but that pumpkin pie, which tasted like orange library paste, was another matter.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Jack, who were the first and until that time the only relatives to escape from the confines of Brooklyn to the suburbs, saw their destiny to include bringing the family into the embrace of Thanksgiving. It was, in a sense for them, an assimilationist metaphor. If they could accomplish this, then we all would finally be at home in America.

They knew they needed to make Thanksgiving a family occasion for it to be authentic. Families gathering from all reaches of the country was an American tradition and prerequisite. So they began their conversion of us, by luring us to Great Neck by adding brisket to the turkey in the certaintity that that would assure we would at least show up. That was the first step—getting us there. Then, if we could get something to eat, we would feel good and maybe begin to see the virtues of Thanksgiving. Especially if there was enough for many second helpings and at least three desserts.

We arrived in family groups—the Krupins always first to assure Uncle Eli some time alone with Uncle Jack. So they could talk about Business. Uncle Eli was in business for himself and in that saw himself equivalent to Jack though not nearly in the same league of success. In fact, Uncle Eli lived life barely one step ahead of the loan sharks who were always hunting for him, threatening, if he didn’t pay off his debts, to break his knee caps or worse. Thus to have some private moments of huddled conversation with Jack, to in effect rub up against his success helped bring Eli out to Great Neck for these Americanisher occasions. We would be next, not so much to enable my father to have an audience with Jack (that’s how they each would view it). No, we arrived right after the Krupins to assert our place in the family hierarchy--that because my father was the only one from his generation within the family to have been from German-Jewish stock and, most important, had actually been born in America, no one could call him a kike or machie. And there was some significant competitive strain between Jack and my father which trumped Jack’s economic success that my father was eager to flaunt: It had more to do with the fact that my father was fully six feet tall (Jack was no more than five-four) and my brother and I were already towering over Jack’s son, Lewis. Clear evidence that the Zwerlings were doing a better job of this version of assimilation than were he and his progeny. And we had better posture. Then the other Krupins would arrive. There were two separate sets of Krupins since Eli and Harry were Krupin brothers who married Tanna and Fannie, two sisters. These Krupins also struggled. Harry was in the “Bar and Grill” business, which meant he both never made a living (a Jew owning a bar was a version of an oxymoron) and needed to spend all his evenings and very late nights dealing with the goyim and maybe, just maybe it was whispered with a floozy or two. So to be in the presence of Uncle Jack, who roamed the world among the goyisher elite, was enough to get Harry out of bed earlier than his usual 3:00 pm and onto the Belt Parkway early enough for a little rubbing. Next were the first of the Cantors—Uncle Bob and Aunt Gussie. He worked in a gas station and though he thus had the best car in the family, he never was able to get all the axle grease off his hands and out from beneath his fingernails. This stigma served as a constant reminder to all of us that, though we were progressing in America, in truth we hadn’t come all that far; and with a little bad luck (which we devoutly believed to be the basic force operating in the universe), we would quickly revert to being Grease Monkeys, a kind of reverse evolution. The Dinersteins followed Aunt Gussie and Uncle Bob. They had a very complicated connection to Uncle Jack in that Cousin Murray “worked for him.” That was a great opportunity, to be carried along with Jack’s success, but as with all such it came at considerable cost. Jack, though immensely successful, operated his global enterprises as if they were Mom and Pop businesses. Which meant that he kept all know-how locked privately in his head (he trusted no one—not even his nephew Murray) and all his papers in empty cigar boxes which he carried back and forth with him from home to office. This meant that Murray, who graduated at night from NYU’s business school, could not put any of what he learned there, “modern business practices,” to use. He therefore, though doing well financially as a derivative result of Jack’s acumen, worked in huffs of understandable frustration. One could not then expect him to be the first to arrive. In fact, one could not expect him to even want to be there. Enough was enough. Being under Jack’s thumb and scrutiny so many hours each week could not be wiped away by a second helping. And finally, finally, the last to arrive were the Fursts—Nina (ne Cantor) and Hank Furst and their children. Not because they came from furthest away. In fact, in ways none of us could figure out or calculate considering that Hank never seemed able to keep a job, they had managed to buy a private house of their own recently in one of the Five Towns and were as a result geographically closest to Helen and Jack. But Hank was an Austrian, born there and then escaping to America at the end of the Second World War, and he moved at the pace of an Austrian gentleman. Not that he was a “gentleman” by Austrian standards (by definition no Jew attain that status); but he had an elegance all his own, moved at an Eastern European pace, and spoke in an accent to envy. Plus a classic style of smoking cigarettes (I think between his two middle fingers) rivaled only by Adolphe Menjoe in the movies. And drank more black coffee each day, in the slowest sips imaginable, than were consumed by the entire family. Our favorite story about Hank was how one day, in his Five Towns’ kitchen, he sat smoking and sipping, barely noticing his son Roy attempting to stuff his sister into the stove, saying, with that killer accent, “Roy, please, don’t put your sister in the oven.” Not getting up to intervene, not missing a sip or a puff. So amazing, so cosmopolitan in a family of hoverers. So we very much looked forward to his arrival because that meant he would bring along his own unique touch of class; and it would signal that we could, at last, eat!

Aunt Helen was a bit of an artist and among the best of her ouevre were the hand painted place cards that she created for each holiday occasion. They were to be taken home by each of us along with the flower centerpieces. But they also served to assign us to seats. (My special place and assignment involved sitting next to her mother, Mrs. Selig, to make sure she would eat, which she did with flamboyant abandon after claiming she had eaten before leaving for Great Neck from Brooklyn and as a result wasn’t hungry. She was totally deaf so I was relieved of the need to make conversation with a 90 year-old—listening was all that was required and that took some effort since she talked, chewed, and swallowed simultaneously and so I also needed, as a result, to blot her face frequently and pick up her spillings from the table cloth and rug below her chair.)

The seating arrangement was more than just about who would get first crack at the circulating platters of mounded food—though that was to be sure not insignificant. Your place also assigned you to Helen and Jack’s judgment about your place within the family itself. Admittedly their idiosyncratic view; but considering the provenance—Jack was the only male child from his generation of six siblings, a very big deal, and he was a legitimate multi-millionaire (not just a so-called Jewish-Millionaire which meant you were worth $100,000)—being literally put in your place by them was, well, being put in your place.

It was location, location, location—a family real estate calculus that defined one’s worth. This hierarchical derivative was greatly facilitated by the layout of Aunt Helen and Uncle Jack’s dining room. It was of a size that none of us had personally experienced except in Cary Grant movies, but even at that it could accommodate just eight around the faux Louis XV table. So an aluminum folding table was affixed to that end of it that was closest to the living room, extending the seating into there. But that too had it limitations—by butting up against the dining room table it eliminated one place and added only seven more of its own—we were thus up to being able to seat 15. Six more places were needed to accommodate us all, and thus to accomplish that a second folding table was hooked at right angles to the end of the first so that in their now full manifestation the three tables represented a hugely enlarged set of wandering domino tiles. Thereby there were now places for Jack and Helen’s family, both sets of Krupins, the Zwerling four, the Dinersteins, Cantors, and Fursts. Do I have them all?

The first time the 21 of us were called to this meandering set of tables we circled each other peering at the place cards to find our assignments—clearly understanding that though all of us began at the head of the Louis XV, being at the imagined self-assigned apex of family prominence, we knew that some of us would inevitably be destined for just that first time to the Siberia right-hooked end that was virtually in the play room—the former now-converted garage. This would be more than compensated for come Thanksgiving when we would find ourselves at our more rightful place around that gilded dining room oval. So we sorted ourselves out on that initial occasion, half of us looking forward to our improved lot a few months hence.

But then when the first of our Thanksgivings was organized, when we circled the tables once more, all of course beginning again at the head of the head table, it was thought to be an oversight that we all found ourselves once again where we had been that previous spring.

At the next Passover, however, it was clear that Helen and Jack were thinking about us in immutable ways—there was no forgetting, no “understandable” confusion (no possible way to make excuses for Uncle Jack about this)—the Krupins (the Eli and Tanna ones) and the Zwerlings (plus my dinner mate—Mrs. Selig) were permanently, better, perpetually situated at precisely where we were meant to be.

And when we had our second Thanksgiving, there was no wishful circling of the dining room table, no close reading of the autumn golden place cards, as if in a trance state, we all robotically went right to where we knew too well where we belonged. It was not a festive situation.

Those most “progressive” family members immediately saw it for what it was—a reflexive assertion of American capitalism where class distinctions caused that historical imperative—the grand dialectic—to be played out amongst us. This Bolshevik reality right here in America would make it impossible to convince us that Thanksgiving wasn’t another opiate of commoditization. In fact, the very idea of “family” itself within which we sought haven in a heartless world, it too was exposed in our very midst to be a socially-constructed fiction.

Thus that time when the platters of turkey began to circulate, just as the aromatic evidence of a very special stuffing began to emerge from the kitchen, the smell of which hinted at the promise that it might perhaps surpass in incandescent deliciousness of the kuggel from last Passover, and in savoring it, seeking second and third helpings, we would at last cross that final border between the Old and New, Aunt Bertha, the oldest of the sisters, and the most eager reader of that very Red afternoon newspaper, PM, when Bertha realized that her distant place at the groin of where the living room folding table made a sharp right turn toward the old garage, denying and defying age and primogeniture, that that table placement was evidence of the Running Dogs of Capitalism’s way of classifying and defining her, she bellowed out for all to hear—all in Great Neck, all in Brooklyn, all even in the shtetals of Poland, that she was not eating. Not one bite.

She would not take, chew, or swallow one mouthful of that cursed bird or allow herself to be tempted by that stuffing you-could-die-for. She was prepared to die for something else, something higher and more universal. She was at last drawing the line. A pox on your turkey; a pox on your house and fancy dining room. A pox on your turkey and cranberries and stuffing. She was mobilizing herself for the resistance and final struggle of the proletariat; right there on Long Island in the very heart of the Imperialists’ stronghold. The time had come. It was her 1917!

Folding her arms across her extraordinary chest, Aunt Bertha glared at her tiny brother at the head of his bourgeois table.

As always with his sisters, nothing was that different now, Jack kept his eyes averted, focused on the sweet potato and marshmallow casserole. Everyone else became silent, the rich ping of sterling silverware on bone china ceased.

The only sound came from Cousin Chuck, who hadn’t missed a forkful, asking if there was a second helping of stuffing and to be sure also to pass him the giblet gravy. The rest of us were ready as well for another round of stuffing and the maids had to run back and forth to the kitchen to keep the supply up with the demand.

As a man of business, that was something Uncle Jack understood. And for the first time in family history he was reported to have been seen to smile. Even he had another helping.

Thanksgiving had arrived, but The Revolution had to wait until next Passover.