December 31, 2005--Saturday Story: "Treyf House"

Treyf House

For boys who wanted to be bad, opportunities to transgress sadly came in just a few muted forms. Stealing a smoke or something from Woolworths, catching a feel in the coat closet in school or catching a kitten and then drowning it, sneaking a look at a Nudie magazine at the corner candy Store or sneaking up to the balcony in the Rugby Movie Theater because it was reserved for adult couples who needed a place to neck. But from this pathetic list of how to be bad none proved more deeply satisfying than ordering and devouring Roast Pork Fried Rice or, better, Shrimp with Lobster Sauce at, forgive me, the neighborhood Chinks.

We Jews took pride in the empirical observation that Gin Mills were to be found in just the rough Irish neighborhoods of Brooklyn. True, we might take three glasses of Shapiro’s Cut-It-Wit-A-Knife kosher wine at Passover, only because we were required to, or an occasional gulp of schnapps or, the women, some Cherry Herring, but only during the winter to warm up. The real drinking was for the goyim.

What we had, what was for us, however, what characterized every Jewish neighborhood, were Chinese restaurants, where transgression itself was on the menu. On Column “A” there were Pork Spareribs, Fried Pork Dumplings, Shrimp Toast, and Barbequed Roast Pork; and on Column “B” you could find Shrimp With Broccoli, Pork with Black Bean Sauce, Shrimp with Water Chestnuts, and the double-treyf ultimate Shrimp (not kosher) with Lobster Sauce (also not kosher.

It didn’t get much better than that in East Flatbush! At least not until 1957 when the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees in the World Series. Actually, that night, after the celebrations subsided, the Jews slipped off to their favorite Chinese restaurants where Shrimp with Lobster Sauce ran out before 8:00 p.m. And the word on the street the next day was that it never tasted better. Among the Jews, even better than the Dodger’s miracle.

Being bad in these ways was a necessary antidote to the feeling of being smothered, even oppressed by too much caring (“My little kinderlakh, is that a sneeze I’m hearing?”), too much sheltering (“It will be cold out so be sure to take along a sweater. The brown one.”), and having too many vicarious aspirations loaded on our already slumping shoulders—to be tall, have straight teeth (not to mention the nose—both of which could be corrected), nothing but A’s from school, no notes send home from teachers, so we would thereby find ourselves on track to medical/law/dental school and eventually a big house on Long Island. On the North Shore of course.

Why the most alluring ways to transgress so often involved food is not difficult to understand. First, among the many promises of America was its seemingly limitless bounty. For shtetl Jewish mothers new to America to be able to put brisket on the table, enough even for the children to have second helpings, was a form of deliverance, a fulfillment of millennia of imagining. For the fathers who could earn enough to provide meat five days a week, it was a measure of success.

Second, while being bad we were in truth still being good—Mama’s Little Angel didn’t stray too far while seeking distance. To suck on a Pork Sparerib involved considerably less family opprobrium then, say, serving as lookout for Hymie the Bookie who had set up his phones in the back of Auggie’s Barbershop. Or worse. After all, on Sunday evenings, eating Chinese, we bad boys sat surrounded by quivering parents and aunts and uncles and cousins, all attempting to pick up their Shrimp Dumplings with chopsticks. Who ever heard of chopsticks in Poland?

And third, just savoring a rasher of extra-crisp bacon at the Scobee Diner or a plate of clams on the half shell, nested in chipped ice, at Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay, got us into deeper, Old-Testament trouble. Both were treyf. Most forbidden. And thus exquisite. To die for. Though not just yet.

Note that treyf was available at Lundy’s, the Scobee, and Lum Fong’s, because everyone in the family kept kosher homes. We had to eat out to get our hands on that succulent, greasy treyf. Some kept kosher homes out of belief; most because Grandpa and Grandma wouldn’t come for a visit to anyone who wasn’t kosher. OK, semi-kosher if you ate shrimp “out.” That was your business, but keeping a kosher kitchen was a prerequisite for their visiting. Unless you had two sets of dishes, one for meat (fleyshedik) and another for dairy (milkhedik), no Grandma, no Grandpa. That’s it. Simple. So we kept a foot in two culinary countries, which in truth was a metaphor for our lives in America—between two worlds.

Grandma and Grandpa were my real grandparents. My father’s parents hardly qualified. His father, Louis, didn’t even manage to live long enough to be at my bris, dying of “indigestion” (read heart attack) before he was fifty. As I grew older, I came to realize that this probably had less to do with his opting out of grandparenting but more with wanting to opt out of his life with Annie. To me a grandmother not even in name or through food since she insisted on my calling her “Annie”; and because on those rare occasions when we visited, she never served anything else but black coffee, which my mother forbid me even to sip though I was desperate to do so and in that way participate in the tummling that took place around her table.

Grandfather Louis was reputed to be a gentle man, not able or wanting to keep up with Annie’s rough and tumble ways—out all night playing Gin Rummy, smoking one cigarette after another, having a few “belts” (decidedly not for medicinal purposes or to keep her warm), and it was suspected doing a little fooling around on the side. Therefore, for him it was the right decision to opt for indigestion, which he certainly didn’t get from her cooking.

So, for the sake of the children, so we could have access to real kvelling grandparents, my mother kept a kosher home. This meant that we had two sets of dishes—of identical color and design as it was more practical to buy service for 12, divide them in half, and keep them neatly segregated in adjacent cabinets. That was enough to make us kosher in the eyes of her parents and thus they duly visited twice a year—which in their very infrequency honored our home and thus became laced into the round of family rituals. Virtually as sacred to us as Passovers at their apartment.

How then did my mother’s get to be the Treyf House? To be etymological—the house where things were “torn to pieces.”

Through an act of assimilationist striving and domestic violence.

My parents were a family anomaly—my mother was born in Tulowice Poland and came to America with her family when she was just five. The youngest of six children, arriving here at an age when it was possible to learn English quickly and, of considerable significance to immigrants, without an accent. The only one in her family to achieve that and thus, with the added advantage of having “Mooney” for a last name was able to “pass” for native born. (She was born a Munya but with considerable good fortune in those anti-Semitic times, it was changed at Ellis Island, presumably by an Irish Immigration Officer to whom Mooney was more familiar than Munya.) At the time this gave her a leg up in life. She also was the only one among her siblings and cousins to become a professional—while her sisters worked in Sweatshops, fabricating shirtwaists and being paid by the piece, she trained to be a public school teacher. For this, she became her family’s best hope to become fully American.

And since that leg up on life of hers was also famous for its shape, as was the rest of her, she had many beaus coming by—some from very wealthy families (these her parents encouraged), others merely very handsome (of these there were very different opinions). My dashing father, with his Clark Gable moustache, fit that latter category and so, in spite of the conflicting family encouragements and opinions, my mother-to-be was hopelessly smitten. Though his family was Jewish they were not observant and that in itself could have been an insurmountable problem for my mother’s very orthodox parents, and thus for my mother. But the fact that he was born in America was a form of mitigation. Thus they didn’t press their opinions all that vigorously or attempt to interfere, suspecting it would have been futile and likely would have driven my mother to elope (he was that handsome and some dresser) and with that potentially out of the family. They might have lost her, their precious Sheyner. This was a real worry since they had an example from right across the hall where a neighbor’s daughter, Malkie Berman, ran off with Herman Schwartz and never returned. And he didn’t even have a moustache or a decent suit!

Thus my parents were duly married, and in order to enable my mother’s parents to pay their ceremonial visits my father consented, as the price for peace, to having a kosher home, though in truth it was more about having the two sets of dishes in their separate cabinets than in the cuts of meat my mother learned to buy—have you ever tried to cut and chew a piece of broiled kosher chuck?

He was, however, less than comfortably compromising when it came to Hebrew lessons for me, to prepare me for my Bar Mitzvah. My mother contended that for me the haftorah classes needed to commence when I was just ten, three years in advance, because I was so inept at anything having to do with language. I didn’t speak a word in any language until I was fully two; and though my mother was quick to point out that Winston Churchill didn’t utter a coherent word until he was three, in my case it was clear that I was to be no Churchill. In fact, in public school, this ineptitude was publicly magnified. No more evident than during the daily Spelling Bees—the boys against the girls. We would stand arrayed against each other on opposite sides of the classroom and the teacher would in turn pepper us with words to spell, in ascending order of difficulty, banishing us in public humiliation at the slightest hesitation or stammer. I was always the first to be dismissed, always during the first round, stumbling on words such as “separate,” “calendar,” or “pursue.” (To this day I still do and would have here if it weren’t for the blessing of Spell Check.)

So my mother enrolled me at the East Flatbush Yeshiva over my father’s limp objections. If he wasn’t going to fight over dishes, this too could be tolerated. That is until basketball season.

To compensate for my verbal incompetence, God, or whatever, gave me the tall genes—I shot up to almost six feet during the summer after 4th grade. And thus when I showed up in Mr. Ludwig’s 5th grade class, this put a gleam in his eye since he was also the PS 244 basketball coach. Previously, his tallest player had been barely five-six. Our team, the Rugby Rockets, was a legend throughout Brooklyn, famous for having the worst won-lost record in New York City sports history. You can then only imagine how Mr. Ludwig felt when I became his student already six feet tall, already with the requisite crew cut and an emerging face of pimples. He couldn’t wait to get me into the gym, where he quickly discovered that I was considerably less than a work in progress. Whenever he would pass the ball to me it would hit me in my decidedly underdeveloped chest, knocking the air out of my lungs and frequently rendering me unconscious. Thus, he needed to take me on as his personal project if he was to put those six feet to use so the Rockets could crawl out from the cellar.

When my father learned that Coach Ludwig saw this promise in me, but that it would require hours and hours and months and months of after school work to teach me the game, it was immediately apparent that having to go for Hebrew lessons every day but Friday, also after school, would get in the way of his basketball dreams--an eventual basketball scholarship to college and, who knows, if I kept growing and wound up seven feet tall, maybe I could play for the New York Knicks in that sports temple, Madison Square Garden. Who knows, but clearly there was a problem and so he began to work on my mother to see if at the very least she would allow me to take a break from Hebrew School for the next year so I could have the time for other forms of learning, learning that would build character, he claimed, as well as my body—running, passing, shooting, and rebounding. Then, he argued, at the more traditional age of eleven I would go back to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah.

But she was unbending, not seeing basketball as he did to be quite such a vehicle for my apotheosis, and knowing that my tallness already marked me for high regard within her family; and in the world beyond the family it would guarantee that I would always be perceived as having been born in America. But she also knew that if I was allowed to stop attending Hebrew School, especially if I helped the Rockets at long last achieve a winning season, I would never return.

This meant that my father needed to employ other tactics--and so he began to work on me. I of course proved much easier to convince as to the primacy of basketball, and with his approving sanction, I immediately began to lose what little interest I had in the rote learning, the backward reading, and the tortured hieroglyphics of the Hebrew alphabet that characterized my “Jewish Education.” I looked for a way to get away from the Hebrew-school humiliations I now had heaped daily on top of those already accruing from public school. At least in the gym, though the ball was still frequently thumping me in the ribs, I stood head and shoulders above everyone, including Mr. Ludwig. At least that was something.

My final day at Hebrew School was the result of my refusal to “contribute” yet another quarter to the costs associated with planting trees in the desert sands of Israel. These quarters were extorted from us by our Hebrew teacher for any infraction, no matter how minor, including my seemingly inherent inability to pronounce the uvular fricative—the quintessential phlegmy "ch" sound required by so many Hebrew and Yiddish words. Though I had the requisite post nasal drip and could thus produce all the torrents of phlegm anyone would ever need for extended discourse in any Polish shtetl, this my specially evolved nose assured, my "ch’s" still tended to come out more like "cha’s," and so I had to keep anteing up quarters for every spritz. Until one day, as our first exhibition game approached against traditional rival PS 92 (who was rumored to have a center about as tall as I, another freak of nature), I was doubly motivated to draw a line in the sand in East Flatbush and stamped, “No more.” And as a result was summarily sent to the chief rabbi’s office for punishment, which he immediately administered, Old Testament style, by lashing my wrist with his ruler, sending me out screaming into the evening.

My father had his victory; the Rockets did in fact have a winning season for the first time since 1941; and my mother’s prediction that if I stopped attending Torah classes I would never return also turned out to be prescient. In the grand design of things, in the struggle for dominance between the two worlds we were attempting to straddle—the kosher and treyf—my dereliction scored a point for the treyf—things were beginning to be “torn to pieces.”

This became even more literally true in just a few months when my father, in a fit of rage that was spurred by a fight he had with my mother over his intention to buy and run a bar and grill (“Such a schonder for a Jew!”), stormed into the kitchen and in an act of Biblical tectonics intermingled all the dishes—the milkhedik with the fleyshedik. Inseparable as a result, recall, because they were identical in design and color and were only distinguishable because they had been stored in separate cabinets.

Considering the consequences of this sacrilege, no more visits by my mother’s parents, I thought this might mean the end of their marriage and began to prepare myself for the humiliation of a life spend shuttling between their two apartments.

But as with numerous previous violations, after a period of silence and passive aggression, my mother began to take up her life of resignation and duty. Food had never stopped being prepared and served, laundry had continued to be tended to, but then, added slowly to this, simple forms of greeting and communications reemerged; and I realized I would not have to be the first in the family or neighborhood to bear the stigma of having divorced parents.

And there was something else that was astonishingly different. Astonishingly, since it constituted an acknowledgment, even an acceptance of what my father had violently wrought within my mother’s family: My mother began to use her pots and pans and dishes in unexpectedly different ways.

When we assembled for breakfast one Sunday morning, when traditionally my mother would make scrambled eggs for us with potatoes and toast, accompanying them were strips of perfectly prepared . . . bacon!

Though we said not a word that morning, keeping our eye riveted to our plates, we did lick up every crackling bit, wanting but terrified to ask for seconds. Or ever talk among ourselves about what had transpired and was changing our lives.

But somehow, by some form of osmosis or telepathy, next Sunday, Cousin Chuck showed up at breakfast time, something he had never done before, and sat himself down at the table where he too was served by my mother a portion of that savory treyf. And the Sunday after that, his father, Uncle Eli was found at our table as well; and the weekend after that Uncle Harry set a place for himself; and after that Uncle Bob; and after that Cousin Murray, recently discharged from the army; and the following Sunday Cousin Hank seated himself at the now groaning breakfast room table, Hank who had escaped the Nazis and who kept a kosher home out of devotion.

My mother added pancakes to the menu and eventually pork sausages. We ate in rapt silence except to mutter for second helpings of what had previously been forbidden. Our smacking lips could be heard downstairs in the Portnoy’s apartment . . . and maybe up in Heaven. We might get a hint of that latter possibility next Yom Kippur when atonement might be called for.

And so my mother, by accretion, came to preside over what we affectionately began to think of as The Treyf House. This transformation occurred without acknowledgement or discussion. More and more family members just showed up, so that in a few months our apartment began to resemble less our old apartment than the Scobee Diner.
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My basketball career thrived (only at the public school level and my only appearance at Madison Square Garden was during the NIT Tournament where I sat installed in a cheap seat right under the roof); any plans for a bar mitzvah were cancelled (though I still to this day am a champion phlegm generator); and I finally topped out at six-four in height (and thus as my mother understood have always been taken for an American); and extra-crisp bacon and Shrimp with Lobster Sauce are still my illicit favorite.