September 14, 2012--Chapter 7: The Treyf House

Seeking to transgress, for otherwise good boys like me, opportunities to do so came in only a few muted forms. 

Sneaking a smoke behind the garage, stealing a bag of marbles from Woolworths, catching a feel in the coat closet at school, trapping a kitten and then chickening out when attempting to drown it, peeking at the cover of a nudie magazine at the corner candy store, or slithering up to the balcony in the Rugby Theater to spy on necking couples--that was what was available for the thrill-seeking timid. 

But from this anemic list of how to be bad none proved more deeply satisfying than ordering and devouring non-kosher Roast Pork Fried Rice or, even better, Shrimp with Lobster Sauce at, forgive me, the neighborhood Chinks.

We Jews took pride in the empirical observation that gin mills, bars and grills, were to be found in only the rough Irish neighborhoods of Brooklyn.  True, we might sip Shapiro’s Cut-It-With-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 or at a Bar Mitvah.  The real drinking was for the goyim.

So what we had, what was for us, 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-trayf 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 by 8:00 p.m.  And the word on the street the next day was that it never tasted better.  Among the Jews, it was even more satisfying 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, was that a sneeze I am hearing? Too much sheltering--“It will be cold out so be sure to take along a sweater.  The brown one with the turtle neck.”  And having too many vicarious aspirations loaded onto our already slumping shoulders.  And too much pressure--to be tall, to have straight teeth, not to mention the nose, the latter two of which if necessary could be corrected.  It also meant requiring nothing but A's from school and no notes send home by teachers.  This was required in order to assure we would find ourselves on track to medical/law/dental school and eventually a big house on Long Island.  On the North Shore.

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 transgressing we were in truth still being good—Mamas' Little Angels 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 Carly Walburton while he stole the latest issue of Action Comics, filching hubcaps, 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 trayf.  Most forbidden.  And thus exquisite.  To die for.  Though not just yet.

Note that treyf was only available when eating out--at Lundy’s, the Scobee, and Lum Fong’s, because everyone in the family kept kosher homes.  We had to go to restaurants 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 was it.  So we kept a foot in two culinary countries, which was a metaphor for our lives in America—we lived between the old and new worlds.

My mother’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa. were my real grandparents.  My father’s hardly qualified.  His father, Harold, didn’t even manage to live long enough to be at my bris, dying of “indigestion,” actually a 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 and more with wanting to opt out of his life with his wife, Lillian.  To me she was neither a grandmother in name nor through the kitchen arts since she insisted on my calling her “Lilly”; and because on those rare occasions when we visited, she never served anything but cigarettes and coffee.  Both mainly to herself.

Grandfather Harold was reputed to be a gentle man, not able or wanting to keep up with Lilly’s rough and tumble ways—out all night playing Gin Rummy, smoking one cigarette after another, having a few “belts” (decidedly not for medicinal or sacramental reasons), and it was suspected doing a little fooling around on the side.  Therefore, for him it was the right decision to “depart” with 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 because of their very infrequency honored our home and enfolded us into the annual round of family rituals.  Virtually as sacred to us, and perhaps them, as Passovers at their apartment.

How then did my mother’s get to be the Treyf House? To be etymological—trayf: 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 Poland and came to America with her family when she was just five.  She was the youngest of six children, arriving here at a young enough age when it was possible to learn English quickly and, of considerable significance to immigrants, without an accent.  She was the only one in her family to achieve that and thus, with the added advantage of having “Malone” for a last name was able to “pass” for native born and not Jewish.  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.  From this she became her family’s best hope to become fully American.

And since that leg up on life of hers was also reportedly famous for its shape, as was the rest of her, she had many beaus caling—some from very wealthy families, those her parents encouraged, if they were Jewish; others merely handsome, and of these her parents had very different opinions, Jewishness not withstanding.  My dashing father, with his movie-star moustache, fit that latter category and so, in spite of the family's objections, my mother-to-be was hopelessly smitten.  Though his family was Jewish they were not observant--he in fact was a proud atheist--that in itself could have been an insurmountable problem for my mother’s very orthodox parents, and thus for my mother.  But his being born in America was a form of mitigation.  Thus they did not 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 quite a dresser--and with that she would have potentially been driven out of the family.  They likely would have lost her, their precious Sheyner.  This was a real worry since they had an example from right across the street 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 grandparents to pay their ceremonial visits my father, atheist that he was, grumpily consented, as the price for peace, to allow my mother to make a kosher home.  Though in truth it was more about having the two sets of dishes in their separate cabinets than 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 comfortable 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 languages.  I didn’t speak a word of even English until I was 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 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 line up 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.”

So my mother enrolled me at 10 at the East Flatbush Yeshiva over my father’s limp objections.  If he wasn’t going to fight over dishes this too could somehow 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 4^th grade.  And thus when I showed up in Mr. Ludwig’s 5^th grade class, a gleam appeared 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 public school sports history.  You can then only imagine how Mr. Ludwig felt when I arrived in his classroom 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 semiconscious.  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 finally crawl out of 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 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 conflict 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 unyielding, not seeing basketball as he did to be quite such a vehicle for my metamorphosis, and knowing that my tallness already marked me for high regard within her under-sized immigrant 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 stopped 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 than my mother, and with his 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 humiliations I now had heaped on me daily on top of those already accruing from public school.  At least in the gym, though the ball was still occasionally thumping me in my slowly-broadening chest, I literally 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 mucus anyone would ever need for extended discourse in any Polish shtetl, this my specially evolved nose assured, still my ch’s tended to come out more like ha’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 (which 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 quarters for trees in Israel.”  And as a result was sent to the chief rabbi’s office for punishment, which he summarily 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 metaphoric 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 on 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 two railroad 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 submission.  She may have been a professional—a teacher—but she still after all was a woman of her time.

During the weeks of passive-aggressive silence, food had never stopped being prepared and served; laundry had continued to be tended to. And then, added 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,  this time they were accompanied by 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.  Nor did we talk among ourselves about what was transpiring and reshaping our lives.

But somehow, by some form of osmosis or family telepathy, the following 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, my Uncle Eli appeared at our table; and the weekend after that Uncle Harry set a place for himself; and after that Uncle Bob; and after that Cousin Morty, 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, as an act of devotion, kept a strictly kosher home. 

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, quivering with fear, we worried, up in Heaven.  We might get a hint of that latter possibility next Yom Kippur when it was atonement time.

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 for illicit rashers of bacon, so that in a few months our apartment began to resemble less our old apartment than the Scobee Diner.

My basketball career, on the other hand, progressed but only at the public school level; my only appearance at Madison Square Garden was during the NIT Tournament when I sat installed in a cheap seat right under the roof.  And any plans for a bar mitzvah were cancelled, though I still to this day as the result of learning just a dozen Hebrew words am a champion phlegm generator. Also, I finally topped out at six-feet-four; and thus, as my mother understood, in the larger world I have always been taken for an American.  And, yes, extra-crisp bacon and Shrimp with Lobster Sauce are still my favorites.