January 24, 2017--Cortaditos at Bohio

Back to the road trip breakfast stories. This is the last in the series--

We were up at Bohio in Lantana, our favorite Cuban breakfast place where they serve a world-class cortadito--a scalding mix of dark Cuban espresso topped by a layer of steamed milk. It's worth the 10-mile drive up Federal Highway.

Before I could take my first sip, from the next table I heard someone say, "The news these days, man, is all about entertainment and distracting us from what's really going on."

Ah, I thought, there might be some good political conversation to go along with the cortadito.

"I couldn't agree with you more," I said, turning toward two men who were sharing the scrambled eggs special. "And I like your choice of food," I smiled to break the ice, "That’s my favorite. The onions and peppers and tomatoes and crisp pieces of bacon mixed in the eggs are wonderful."

"Man, what are they feeding us?" From his serious tone I knew he wasn't talking about the food. "And what do they take us for? They think we're children or something? I wish they'd treat us serious." I was nodding. "Now it's the Whitney Houston business. And contraception. How long do they think they can get away with those?"

"Until they have the toxicology report or gasoline is $5.00 a gallon," I suggested.

"In the meantime, man, look at Whitney’s record sales. Off the charts. And you know what?" He didn't pause for me to jump in, "they jacked up the prices. Doubled them. Can you believe that?"

"That I can believe."

"I'm all for capitalism, man. I don't have a problem with any of that, but I do have a problem with what the media are up to."

"What's that?" Rona asked.

"To keep us from knowing what's really going on." Neither of us said anything. "I'm in IT, man, I mean I used to be. I got laid off more than a year ago—it’s tough out there--but the things I learned I'm not sure you want to hear about on a beautiful morning like this." He gestured toward the east where the sun was shining through Bohio's wide-open windows.

"For example," he slapped his cell phone on the table, "they know where you are. From this." He tapped the phone. "Wherever you are on the planet. And I mean the whole planet, man.

"Why would . . . ?" Rona began to ask.

"Obvious, man. To control us better. Like I told you, I had this IT job. A big job down in Miami. Evaluating mortgage applications for a bank. One of the really big ones, man. No need for you to know just which. One day my boss called me in to let me know what the bank was really about. He said to me, 'Man, you've been here long enough and have proven yourself. I trust you, man, so you should know what’s going on.’ He told me my job, the bank's job, was to gain all kinds of information about everyone. Everyone, man. From the Social number and bank statements and taxes. From all of that and then to pass it along to the government, To a part of the government that you never heard of." He gestured toward me. "As I said, man, you don't want to know. You just want to enjoy the rest of the time allotted to you. To enjoy the sunshine and the good food and your lovely lady." He was smiling broadly.

"I can tell you from experience that the government knows everything,” he went on, “and I mean everything. And with that they control you and everything else."

"I find this hard . . ."

"I know, man, ‘to believe.’ Right?" I nodded again. "At first I too didn’t believe what they were telling me. So let me give you an example."

"I was just going to ask if you could do that."

"No problem, amigo. Do you remember the savings and loan scandal? From back in the 80s? You seem to be up on things. To most folks it looked like your typical banking scandal. The big boys, man, and this including a half-dozen senators, taking advantage of the government cutting regulations on the banks. And what happened? I mean from what you read in the papers?"

I tried to recall but while I was struggling to do so, he continued, now in part propelled by the two Cuban espressos he had downed, "Well, like recently, when these banks came crashing down and seemed to threaten the whole system, what happened?"

"The government stepped in to bail them out."

"That’s what they wanted you to think. The government I mean."

"I'm confused," I said. I truly was. "What did they want us to think?"

"That it was just another bail out. That's what they wanted you to believe. The truth is that this gave the government a chance to look into everyone's bank account. I mean of all these banks’ customers."

Squinting at him, Rona asked, "For what purpose?"

"It's part of a much bigger thing. About the government wanting to know, man, where we are every minute, who we're with, what we're reading, soon even what we're thinking. One of these days they’ll be able to plant a tiny chip in your brain,” he tapped his temple, “so they can know what you’re thinking. This isn’t science fiction, man. Remember, I’m from IT."

"Why do they want to know all this?"

"To sell us things. You got to realize that's government's main job. To make it easy for those corporations to get their hands on what’s left of our money. That's the whole point, man. I know you're skeptical. I used to be too until I looked into what's really behind all the new technology--these phones, our computers, our TVs, our GPSs, everything electronic, man. It's all about controlling us by taking away our freedom. Freedom is the most powerful thing. To take control of us they have to take it away. In ways, man, so that we don't notice it’s disappearing."

He paused to gulp down another shot of espresso. "Let me give you another example. Remember that Ted Kozinski Unabomber guy?"

"I do," I said.

"Well, man, what do you think his real story is? And I'll throw in something else for you to think about, man, since you're looking at me that way again. To fill out the picture. There's also that Timothy McVeigh. The Oklahoma City bomber. Remember him? Supposedly these two dudes acted alone. OK, McVeigh had that stooge Terry Nichols, or whatever, working for him. At least that's the cover story that they want you to believe. If you really look into his case, McVeigh’s, you'll discover that he was part of a big network. Guys who supposedly hated the federal government because of Waco, man, and Ruby Ridge. Remember them?"

"I do."

"And did you read the long confession he wrote while he was waiting for them to execute him?”

“I have a vague memory of that.”

“I recommend it to you. But in the meantime, I can tell you that the official stories in their cases are about these terrorist types--supposedly American terrorists--acting on their own. Unabomber, right? You know, man, what una means. One or alone, right?"

"About that I don't know," I confessed.

"Well, you can trust me on that one. But here's the real story, man,” he looked around and then leaned forward to whisper, “they were actually working for the government."

"Really? I find that hard . . ."

He put a finger up to shush me, "I know you do. That’s the whole point. For you not to believe this. As I said, trust me on this one, amigo. I know from where I speak. It was the plan for the government to make it look like these were militia-types. Hating the federal government. Acting on their own. And after doing their deeds they gave the feds the justification they needed to take away more of our freedom. They provided the excuse to order up more surveillance.”

“This seems s little far fetched to me,” I offered.

Waving me off, he said. “And if you think this is far out, do you know that McVeigh and Kozinski were both working with the al Qaeda terrorists?” He paused for that to sink in and then continued, “I can tell by the way you’re both looking at me that you don’t believe this.” He was right about that.

“As I said, man, at first neither did I. But I came around because what I’m saying is true. It's all tied together because after al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 what happened?" Rona and I just looked back at him. "Well you know about that Patriot Act, don't you? That let’s the government listen in on our telephone calls and emails. You think Bush could have gotten away with that one if he hadn't allowed the Israelis to attack us?"

"The Israelis? Now you're going too far," I said. “Actually, that's been charged before, investigated, and dismissed as, frankly, anti-Semitic."

"That's not who I am, man. I love the Israelis and the Jews. To me they're the best people in this world. I wish we here in this country were more like them."

"But you just said the Israelis were behind 9/11." Quoting him back to himself, I asked, "How does that make them 'the best people in the world'?"

"Well, some of them, man, are involved in what I'm trying to explain to you. Like I said, Americans for the most part are good. And most Israelis too, But all these good people here--and that includes all of us--and in Israel are at the mercy of their governments. It's the governments that I have my problem with. Not the people, man. Get me?"

"I think I do," Rona said, wanting to begin to bring the conversation to a conclusion and to get back to her cortadito. It was getting cold. “I know we have our problems, but about what you’re saying I’m not so sure.” She picked up her cup and turned back to her eggs.

“Sorry if I got you all upset, man” he said, extending his hand to me. I shook it.

“That’s OK,” I said, “We like hearing all points of view.”

“One last thing,” he winked, “If you haven’t, you should read Kozinski’s Manifesto. Some of it’s crazy, that I’ll admit to you, but most of it's worth taking seriously. Especially how technology is taking away our freedom. And that McVeigh, who was in Desert Storm, was pretty liberal about foreign policy. He was against all these wars in the Middle East. Check them out, man.”

One the drive home, Rona wondered out loud, “How does someone as well informed as he come to such conspiratorial conclusions? You would think that after spending so much time reading he would see things in a much more balanced way. Sure there are problems with the government. Even most liberals would agree with that. But to see us and the Israelis conspiring to attack the World Trade Center just to help corporations make more money? I don’t get how someone that well informed would believe that.”

“I agree. We hear all sorts of anti-government things from people who really don’t know what they’re talking about. Who simply make things up and won’t accept any facts that contradict their beliefs.”

“Maybe the next time we run into him we’ll ask him about that—how he gets to his conclusions.”

“As for me,” I said, “the next time I think I’ll just pay attention to my cortadito.”

December 15, 2015--Ladies of Forest Trace: Mt. Lebanon

We visited my mother on Sunday at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. It was a little more than five months since her death. It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm day and she was at rest amid the graves of her parents, among her bother, sisters, and their spouses, and next to my father.

Being there reminded me of earlier times at Mt. Lebanon. In truth, often happy, secure times for me when I was a young child. I wanted nothing more than, in one way or another, to be with my family.

I thought to share again something I wrote a few years ago about her final resting place, the family plot in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery--

Shuttling between cemeteries is the way I spent much of my childhood.  One was Mount Hebron, my father’s family’s place of final rest; the other, my mother’s family plot at Mount Lebanon.  Just three miles apart, in the borough of Queens.  It felt like being pressed between the pincers of two grim parentheses.

My mother’s family, the Munyas, arrived in the America in about 1912 from a shtetl town in central Poland, Tulowice.  Her father, Laibusya Munya, was a paymaster in a forest.  This was a job for Jews—they were trusted with the money but not the physical labor of cutting down trees.  That was for the goyim.  Grandpa Laibusya went into Warsaw each week to pick up zloties and brought them back to the forest to pay the men who cut down the trees and schlepped the logs to the river.  With his wife, Frimet, my eventual grandmother, he lived in a log house with his six children, including my infant mother.  When the pogroms became more frequent and bloody, he began to make plans to leave.  As with so many before him, he went first on his own to the New World, established himself as a baker on the Lower Eastside, saved money by existing on rye bread, and then sent for the rest of the family.  They settled within a community of other Polish Jews, most of whom came from the same part of the Pale of Settlement.

They moved from apartment to apartment whenever the landlord raised the rent, but once they were all huddled safely in America, they found a more permanent place to live (a rent controlled third-floor walkup in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn), a store for groceries (Beckman’s, down the block), a butcher (Fleishman’s, next to Beckman’s), a fruit store (Willy’s, across the street), and of at least equal importance, they formed a burial society—a Landsmanshaftn, or a home town association.  There was no time to waste—as my grandfather would say in Yiddish, one never knew when having a plot would come in handy.  And through the years it turned out to be as he predicted--before I was of legal age more family members resided in Mt. Lebanon than Bensonhurst.

Even before finding suitable burial sites, the members of the Landsmanshaftn elected officers—a president, vice president, secretary, and especially a treasurer.  Especially, since the treasurer was responsible for what little money there was—money to pay the cemetery the annual maintenance fee and to write checks for the “perpetual care” for the ground around and on the graves.  Also, the treasurer, because of these fiduciary responsibilities, was the only one who was compensated.  At first five dollars a year.  And thus it was a coveted honor and contested fiercely, particularly as time went by and the annual stipend was raised to $25. Real money when a dollar was still a dollar.

The Tulowice Landsmanshaftn somehow managed to strike a good deal with Mt. Lebanon in spite of great demand-side pressure: Jews were arriving in New York in such numbers during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and dying at such a rate thanks in part to the unchecked influenza, that more and more dairy farms in Queens were being converted into cemeteries and plots were gobbled up as fast as pastures could be converted into graves. 

Mt. Lebanon was established in 1919.  Perfect timing for the Tulowicians who were able to get in on the ground floor during the year of the most virulent and deadly flu epidemic.  They were able to buy a reasonably contiguous cluster of thirty or so plots in a desirable, hilly, shady corner.  It came with a pine tree and a view of the new Interboro Parkway.  As evidence of how desirable a location, Richard Tucker, the famous cantor turned Metropolitan Opera star came to occupy a nearby plot of his own as did Nathan Handworker, founder of Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island.  So the family was in good company and assured of eternal upward mobility.

Exactly what they had come to America for. The streets may not have been paved with gold, but to forever be across from the “biggest” tenor and the hot dog king showed that they had “arrived.”

On the other hand, the Zwerlings, my father’s family, claimed they came to America from Austria, not from the downscale Pale in Poland (although there are in fact no extant papers to prove this assertion).  Full of pride they boasted they were from Vienna, spoke German, and arrived well before those Eastern European shtetal Jews showed up at Ellis Island with their cardboard suitcases.  In fact, unlike the Munyas, who had the good fortune to have had an Irish immigration officer convert Munya to Mooney, the Zwerling needed no such transmutation—the German-sounding “Zwerling” was fine just as it was.  Though hardly of the Our Crowd crowd, the Zwerlings prided themselves on the fact that they were born in America, owned their own house, and didn’t understand Yiddish, much less speak it.  So when it came preparation for dying, they had a different approach than the Malones. 

The cemetery they selected and in which they bought real estate (that is how they viewed it—as a real estate transaction), Mt. Hebron, was founded by assimilated German Jews in the late 1880s.  In contrast to the other Mount, there were no burial societies, none of the carving on the tombstones were in Hebrew--everything in Mt. Hebron was ostentatiously in English--the roads weaving among the graves were wider (Mt. Hebron families had cars), there was abundant parking, the above-ground mausoleums were more elaborate and spacious, and there were even well-tended restrooms.

However, though in all other ways the Zwerlings and Mooneys lived cultural worlds apart, they did share one thing in common—an absolute obsession with illness, dying, death, and above all their final arrangements.  And no one was more obsessed with final matters than my father. 

But first I need to say more about how my mother’s family devoted themselves to their sixteenth of an acre of American soil.  First, with a name like Mooney they had to convince the Mt. Lebanon authorities and that they were in fact Jews and thus eligible to be laid to rest in ground consecrated exclusively for people of the Old Testament.   With their Irish-sounding name they were suspected of being goyim and had to show not only their Ellis Island papers but also those they brought along with them from Poland that identified them as Munyas, and thus Jews.

After successfully making that case to the Mt. Lebanon council of rabbis and being allowed to erect a tombstone with the gentile name “Mooney” chiseled on it, they then needed to consider how to care for the plot itself.  There was the “Perpetual Care” option, but neither the family nor the Landsmanschaftn as yet had the hundred dollars necessary to arrange for it.  That would come later when Uncle Jac did well enough and could afford to underwrite the tending of all thirty plots.  Even then, because of their experiences with pogroms and subsequently the Holocaust, the Mooneys were suspicious of institutions, including cemeteries (after all they too were businesses) and thus were congenitally incapable of trusting them to provide care perpetually (enough of them by then knew English sufficiently to understand how long perpetual in truth was) much less trust the cemetery owners not to run off with the hundred dollars before the clock on perpetual ran out.

Thus, during the spring and summer growing season, we went to Mt. Lebanon every Sunday.  Not to visit Grandpa and Grandma Mooney, who at the time were the only ones in permanent residence, but to care for the gravesite itself.  As the youngest and most agile that meant I was designated to crawl around among the tombstones to pull weeds and cut grass with the pinking shears my Aunt Tanna always had in her pocketbook.

Sitting on the bench to supervise, her sister, my Aunt Fay, would watch with pride as I scampered from head- to foot-stone, kvelling, “Look at him, look at how little Steveala is clipping Papa’s grass and plucking Mama’s weeds.  He has such hands.  With those hands one day he could be a surgeon, be rich,  and make everyone proud.” 

At her older sister’s words praising my skills and predicting my promising future, my mother would swell with maternal satisfaction and say to me, “When I am buried here, Steven, with the family, I know you will come to take good care of me.  And you will tell me about your own wife and your own children and grandchildren.  And about your patients and their appendectomies. Just like I talk to Mamma and Poppa.” 

Though this was more than I wanted to contemplate, any aspect of it—I was already burdened at school with spelling and the six-times table--I nodded and continued to clip away. I moved among the grass and weeds as if born to the task, wielding the pinking shears, which I was told were the only scissors in the family with enough heft to cut through thistles.  So when I had completed my pulling, chopping and cutting with those slotted shears it looked as if the grass had been Marcelled.  As a result, the Malone wavy gravesite was reputed to be the envy of the two burial societies that owned adjacent plots.

In truth I loved this first adult responsibility.  And since none of us had the wherewithal to ever get to real mountains during the hot weather, going to Mt. Lebanon was our version of a trip to the country. 

While I scooted among the tombstones, my aunts would sit on the bench and talk to their Momma and Papa, telling them about what had happened during the week.  There was a lot to report since the family apartment was the site of a constant shuffle of relatives and friends from the Camps in Europe, distant New Jersey, and even the occasional refugee on the way to Palestine.  For the latter, Aunt Tanna would collect money for their passage or to help them buy a car or icebox.  All that news was duly recounted to my grandparents at rest nearby.  But since it was in Yiddish, I could gather little of what they reported.  My ears perked up, however, and my nearly non-existent Yiddish improved, when they whispered about “That Rifka. Not quite a relative but a distant cousin of a friend of my grandparents, Rifka was someone they referred to as a nafke, which even with my limited Yiddish I knew meant tramp.  I made a mental note that when I was old enough I would make an effort to meet that Rifka.

My father’s obsession with his family’s cemetery, however, was of quite a different sort. 

Among the Zwerling, he was the only one preoccupied with the family plot.  To the others it was just that place in Queens where they might eventually have to be taken after marrying off the children and retiring to Florida.  But to him it represented a different order of reality.  Again, in the tradition of the Zwerling, it was more about real estate than visiting the departed and reporting to them life’s quotidian events. To him it was a matter of being sure there was a physical place for everyone entitled to be there.  And that the arrangement of those places, the individual gravesites, were appropriately hierarchical. 

Proximity to the family patriarch, Louis, his father, my grandfather, and mother-grandmother, Anne, was, as it should be, where the hierarchy began, with the sons and their wives and the sisters and their husbands arranged in descending tiers by birth-order and gender.  As the oldest, the first-born male of a first-born father, this meant my father would reside right below his father and mother, and so on down the Zwerling family genealogy.

An awareness of the shape of the Zwerling Family Plot would immediately see that the task my father set for himself was not so easily accomplished.  If they had been able to purchase a plot with hierarchy and primogeniture in mind, they would have bought something more in the shape of a pyramid.  But in the gridded-out reality of Mt Hebron, obtaining a family plot in this anthropological configuration was impossible.  So my father, the arranger, had to work with the rectangle that was bequeathed to him by his father, Grandfather Louis.

He spent endless hours with an outline of the full plot inscribed on a large sheet of oak tag, and within it, using an architect’s triangle and ruler, drew a series of perfectly scaled grave-shaped rectangles, in various combinations and permutations until he had it laid out as appropriately as he could, considering the restraints imposed on his grand design by the unyielding boundaries of the plot.  And when he had his plan worked out as much as possible in primogeniture order, he made a final rendering, using draftsman’s indelible ink; and at a series of family meetings with his brothers and sisters and their spouses, he got each to initial the rectangle assigned to them until all were duly filled in and signed off on.

And thus the responsibility his father bequeathed to him was done. . . . 

That is until his sister, my Aunt Madeline began to upset the scheme by marrying a series of husbands who in turn died shortly after each wedding, and, most critically, were buried, one by one by one, side-by-side in the Zwerling plot.  

By the time Husband Number Three was interred, my father began to worry.  As you by now would expect, he worried not so much about his carefully crafted plan, but, in frankness, more about his own eventual fate.  If Madeline mainatined her current pace, by the actuarial time my father would need the full services of Mt. Hebron, there would no longer be room remaining for him.

Thus, he convened an urgent Zwerling family gathering and laid out the issue squarely and frankly.  Madeline was understandably distraught, having lost her third husband, Morty, just the previous month. He had jumped off the roof of their apartment building—it was well known that she was not easy to live with. 

But in spite of Madeline’s grief, with at least the appearance of sympathy, my father was able to forge ahead and succeeded in mobilizing a majority of sibling and spouse votes to let Madeline know there were no more places at Mt. Hebron for subsequent husbands.  That is unless she was willing to relinquish her own plot.  Or, perhaps she would prefer to have my father arrange to move one or two of her husbands to a different part of the cemetery. 

Considering her options, Madeline agreed that though there would likely be more husbands (that was not open to family discussion) there would be no more places for additional deceased husbands.

That should have been the end of the story.  But again there is more.

As it turned out, there would be room for two more husbands because my father, when his time arrived, did not after all require his place in Mt. Hebron. Nor would my mother.

When a Jewish person dies, it is considered desirable that the person be buried as quickly as possible.  The dust-to-dust imperative is very strong indeed and thus the sooner the better.  As might be expected, to expedite the process, my father had arranged for a prepaid funeral. For him it was also an opportunity to shop for his own casket and arrange for the limousines and memorial service, including that there be nothing that involved a rabbi or any prayers in any language—he was an outspoken lifelong atheist.

His place next to his father’s side at Mt. Hebron awaited, but my mother had a different plan in mind—something more indelible than the ink he had used to make the oak tag diagram.

During their 60-year marriage, she had participated in dozens of discussions about Mt. Hebron.  Or, to put it more appropriately, my father’s plans for them at the Zwerling plot.  She had only hinted to my father how much she did not look forward to spending eternity with The Zwerlings.  It was an era when wives hinted at things that concerned them. She, in truth, dreaded the thought that she would not be with her parents and her real family.  She also hated the idea that she would have to spend her afterlife listening to the Zwerlings arguing, talking simultaneously at the top of their voices, literally forever. 

And so she directed the funeral director--“Let’s put him in Mt. Lebanon.” 

Fortunately there was still room.  Again, in the informal shtetl ways of the Tulowice Landsmanscahftn, without the existence of a notarized plan, she was able to get her remaining siblings to agree to find a space for him and one beside him for her. 

She did feel some guilty that this new arrangement placed him right next to his family rival, brother-in-law Harry.  They had been in a series of failed businesses together and had not only fought about money but about such things as how many spare light bulbs to have on hand—my father thought six were enough; Harry always believed in buying by the gross. She knew, as a result, that there would be family tension right there at Mt. Lebanon. About light bulbs and also who was at fault for driving customers away from their last deli. (She personally blamed my father.)

But she also knew she would be in the warm vicinity of Mamma and Papa. And, when her time came, being separated by my father from Harry, would bring her more peace than she was accustomed to in life. In any case, she assertedly thought--Who cares. Let them fight.

February 18, 2015--Bibi, the Fanatic

"Eli, the Fanatic," one of Philip Roth's wonderful short stories, is also one of his most overlooked. Perhaps because of the direct way in which it deals with and excoriates secularized, seemingly-assimilated Jews.

Set in suburban America, the story concerns a non-observant Jew, Eli Peck, who is hired by his Jewish neighbors to convince a recently-arirved group of orthodox Jews to close the yeshiva they established in their midst. The other Jews in town are embarrassed by the visible presence of these Hasids, fearing they will call attention to them and thereby interfere with their desire to blend in among the largely gentile residents of Woodenton.

To make a short story short, Eli fails in his attempts to get the ultra-orthodox to back off, including abandoning their traditional way of dressing, and, after an epiphany of his own, gives up his normal wardrobe and appears before his stunned and outraged Jewish neighbors in Hasid garb. The last thing they want is to be identified as Jews. And, thus, they became what some call self-hating Jews.

It is worth reading these days when throughout the Middle East and the West a fierce new religious war has broken out with people being attacked, tortured, enslaved, and killed just for being who they are--the wrong kind of Muslim, Christian, or Jew. It's a from of back to the Middle Ages.

The latest outrages, just over the past few days, are the shootings in Copenhagen, the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by ISIS in Libya ("We will conquer Rome, by God's permission"), and of course the murder of three Muslin university students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

As evidence that fanaticism is not just confined to ISIS and other Muslim extremists, pay attention to what Benjamin Netanyahu is calling for. As after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, this week following the murders in Denmark, Netanyahu again called for all European Jews, by "mass immigration," to give up their countries and European roots and emigrate to Israel where, he claims without evidence, that they will be safe from religious extremists of all stripes.

He makes no mention of Hezbollah fighters in the north of Israel nor rockets fired into Israel from Gaza. And, of course, the real possibility that Israel, under Netanyahu, will preemptively wage war against Iran.

In Bibi's own words--

Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews. Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home.

This call is hardwired into the consciousness of many Jews who remember the Holocaust when millions of Jews, on European soil, were slaughtered for just the fact of being Jews. Since then, there has been pressure on Jews living in more than 100 countries to "make Aliya," which literally means to "ascend," to "return" to Israel and for Israel to call for the "in-gathering" of Jews living in the Diaspora, in "exile."

This call for Jews to in-gather is about much more than safety. It has deep religious roots.

For the orthodox, to foster conditions that will call forth the Messiah (for Jews, of course, Jesus is not the Messiah) and lead ultimately to the End Times and Last Judgement, all Jews in the Diaspora must return to what messianic Jews refer to as Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, which to many means Greater Israel.

There is dispute about what is biblically-defined to be that Land, especially Greater Israel. With the latter it is a geopolitically dangerous view of national boundaries, because to those Jews literally right now awaiting the appearance of the Mashiach, Greater Israel stretches from the Nile River in western Sinai all the way to the shores of the Euphrates. In other words, from land belonging to Egypt to territory that is a large part of current-day Iraq. Settling the West Bank is a part of this strategy.

So these are not just eschatological ideas but political ones. And dangerous ones at that.

Thus, the seemingly empathetic, welcoming call by Prime Minister Netanyahu to Jews in so-called exile to emigrate to Israel resonates much more deeply that a simple reminder and offer to descendants of those who died in the Holocaust. It also serves a larger purpose--to have Jews return to ancestral lands and thereby help flesh out the boundaries of Eretz Israel and to contribute to the circumstances that will lead to messianic times.

As an American of Jewish descent I resent and reject these fanatical notions. I am not Philip Roth's Eli.

Though assimilation is never easy--even in polyglot America--I do not consider myself as living in anything resembling a diaspora. Any more than Americans of Italian descent consider themselves living in an Italian diaspora. Israel is not my home. No matter what might happen here (and there have been waves of dangerous anti-Semitism in America) this is my home, my land, my America.

December 25, 2014--Christmas, Jews, Chinese Food

Now our little secret is exposed--Atlantic magazine just published a piece titled, "Why American Jews Eat Chinese Food on Christmas."

I could have told you that. From personal experience I have known about this for more than 60 years. Every Christmas everyone in my family and Brooklyn neighborhood went out for Chinese food (or, if you'll forgive me--chinks) stuffed themselves with chicken chow mein, shrimp with lobster sauce, and pork fried rice.

When I asked why we did this so ritualistically on Christmas day I was told that with Catholics (how Jews referred to all christians) eating at home with their families, it would be easy to get a table--the same point made in the Atlantic article.

Further, I learned, since the only other restaurants in the neighborhood were Italian and Italians were Catholics and thus at home their restaurants were closed. And so Chinese food was our only option.

"Only option"? Most of us ate at home 360 days a year.

And I added, "There's never a problem getting a table. Catholics don't like Chinese food. Only Jews. Since there are so few Catholics in our neighborhood what difference does it make anyway?" I was a bit of a smartass.

I never got a satisfactory answer, just a little slap on the back of my head and the admonition to finish my egg drop soup.

And the Atlantic piece also doesn't supply a satisfactory answer. They claim that eating Chinese was the easiest way for Jews to eat out and fool themselves into believing they were still being kosher--like with authentic kosher food, the Chinese do not mix dairy products with meat.

But that's where the self-deception ends--shrimp with lobster sauce is kosher? Shrimp? Lobster? And pork fried rice? Really?

The author needs to revisit Deuteronomy where the foods that are forbidden are explicitly listed.

At the very top of that traif list are shellfish such as shrimp and lobster (though I suspect there was never any lobster in the lobster sauce--just a lot of shellfish stock flavored cornstarch) and of course the most forbidden of traif, finger-licking pork in all its forms.

Thus, one has to dig a bit deeper to figure out why I and my people will be found later today gorging on spareribs and shrimp wantons.

From me, then, here are a few actual reasons--

Perhaps foremost, Jews (as is true for most others) don't like to be exposed as hypocrites. In a small neighborhood, being observed eating traif in public qualifies as being thus exposed. So, we could indulge ourselves in as much forbidden food as we liked on Christmas day, knowing we would be doing so in private, among our "own kind," without being concerned that there would be any Catholics around to observe and expose us for what we were--well, food hypocrites.

Then, there is the reality that traif is scrumptious (does anyone not like shrimp or bacon?) and to have any excuse to get one's hands on it can quickly turn into an annual ritual. Like always going out for Chinese on Christmas day.

Plus, for those of us who were over-coddled by proverbial Jewish Mothers, participating in anything forbidden (even eating egg rolls) added additional spice to the experience. Being bad within safe limits was something pretty much everyone I knew who was leading an over-monitored life found to be alluring. Even something seemingly as benign as loving clams with black bean sauce.

So, you'll know where to look for me later today. At Noodletown in Chinatown or Phoenix Gardens up by the UN where they make the best salt-baked shrimp in New York. Or, back in the old neighborhood, at the Happy Garden on Pitkin Avenue for their classic pork egg foo young.

November 26, 2014--Sacred Spaces

I once had a colleague who for his doctoral dissertation wrote about scared spaces. Mainly those places that held special, spiritual meaning for native peoples. Places that they attempted to hide and if necessary defend against outsiders.

I asked him if there were equivalent places that were held to be scared by people in the so-called developed world. He smiled at me, as if to indicate how naive I was.

"Just look around you," he said.

"Even here in Midtown Manhattan?"

"Even here. During lunch let's walk over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral and look at the people worshipping there. Sense what that physical place means to them."

I didn't take up his offer but two years later, in Jerusalem, I understood all to well what a sacred space is and how those for whom it is sacred, who couldn't hide it from "outsiders," were willing, eager to defend it. Even to give up their lives to protect it from encroachment.

This was most emotionally vivid at the Western Wall. A sacred place to observant Jews who claim it is one of the walls of the Second Temple, which itself stood on the site of the even more sacred First Temple, constructed, it is believed, nearly 3,000 years ago by King Solomon. And it is at this very place where the Third and final temple will be built, the intra-orthodox fervently believe, when the Messiah appears.

They await him now and some are making preparations for his arrival, including moving in on the Al-Aqsa Mosque which sits on top of the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred places for Muslims, the place from which it is reported the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. All of this not very far from a number of sacred places for Christians--the Via Dolorosa, the road along which Christ was said to have  borne the cross as he proceeded toward Calvary and the Church of Holy Sepulchre, which was built to mark the sacred place where he was crucified, entombed, and resurrected.

All of these places--central in meaning to Jews, Christians, and Muslims--are located literally within a square kilometer of each other. Those who are skeptical, even non-believers (me included) when there feel overwhelmingly that this is a special place, charged with spiritual power.

A sacred space, a site where our search for meaning, truth, and divine inspiration commingles with religious beliefs and practices in the attempt to find the most fundamental of answers--just what my long-ago colleague was attempting to get me to understand.

How then, with so much at stake, in the world's most-contested piece of real estate can there ever be a resolution to the conflict between Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians, both claiming, in the flow of blood, that they have special rights and historical, divine, prerogatives for exclusive control of the place that one side calls the Temple Mount and the other the Dome of the Rock?

This is not a situation where compromise and splitting-the-difference has much chance of working.

August 5, 2014--Brothers Under the Skin

I always wondered why the late Chairman of the Palestinian Organization, Yasser Arafat, looked so much like my Uncle Louie.  Now I know.

We're related!

Take a close look at that punim, that face.

And then take a look at mine--just over there on the right.

Get the picture?

But there is more evidence than just from photos.

According to Wikipedia--

Genetic analysis suggests that a majority of Palestinians, including Arab citizens of Israel, are descendants of Christians, Jews, and other earlier inhabitants of the southern Levant whose core may reach back to prehistoric times. A study of high-resolution haplotypes [DNA sequences] demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Israeli Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool. 

So there you have it.

What is happening in the Middle East is a "family dispute" and we know how ugly these can be.

July 31, 2014--Blood Feud

This is the first Arab-Israeli war that isn't about territory--about expanding or protecting borders.

It is about hated and blood letting. Pure and simple, killing. That's the agenda. For both sides.

It is about Palestinians associated with Hamas trying to kill or capture any Israelis they can get their hands on purely in order to murder them or use them as bargaining chips. And on the other side, it is about the Israeli military, in spite of its denials, attempting to kill as many Palestinians as possible without regard to the distinction between fighters and civilian innocents.

There is no place to hide in Gaza--all available land is built up and there are no open spaces where refugee camps can be established and declared safe havens for non-combatants. And so those whose homes have been destroyed or live in fear are either trapped where they live, continuing to be subject to bombing, or flee to shelters provided by the United Nations.

But then, while cringing in these, they are not immune from attack. Just yesterday one of these shelters was destroyed and 20 more civilians were killed, many children. This is the third or fourth time a UN facility was destroyed with significant loss of life. In an era of smart bombs this cannot be explained away as "collateral damage."

So the Israelis claim it is the Palestinians themselves who have been attacking what should be sanctuaries. Hamas is doing this to its own people, they say, to make it look as if Israeli forces are intentionally targeting women and children.

The UN says it has evidence that it has been Israeli rockets and bombs that have destroyed these so-called sanctuaries.

And so it goes.

Each day we have updated body counts--remember body counts? More than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100 Israelis.

Both sides are seeing "progress" in those numbers--Israelis believe that if they kill enough Arabs Hamas will give up its struggle to expel Israelis from land they claim to be theirs while Hamas, recently losing power and influence in Gaza, will become resurgent if they kill enough Jews and thereby reestablish their credibility as warriors for the Palestinian cause.

This is thus a blood feud fueled by decades of hatred on both sides--equally vicious ethnic stereotyping and bigotry that is promoted in schoolbooks and popular media. Recall that this most recent conflict began after an exchange of barbaric killings of Israeli and Arab teenagers. It is Old Testament retributive tribal warfare waged lustfully and hatefully by both sides.

Both have legitimate issues. Israeli has the right to live securely within some version of its current borders and Palestinians have the right to a contiguous state of their own. Both have ancient claims to these lands. But both have moved beyond the normal range of political and geographic struggle, even warfare, and descended into hatred-drivien, senseless slaughter.

July 29, 2014--Ladies of Forest Trace: Winking

“If you want to talk to me you have to call between winks.”
"Between What?"

“I’m sleeping all the time. Twenty winks.”

“Forty.”

“Forty what?”

“Winks. You’re catching 40 winks.”

“So call me later when I’m awake. When I’m not winking.”

*  *   *

Which I did.

“Did I wake you?”

“No the phone did.”

“That was me.”

“You? I heard the telephone. Not you.”

"That was me calling. So the phone rang and . . .”

“I know. I was sleeping. And it woke me. Not you.”

*   *   *

When I called again, she said, “I’m such a baby.”

“A baby? Is there something frightening you?”

“No. Nothing.”

“But?”

“But, I’m such a baby. All I do is sleep.”

“That’s not true. You nap.”

“Nap, schnap, I sleep. I’m turning into a baby again. They sleep all the time. And do other things I don’t do . . . Yet.” She chuckled.

“You watch the news, read the paper, do the puzzle, join friends for breakfast and dinner, and . . .”
“Sleep all the time.”

“Nap all the time,” I muttered under my breath and said, “You are after all more than 106-years-old. And you do need your rest and . . .”

“And sleep.”

She trailed off, breathing heavily.

*   *   *

“While I’m between winks I have something to say.” It is rare now for her to initiate calls.

Is there something wrong I feared?

“I know this is upsetting you,” even on the phone, at 106 she can still read my mind and emotions.

I lied, “Not at all. I love hearing from you. It’s just . . .” I couldn’t hide my anxiety.

“Just that I never call any more. I’m so mixed up by what day it is.”

I wasn’t sure what that had to do with calling.

“I used to call you religiously every Sunday at 12:00. When I say religiously, I don’t mean . . .” She was breathing heavily.

“I know you don’t,” I jumped in, not wanting to tax her—it is now unusual for her to be able to sustain a conversation of more than five minutes. A few back and forths. Actually, with me doing most of the talking, which is easier on her.

But this time, with considerable effort, she pushed ahead.

“I know you are wondering what is keeping me alive.”

“Not really. I know that . . .”

“I’m too old and too smart for you not to tell me the truth.”

“I’m not. I’m . . .”

“Stop interrupting. At my age, this could be the last thing I ever say to you.”

“That can’t . . .”
“Yes it can. So just sit still.”

“I’ll try.”

“We’ve talked about why I got to be this old and you told me it’s because of my IRA.”

“DNA, though your IRA doesn’t hurt.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that. DNA, IRA they’re all the same to me.”

“In terms of the quality of your life that’s probably true. But you’re fortunate to have both.”

“Who’s doing the talking? Me or you?”

“Sorry.”

“Worrying is what keeps me going.”

“Sorry, worrying?”

“About everyone and then the rest of the world.”

“I . . .”

“You know how I always ask you about the young people in the family?”

“Yes.”

“How I am the last one?” I knew she meant of her generation and, now, more and more, even of the next one as her nieces and nephews are aging and . . .

“I worry about them and need to know they will be all right after.”

I held back from asking what she meant about after. I knew.

“And then I worry about what Mama and Poppa will say.” Her parents died nearly 70 years ago.

“Will say?” I was having difficulty not responding.

“What they’ll ask when we are together again. If I took good care of everyone. As the last. As they want me to.”

“I am certain they . . .”

“You don’t know them like I do. So I am not so certain.”

“We can disagree about . . .”

“And I also worry about the world. Not just the Jews. Though about them I am most concerned They are not doing the right thing.”

“The right thing?”

“For themselves and their neighbors who have been there for thousands of year. My Poppa always says that it is the responsibility of the strong to show understanding and compassion. Not to make it worse for those who are weak and suffering. Shouldn’t we Jews especially have learned that lesson? After so long being weak and suffering?”

“About this we do agree.”

“So I read, I watch Wolf on CNN, I listen to the girls at dinner, and I know it is not yet time for me to go.”

“I am happy that . . .”

“But I am not happy. I am not happy living this way where I can’t do things for myself. And I am unhappy at what I see. Not with the family. Though I worry about this one and that one I know they are secure and either can take care of themselves or are being helped. This is what to me family means.” She took a deep, raspy breath.

“I am unhappy with what I see in the world,” she said, “Russia. Iraq. Syria, Lydia.”

“Libya.”

“Lib-ya, yes, thank you.”

“You are not responsible for any of this. I keep encouraging you not to spend so much time watching the news. It upsets you.”

“What else do I have to do with my remaining time?”

“I understand. Though I have urged you not to dwell on all these troubling things, to do so is who you are. And, I’m sure you’re right, worrying, being concerned about everyone and everything has helped keep you going.”

“Where am I going?”

I chose to not respond since I did not have a good answer for either her or myself. Instead I said, “You can report about all of this to your parents when the time comes.”

“It is coming. But I try every day to live. There is still so much more . . .”

June 10, 2014--Un-Settling: The Politics of Middle East Real Estate

If you ever for a moment thought that the Israeli government's allowing the building of "settlements" on land claimed by Palestinians is primarily to accommodate population growth, if you imagined that the recent decision by the government to permit 1,500 more housing units to be constructed deep in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was about needing additional apartments for an expanding population, think again.

It's not about living accommodations, it's about the politics of hate and real estate.

The Jewish population has been growing very slowly. Though the ultra-orthodox are having increasing numbers of children, that rest of the Jews in Israel are not growing in number.

There are at least two dimensions to this increase in the number of settlements--the orthodox, the Haredi, are messianic-minded, which means that they are preparing for the appearance of the Jewish Messiah. To them this requires that Jews come to occupy all of Greater Israel--one of the conditions for the Moshiach's appearance--and that includes all of the West Bank, all of Jerusalem, all of Judea and Samaria, the Sinai, and a good slice of current-day Iraq.

The second reason for expanding housing, politically linked to the presence of increasing numbers of aggressive Haredi, is that settlement policy is one vexing arm of the struggle between the current Israeli government and the aspirations of the Palestinian people who want a homeland, a country of their own. And, to present a balanced picture, this to extreme Palestinian  power-players means occupying much of what is currently Israel.

As evidence of the settlements political agenda is the recent move to authorize 1,500 more units in response to the emerging reconciliation between Fatah (moderate Palestinians) and the more radical Hamas, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Israeli government was uncharacteristically honest about the new settlement policy. In the past, they would have claim it was to alleviate a housing shortage. But not this time--

By presenting the new building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a punishment over the newly constituted government of the Palestinians, who regard that territory as theirs for part of a future state, Israel set itself further apart from international consensus and drew criticism from foreign allies, including Britain, France, and the United States. [Italics added.]

Where we go from here is anyone's guess. Minimally, nothing much will change to alter the Israeli government's aggressive behavior until and unless the United Staes and its allies finally say enough. And act accordingly.

March 14, 2014--The Babe

It started innocently enough.

My friend Lee Frissell, knowing my interest in baseball, sent me a link to an article in the New York Times about Babe Ruth's 97-year-old daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, who recently visited the other "house" that Ruth built, the Yankee's old spring training field in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Lee wrote--

Isn't this a great story? I always thought the Babe was just a hedonist with massive appetites of all sorts. I had no idea he was an anti-racist who was kept from managing a team because he would have brought in black players. And, even if his daughter is wrong about that, it's gratifying to know he was both anti-racisit and anti-fascist. I always figured he had no politics or social views. I know he drank a quart of vodka, a gallon of orange juice, a dozen eggs, and a pound of bacon for breakfast, and preferred his women six at a time . . . but this makes me like him even more.

I wrote back with a story of my own, a true story--

My Uncle Eli owned a meat processing plant where the UN is now located. Paramount Meats it was called. The Secretariat  is built on top of what used to be Manhattan's eastside slaughterhouses and meatpacking district. 

Babe Ruth parked his car in a garage across the street and, Eli told me, when he smelled my uncle smoking pigs' knuckles, a Ruthian favorite, he would stop by to pick up a few which he proceeded to eat on the spot. Even without a quart of vodka to wash them down. 

One Saturday, Uncle Eli took me to work with him and, with the air on 45th Street saturated with the smell of smoking meat, the Babe was lured in. 

I was about ten years old and he was visibly near death. But to me he was not just a legend by a looming presence. Mammoth in size and, though it was not cold, wrapped in a full-length, belted cashmere coat. In addition, he was wearing his signature Babe Ruth tweed cap. 

He tousled my hair (I had a full head of curls then!) and you can imagine what a thrill it was for me, a lonely Yankee fan from far away Brooklyn. 

The next week, Uncle Eli brought me a baseball autographed by Ruth on which he had written, "To my pal." 

Of course I should have saved it. But back then street kids didn't have much sporting equipment and a new baseball was a rarity. All the others were battered and wrapped with friction tape. 

So we used mine until someone belted it a mile into some bushes where we couldn't find it. 

Ah, well. I don't have the ball stashed away in a safety deposit box but the memory is sweet.

Within 15 minutes, breathlessly, Lee wrote back--

This email of yours is going to take some time to reply to! But let me begin with--smoking pigs' knuckles???!!!

What did Lee mean? That he needed "some time to reply"? I knew he was at work. I assumed he was busy and wouldn't be able to get back to me until after his meetings. Or whatever. But then what about the "pigs' knuckles???!!!" business. Very strange.

But it didn't take him long to get back to me. What should I make of this???!!!--

Well, I'm not going to get any work done today until I respond to your original email. 

To meet Babe Ruth was probably the most deeply held dream of every American boy born between 1925 and 1975, and to have your hair tousled by Babe Ruth, and then to have been given a ball autographed by him, "To my pal." 

And you fucking played ball with it and lost it! 

How poor could you have been? You had Uncle Eli's knuckle smokery; your Uncle Schlomo's chittlin' factory, and your Uncle Ralph's Cuban sandwich shop. There must have been enough family money to buy a friggen baseball. Or to have used one of those pigs' knuckles. 

I advise you not to tell that story to your wife, Rona. Despite a subsequent considerable body of evidence to the contrary, that is such an act of monumental stupidity that it's hard to believe you could ever make anything of your life. Maybe if playing with that precious ball had laid the foundation for your getting into the Major Leagues and breaking the Babe's records or approaching your 7th Cy Young Award, it would be excusable. Otherwise, there really is no exculpation for you.

Wow!

I know Lee has quite a sense of humor, but he was sounding serious. No exculpation? I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds serious. Even biblical. Hey, to me, though I know if I had saved the autographed ball and kept it it would be worth a fortune, at the time, to me, it was just a baseball. And life on the streets was mean. Even though there was enough family money, if I took up a collection, to buy a new ball. No likelihood of that.

And, by the way, Lee made up Uncles Schlomo and Ralph. They don't exist. I did have an Uncle Harry who never had a job and an Uncle Bob who owned a gas station on Myrtle Avenue. And also there was Uncle Jack who was in the clock and watch business, decidedly not in the non-kosher, treif food business. And if he didn't live all the way out on Long Island, if he had known we were using rocks as baseballs, he might have come through with some real sporting equipment. He was that kind of generous guy.

But not knowing what to say back to Lee and worried that somehow thinking about Babe Ruth and my, I guess, stupidity, had made him crazy, I thought to try to calm things down by dashing off a bland note staying--

I suppose you're right. I guess you had to be there at the time, blah, blah, blah . . .

But this didn't work. There was more fired back from Lee--

Of course I had to tell this story to our orthodox friend Ed G, who agrees that meeting the Bambino was the fondest dream of an American boy. But he's not perturbed by your Uncle Eli's treifish occupation. "You can't eat it," he said. "But no one said you can't touch it. Nu. It's business." 

I know you're no fan of the hassidim [true], but a pig smokehouse is a little too reformed even for a quintessential goy like me.

Concerned about Lee's blood pressure, again I tried the calm approach--

Does this mean Ed G has exculpated me? That's it's OK that I had an uncle who was in the pork business? 

And while we're talking baseball, did I ever tell you my Jackie Robinson story?

I should have known better. Lee wrote--

I shudder to think what the Jackie Robinson story must be.

Caring a little less about upsetting Lee, though still not understanding what had gotten into him when I mentioned "knowing" Babe Ruth, I couldn't contain myself from writing--

When I was again about ten, that would be 1948 or so, a year after Jackie Robinson began to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he and his wife and baby son moved into an apartment four blocks from where I lived. At the corner of East 52nd Street and Snyder Avenue. 

It was a mainly Jewish neighborhood with a few Italian families sprinkled in. When the Dodgers played at home, at Ebbets Field, at the time they were all day games, each evening Jackie would come out and play baseball with us in the street. Can you believe it, teaching us about fielding and batting. His wife Rachel would sit on the stoop with their young son, Jackie Junior, and we would play until it got dark. 

Then one day, as usual when the Dodgers were at home, we raced over to the Robinson's and . . .

That's as much as I wrote. I haven't yet heard back from Lee, which is fine since the story doesn't end well.

That's an exaggeration--I did hear once more from Lee--

As soon as we're back in New York, he wants to go together to Hawthorne, New Jersey, to visit the Babe's grave. And quintessential goy that he really is, he still knows a lot about treif and Jewish cemetery customs--that when visiting a grave we leave a stone on it to note we were there. In Babe's case, he suggests we leave a baseball.

October 23, 2013--Zwerg

It seems everyone I know has become interested in genealogy.

Up to now I thought that strange--what, after all, is important about knowing you had a great-great grandfather who was a colonel or general in the Civil War or (like me) a horse thief? What does any of this say about anyone? Does it make you more worthy if you had an accomplished ancestor or diminish you if a distant relative was "only" a scrivener?

I got the "Roots" thing. For people who were ripped from their homeland, put in chains, and shipped here as slaves where their history was stolen from them, to find connections to Africa and distant families and nationalities made sense to me. That was about identity, not a search for previous family accomplishments.

It felt fundamental, not an act of vanity.

That's cynical me talking. I'm sure for those who use ancestry.com there are all sorts of interesting and good reasons they root around in their family's past.

Then someone sent me an e-mail asking if a certain Lisa Zwerling was a relative of mine.

I said yes and yes. That there are at least two of them--my first wife who, after we divorced, kept Zwerling as her last name, and another Lisa Zwerling who is an executive producer for ABC.

When I checked out the link my friend sent about the Lisa's, there was another that offered to provide information about the etymology of family surnames. Without looking anything up, I knew Smiths descended from ancestors who were iron mongers and Coopers, barrel makers. But when it came to Jewish family names, when my people in the past were required to take on family names, those frequently assigned to them by anti-Semetic officials were often derogatory.

Sephardic Jews in what is now Spain as early as the 10th or 11th centuries took on last names but it wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries that Ashkenazi, or German Jews were forced to have last names if they wanted legal emancipation.

I knew about how Schwartz was from the German for "black" or "devil." Or why there were so many Jewish Golds, Goldbergs, Goldsteins, and Goldmans--because one of the calumnies associated with Jews was (and often is) the claim that we were gold hoarders, jewelers, and usurers.

But then there are other Jewish names that are quite benign, even affectionate. Gorelik, for example, is the nickname for someone who had a house fire; and Geller the nickname for someone with red hair. Then Stein is for someone living near rocky ground.

But what about Zwerling? For years I have been curious about that--what is its etymology? I was told we were once Zwerdlings, but some Zwerdlings for some reason dropped the D and became Zwerlings. But then what does Zwerling or Zwerdling mean?

Someone once said, "pesky little sparrow"; but though this could be a good name for many Zwelings (me included), I could never verify it.

Then, yesterday, via the same etymology website my friend sent, I discovered that Zwerlings may actually once have been Zwerglings. The addition of that G made it quite a mouthful and I can understand my people jettisoning it.

But if in fact we were once Zwerglings, that means we were named for zwergs, which in turn was derived from the Old High German dwergaz--dwarfs.

So though my father was for his time a towering six-feet tall and my brother and I are six-three and then some, we apparently come from a family of dwarfs.

Not that I have anything against little people, but you get my point about this ancestry research?