THE LANDSMANSCHAFT PICNIC (5/7/04)

Let the culinary get-a-life crowd catfight over the precise moment at which the venerated barbecue morphs into the despised cookout. A sigh of relief, then, for those of us who rose above that cultural fray, whose closest touch-point to “authentic” barbecue was the landsmanschaft picnic.

Landsmanschaft. Some double-dome sociologist probably told you that it meant a “regional affinity group”? Feh. Landsmanschaft . . . it is probably better described than defined: folks who came from the same town in the Old Country, settled in one city or another, where they got together to socialize, play cards and gossip. They also passionately looked out for each other, bailed each other out and financed each other’s debts.

Landsmanschaften, especially through their national organizations, excelled in bringing landsleit out of the Old Country, resettling them and getting them started in the New Land. This often entailed paying on a moment’s notice exorbitant ransom to mafia thugs, anti-Semitic underlords and minor Nazi operatives. Yet, to their immeasurably grief, too many landsleit were left behind to perish. A saintly old rabbi, despite knowing of my grandfather’s socialist leanings, wept when he discovered that I was his grandson, telling me in a hoarse whisper, “He saved many, many lives.”

My mother’s father (Pa) and mother were the muscle behind Chicago’s Grodner (Grodno, Poland, now Belarus) landsmanschaft. By the time I was old enough to be schlepped to the annual Grodner picnic, the ransoming and bitter tears were behind them. The Grodner had aged, gracefully and not, the lingua franca on the occasion was still Yiddish and memories of their youth and starting over in the New Land had evolved into full-blown mythologies.

My grandmother had already died, but Pa lorded over the picnic like a godfather. He had the charisma and grooming of Gotti. No ring-kissing, no mafia hits, but quite a lady’s man, and throughout his marriage he had a tolerant wife of the old school, so you surmise the rest.

He was the quintessential schmoozer: No back-slapping, but an ingratiatingly gentle arm around shoulder. Quick with a handclasp. A robust “Sholom aleichem!” A laugh enhanced at the edges by as asthmatic rasp. Heaping more food on your plate, want it or not. Calling every kid by his Yiddish named, then “Kum aher!” (Come here!), stuffing a dollar bill in each kid’s pocket.

The rest of the Grodner? I remember only a few. They seemed to be randomly divided into last-namers and full-namers: Babitzky – I loved the way his name slipped off my prepubescent tongue. Gold – The only card-carrying Grodner communist, whose bourgeoisie son made millions, nonetheless. Kosdon – The only Grodner to become a lawyer, the Jewish counterpart of Algonquin J. Calhoun of the now infamous Amos ‘n’ Andy show.

Among the full-namers: Tanchum Paul – I thought his name was “Tom-Tom” and, combined with his silver hair and ruddy complexion, I assumed that he was the only Grodner Native American. Leizer Pollack – The only Grodner who took being a Grodner too seriously even at the picnic, to which he wore a fedora.

Ah, the food . . . Let me digress for a moment, for the cuisine at the Grodner picnic was the first sign of enigma: This generation of Jewish immigrants so venerated their Americanization. No matter that the bastard child they created looks so comically mangled in retrospect, having given birth to the Borscht Belt, Yiddish Swing, Miami Beach. It was their best effort to make things work out OK. So then, where was Middle America’s traditional fare at their picnic, the hamburgers, hotdogs, baked beans?

The Grodner cuisine was delectably and exclusively Old Country: off-the-scale garlicky brisket and orange-yellow gravy (at home our brisket was always as bland as wet hemp; garlic came up on my grandmother), roasted “Shabbos” chicken, oven-browned potatoes, Pa’s sour pickles and tomatoes, kasha varnishkes, dense potato kugel (nothing like our scaly-crusted mashed-potatoes home fare). Honestly, I do not remember the sweets, because even in childhood I had already fressed to the point of glazed-over on well-fatted fleish-mit-bulbes (meat-and-potatoes) well before dessert.

So much more to be told some other time, but I assure you of this: no egg tosses or potato sack races. Card games like Kaluki brought over from the Old Country (although, ironically, its origin may be South African or Caribbean). And Pa, voice still honey-sweet despite his asthma, would lead the Grodner in Yiddish songs, happy, melancholy: Teyere Malkeh – Fill again my cup with wine! Hob’n Mir a Nigen’dl – Let us sing a song of childhood! A Sudenu – How shall we host a feast for Messiah? And the doleful Partizaner Lied, in memory of the Partisans who struggled valiantly against the Nazis – Never say there is only death for you!

I have come to a bittersweet conclusion about the absence of Americana from the landsmanschaft picnic and why it was so steeped in the Old Country ways. I found it in a 90-year-old snapshot left behind by my Uncle Abe that he titled “The Last Picnic in the Suwalky Woods.” What wistfulness did their eyes reveal? These were young adults with big-city ways (from a region of 700,000), not Tevye and his shtetl dwellers, living relatively charmed lives in the Old Country, about to disperse to seek their fortune in the New Land, the hope, the fear, the mystery, the ambivalence, the unknowingness, the self-doubt.

Chances are that each Grodner had the same wistful “last picnic,” departed from friends and forest greenery and knew only too well the inferno into which the life and family they left behind had descended. Then, even as the decades wore away at them, once a year at their landsmanschaft picnic they replicated the deliciousness of their long-ago salad days, their customs, rituals, language, cuisine yet intact.

Why I too miss those days I have yet understand. Perhaps it is because the memories are not simply cherished, but consecrated. I guess that, despite its theological implications, even Gold, the card-carrying communist atheist, would have to agree.