A YOKEL GETS NO SUPPER

My friend Arnie, despite his Jewish birth, lives like gentile in a gentile world. That seems to be slowly changing. Perhaps a little of it is due to the chopped liver that I occasionally serve him.

Arnie recently regaled me in his first experience of a “real New York” Bar Mitzvah. The father of the bochur was the lead counsel for a television network. The mother was a society matron. Arnie expected a celebration that was equally dignified. And indeed, the service was. In fact, he used the word “uninspiring,” as though his Yiddishkeit was already better prepared for my son’s Lubavitcher wedding next month.

Arnie thus had every reason to expect an equally sophisticated celebration on Saturday evening. Then, his world of lofty Jewish expectations came crashing down. You entered, he said, through a huge kids’ ballroom blaring hip-hop music and cluttered with video games. Interspersed among the games were screens narcissistically broadcasting the Bar-Mitzvah bochur’s picture and the caption, “He’s the One!”

The next ballroom, Arnie told me with his eyes wide open like Alice in Wonderland’s, was a bacchanalia – a League of Nations, he said, of every imaginable cuisine: sushi, Peking duck, Weiner schnitzel, spareribs, pork Wellington, Dom Perignon, a bar of shrimp, crab legs and men in white jackets shucking fresh oysters . . .

Arnie, the cosmopolitan multimillionaire, said that he felt like a complete yokel. He assumed that the decadent buffet was the evening’s dinner, indulged himself accordingly. Only then did he discover that this was merely the appetizer course and that he had already eaten too much to enjoy the entrees of prime rib of beef and duck l’orange.

I commiserated with him and reassured him that even though I had spent 12 years in yeshiva, I had made precisely the same mistake at my first “real New York” Bar Mitzvah.

“But what about all the pork and shellfish?” he asked.

“OK, Jews cheat. Let’s just hope it’s here and not in their business. Did you cheat?”

“No comment.”

Then I taught Arnie his first Yiddish expression: “Schver tzu zein a Yid.”

IT’S HARD TO BE A JEW . . . ON SUNDAY

Any time that I have the opportunity to escape my goyische hometown of Greenville to visit New York, my spirits are lifted as if I were praying before the Holy Wall in Jerusalem. Even more so recently, when the trip was to commemorate my son Ben’s graduation from Yeshiva University and his engagement to Joy, a Syrian-Sephardic girl whose Oriental beauty conjures an image of the exotic Shulamith in the Song of Songs.

That evening, the family celebrated the events at a simply delightful kosher restaurant, Mike’s Bistro (shameless plug) where Ben has been interning. But the wonderful experience was overshadowed the following Sunday by attempting to drink a simple cup of coffee on my way to the airport.

Prior to the trip, I suggest that the bride and groom join me at a little restaurant across the Yeshiva campus. As we enter, I realize that the diner is a dump that observes kashrut. Recognizing that I would not eat again for a number of hours, which would wreak havoc on my blood sugar, I decide to get a simple bite to eat. What could be wrong, I think, with a salad or a slice of kosher pizza?

Strutting to the counter, I see pizzas festooned with broccoli and green pepper. But green pepper hurts my stomach and I just don’t like broccoli. Would you not assume that a simple cheese pizza was also in the offing? No, they say, all the cheese pizzas were frozen from before Shabbos and would take at least a half-hour to thaw.

“Well then, OK,” I tell the server, “let me have a salad.” I note from the menu that I have my choice of between “iceberg” lettuce and “mixed greens.” Having been force-fed iceberg lettuce as a child, I opt for mixed greens. The server brings forth the mixed greens, but does he serve them to me? No, he starts chopping iceberg lettuce and adding it to the greens in huge proportions, telling me that the iceberg was “left over from before Shabbos.”

“All right, the menu says I get a choice of toppings for my salad. I’ll have the ‘fresh white albacore tuna’.” But I look over to the counter and see that the tuna bears a dark brown crust. “Is that fresh white albacore?” I ask. “It was, but that was before Shabbos.”

“Well then, give me the black olives.” “Uh, we mix them with the leftover green ones before Shabbos.” “How about red peppers?” But I already know the answer: You can’t light Shabbos candles until the red and green had been mixed together.
“Fine, just pour me a cup of coffee.” “I hope you like that black because we haven’t had a delivery from the dairy since before Shabbos.”

“What about a Diet Coke?” I ask with exasperation. “Sorry, we only have regular. They won’t be delivering Diet until tomorrow because of Shabbos.”

Ah, the Starbuck’s coffee and Hershey bar at LaGuardia might as well have been nectar and ambrosia from the gods. For the first time in my life, I actually dreamt of being back in goyische Greenville, where black and green olives come out of separate jars and you can get fresh milk for your coffee seven days a week. I instantly kissed Greenville’s earth, drank a Diet Coke and reveled in Ruby Tuesday’s salad bar, where I lustily ate mixed greens with fresh toppings of my choice.

God willing, the next time I return to New York, it will be for the Ben and Joy’s wedding. I have already told the machatonim that they may do whatever they please but not have the wedding too soon after Shabbos, so that at least the pizza will be fresh.