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.”