WOULDYA PLEASE PASS THE SCHNITZEL?

My old schule recently entertained the idea of inviting me back to be their rabbi. It’s a long story, but instead they hired a woman who does not know how to read from the Torah. As I was told, she has more charisma than I do.

“It’s all for the best,” I said to myself. This will give me more time to work on my television show, “Rabbi Ribeye.” The name rhymes in English. In German, it would be loosely translated as “Rabbiner von Beefsteak.”

I am not kidding about my television show. Two producers discovered that I am a fairly good chef and comedian, at least for a rabbi. People would be interested, they said, in a rabbi who cooks like a yokel – but strictly kosher – tells funny stories, and plays the harmonica with a blues band. I can also, they said, cook matzo balls and veal breast and make the goyim think that they’re hush puppies and roast ham.

So now, we’ve taped a pilot, and five networks are ready to buy it. I have my own production company, agents, and lawyers. I am making personal appearances and showing old black chefs how to cook kosher barbecue.

Ach. My biggest problem is that the want me to write a cookbook. Funny, but I don’t know what to write. None of my recipes have measurements, just “throw it in.” I have to go back to figure out how large a “handful” of matzo meal really is.

What to do? I am tired of all the ways of making tuna casserole and brownies. So, I have a challenge for you: Send me your recipes – but no more potato kugel, gefilte fish, and latkes. I want authentic German recipes, kosher, of course: Schnitzel ala Holstein, Schwartzwalder Kirschtorte, Rouladen . . . you know.

If I include yours in my cookbook, I will not give you a penny, but all the credit, at least for the 15 people who buy it. If I really like your recipe, I will send you an authentic “Rabbi Ribeye” cap and an autographed picture of me eating Spaetzle.

Send them to me fast. After all, Chanukah is right around the corner, and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss Frau Unterdorfer’s recipe for Rotkraut zum Gaensebraten.

THE RIGHT FIT

My youngest, Ben, now dons the garb of a Chasidic Jew when he celebrates Sabbath, holydays, and sacred occasions – long, black frockcoat, broad-brimmed hat, ritual fringes, woven prayer-sash, and the rest. He has come to identify with an Orthodox sect, Chabad, with which I, too, was once closely associated.

Chabad has recently gained some modicum of controversy, having posthumously declared their Rebbe (“Grand Rabbi”) the Messiah. The disagreements between us have never become rancorous, because Ben knows my watchword: “Son, as long as you are first and foremost, in every dimension of your life, a ‘mensch’ (a decent, God-loving, honorable human being), everything else is just parsley around the plate.” So far, he has been faithful to my watchword.

His siblings are not quite so tolerant. Oh, they would put down their lives for him. They, too, are quite religious, simply more modern. They see his “dress-up” as “mishugas” (foolishness) and have even asked me to try to straighten him out.

I won’t.

Maybe part of me is proud to have raised a child so devout, yet live such a responsible life. (He is a senior property manager for a multinational firm.)

But I think it’s more than that. Here’s how I see it:

Everyone should grant him/herself the opportunity, with impunity, to try on different outfits – to see which fit, which are transitory fads, which might be outgrown, which make us look like fools. I would like to believe that we’ve all been through it – groping around, perhaps for a lifetime, for the personae, tastes, cultures, friends, politics, philosophy, that “fit.”

How sad for people who don’t, who fear the intrigue, who refuse the human prerogative to change. How sad for those people who are deluded or brainwashed into believing that one size will always fit all. How sad for those people who mock and deride – as, by the way, my parents did – those others who try on different outfits, some garb whose silliness will be overcome, some not, and some that turn out isn’t really silly at all.

Of course, each new outfit might bode of a commensurate change in values: After each Sabbath, Ben changes from his frockcoat into basketball shorts and a grubby tee-shirt. So, we call him “neo-chasidic.” We laugh, and he laughs along with us. Another child of the extended family, age 28, dresses quite fashionably, but as a matter of commitment, just like her mother. Her persona is stuck at 60.

But values that form ones core? They must remain at the core, despite the permutation of clothing that circles around them. It’s as I tell Ben, “So long as you are a mensch . . . justice, mercy, humility, justice, mercy, humility . . .” Thanks to Micah. No matter, these must endure. If not, then all the changing of outfits becomes nothing more than an obscene striptease.

In adolescence, I was obliged to dress like a mama’s boy, quintessentially obedient. Then, the work-shirt and jeans of a ‘60’s radical. Then, like Ben, the pietistic chasidic cassock. Then, the intimations of prosperity cloaked in Brooks Brothers pinstripe and button-down, just out of Wall Street, which I wasn’t. With the denial of my collision with middle age, I dressed ridiculously retro-youth. Now, a bit more adjusted, slacks and a sport shirt, maybe an occasional pair of shorts, maybe a bowtie, just for the effect.

And that’s precisely the point – the fit marks the passing time and persona: obedience, radicalism, liberal, conservative, liberal, radical liberal, resolved . . . and maybe not resolved. That’s the story of my life. With old age, how can one know?

Long ago, the rabbis marveled at how the same King Solomon could have penned the mushy Song of Songs and the cynical Ecclesiastes. Some of them answered the obvious: He wrote Song of Songs when he was young and full of youthful romance, and Ecclesiastes when he was an old, sour crab. Others, though, showed more insight: No, they said. He wrote Ecclesiastes in the cynical disillusionment of youth. Then, he composed Song of Songs when he attained the resolution and romance that come from maturity and the philosophical mind.

I vote for interpretation Number Two. Or, at least I pray for it. I can see Ol’ King Solomon sitting on his throne in regal vestments and then a couple of hours later puttering around in his garden in tee-shirt and jeans.

I wonder if I can get there, too. That and justice, mercy, humility, always justice, mercy, humility. Finally, a pretty good fit.

THE YEKKE SYNDROME

It wasn’t until I went off to college that I discovered that being a Yekke was not a nationality, but a syndrome. I’ve never met another species of Jew who named his child Irmgard or Berthold. Scott and Craig, of course. Those are real names. But not Gunther nor Franziska. Those are the kinds of names you find in stuffy operas, not baseball teams.

I wound up in Washington Heights, which proper Yekkes call “Frankfurt am Hudson.” A lovely elderly couple, Herta and Ludwig, took me in from time to time for Shabbos lunch. Their hospitality entirely gracious, but what kind of Shabbos lunch? Did we recite the Motzi on challah? No, on something they called “barches” that looked like a football. And where did that weird name “barches” come from? My research determined that it was derived from the twisted bread offered to Berchta, the Teutonic goddess of vegetation. I knew that German Jews were assimilated, but not idolaters.

What happened to the gefilte fish? Could it have morphed into a slice of boiled carp swimming in a blob of dense gray jelly? And that sauce? Mayonnaise?

The main course. We of real Jewish ancestry eat tongue picked and spiced, served on rye bread with mustard, an honorable deli sandwich. But who ever thought of roasting a whole tongue like an old boot and drenching it in a sticky raisin sauce, like ham? Only the Yekkes.

But, I dare not complain about apfelschalet – that wondrous deep-dish apple pie that makes cobbler of the southern US taste like pabulum. When I got divorced from my Yekke wife, I pleaded with her, “Please, take the house and the dog. Just don’t take the recipe for apfelschalet!”

Then there was the mandatory stroll through Fort Washington Park on Shabbos afternoon. In my life, I have never seen so many women in black coats and men walking with their hands clasped behind their backs.

Schule was the crowning experience. Oh, those majestic Teutonic oompah melodies for L’Dovid Boruch and Tzaddik Ka-Tomor. I still strut and sing them triumphantly whenever I walk the dog.

I found that as a visitor, you never, but never, simply take a seat in a Yekke schule. You are ushered to one, lest you choose a seat that is owned by a regular congregant. How dare you?

Once upon a time, I attended the schule of Rav Breuer, where every worshipper must surely have a lulav stuck up his . . . An usher led me to a seat next to a gap in the row. I asked the obvious: “Why the missing seat?” I assumed that it had belonged to a schule dignitary who had passed, and now the seat had been retired, the way one would retire the jersey of a superstar hockey or soccer player.

The usher quickly hushed me and said that if I were still interested he would tell me after services. My curiosity piqued, I approached him.

“You see that man on the other side of the gap?” he said, still whispering. “He hated the man who used to sit there. So, one Erev Yom Tov he came early, bought the seat, and had it unbolted.” If that is not the quintessential Yekke story, Lohengrin was just a jitterbug.

So, again I think to myself, being a Yekke is not a nationality. It is a syndrome. If they didn’t make such awesome aufschnitt, I’d tell you the real truth about them.

DISCUSS: AN EGG CREAM CONTAINS NEITHER EGGS NOR CREAM

The birth of our granddaughter in New York was all the excuse we needed to head Downtown and conduct “scientific research” on the quality of the pastrami, etc., at the newly reopened Second Avenue Deli, the Olympus of kosher dining. We had another good excuse: to introduce the gay couple that lives next door to the wonders of deli cuisine. “The Boys,” as we call them, happened to be in New York for a weekend of theater.

They’d never eaten heimische Jewish cooking, save the occasional dinners I’d prepared for them. It was no wonder. The Boys had grown up in tiny Seneca, South Carolina, where it was dangerous enough to be gay, not to mention falling in love with Jewish cuisine, or even finding it.
They, we commanded, had to join us for lunch at Second Avenue. On being seated, I discovered an auspicious lagniappe waiting at the table – a bowl of gribenes. Before I could explain the wonders of rendered chicken skin, The Boys had attacked the bowl and pronounced the cracklings “even better than pork rinds,” a kind of gribenes derived from pig skin. A klog!

Not I, but my pencil-thin Lady Linda ordered lunch – everything “for the table,” sharing it all until the last diner dropped. They had never tried chopped liver, so we demanded that they try chopped liver. “Mix in some gribenes!” I admonished them. “Ahhhhhhh, even better.” Then the fricassee. They recognized what they called “gizzards,” but I wouldn’t let them continue until they learned that proper people called them “pupiks.” Kishke, yes. Did the intestines bother them? Not a chance! Corned beef. Pastrami. Salami. Knobbelwurst. Potato and lokshen kugel.

At our insistence, they washed it all down with an “egg cream,” a beverage of seltzer and chocolate syrup. “Where were the eggs and cream?” they wondered. “Goyische kep! Those would be too hard to digest!”

We paid. We feared that otherwise we would be indicted for murder. All The Boys could say was, “How can we become Jewish like you?”

I asked if they’d been circumcised. They looked at me sheepishly. “Boys,” I said, “if you’re not, keep your knives at your plate. Just enjoy your gefilte fish, and you’ll be as Jewish as most Jews I know.”