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.