Today
is Yom Kippur. It is the holiest day of the year. In synagogues
all across America frustrated rabbis will scold their swollen
congregations for being “once–a-year-Jews.” This year I’m
not even that. I am waiting in the doctor’s office, my new
house of worship. I am in trouble.
My white blood cell count is in the basement.
I have been warned to avoid crowds. I attended the family
dinner last night but when my sisters and nieces crowded around
the hall mirror fixing their lipstick I sat at the table and
picked at dessert. They were going to Kol Nidre services.
I was going home to bed.
I
will miss the confession of my sins. I will not stand between
my husband and my daughter as part of the congregation as
we each acknowledge and take responsibility for our own imperfect
behavior. I will not be present for the Yizkor
service where I would have said the memorial prayer for my
father who died not quite a year ago. This year I am an outsider.
Aunt Betty and I had a long chat on
the phone this lonely morning. She is also staying home this
year. When I was a teenager, she was the most beautiful woman
in Detroit. Or at least, I thought of her as Jewish Detroit’s
answer to Betty Gable, slim and blond with a great figure;
expensive, elegant clothes and a raspy seductive voice. She
was a cigarette smoking, vodka drinking, outspoken, mildly
scandalous sexpot. She was fond of reminding everyone that
she would always “tell it like it is.” This was true but only
as far as it went. She is the queen of euphemisms. Almost
nothing she tells “like it is” can be understood without knowing
her private lexicon. God is “the little man upstairs.” A vagina
is a “gracie.” And all sexual activity
is “canoodling.” As in “the little man upstairs doesn’t approve
of canoodling around your gracie.”
She gave me my first cashmere sweater, my first really good
haircut, and was the first to tell me that a guy doesn’t have
to buy the cow if he is already getting the milk.
She
is in a losing battle against lung cancer. She is dependent
on oxygen, and is generally housebound, except for the beauty
shop and, on a good day, “lunch at the club.”
It is only lately that she has acquiesced to being seen publicly
with her oxygen tank. It offends her sense of propriety to
be seen tethered to a machine.
“At
least I’ve got my hair,” she says when the two of us were
standing together waiting for a ride. She had noticed another
woman whose obviously bald head is
covered with a scarf, forgetting for a moment that I too was
wearing a wig.
She
and I do not talk about our health issues when we speak. Through
wracking coughs, she tells me she is fine and I tell her I
am fine also. Then
we speak of Yom Kippur. She tells me that Uncle Nate
and she will pray at home this year.
“Listen,”
she rasps, “the little man upstairs has better things to worry
about than who goes to Shul. When your name is on a slip, then your name is
on the slip. Nothing is going to help. Besides, it’s not what
it used to be. No one bothers to dress up anymore.” She pauses
and takes a breath. “I mean what ever happened to hats?”
We talk about hats for a bit. She describes
in perfect detail hats that she wore thirty or forty years
ago to make her theatrical entrance into the temple. She would
glide down the aisle on her husband’s arm nodding to friends
like a queen. Her preference was for shaped, black hats ornamented
with a dramatic feather or jewel.
“Hattie Carnegie made nice ones,” she says. “But, you
had to watch out for veils. It is ridiculous to try reading
through a veil. The type bounces around.”
“What about hats with flowers?” I ask.
“ Forget it.” She barks
out a laugh that turns into a cough. When she catches her
breath she continues, “Strictly for goyim. Let the
Queen of England wear a bouquet on her head.”
For her, Yom Kippur was the Jewish Easter
Parade and she was Judy Garland. I wish her a happy new year
but not an easy fast. She and I have a dispensation.
This year we do not fast. The
last time I did not fast on Yom Kippur I was nearly
eleven years old.
My grandparents, my parents, Uncle Eugene, my mother’s
baby brother, who is less than two years older than me, and
I attended services together. We walked to our synagogue,
an elegant stained glass and stone building almost two miles
from our home on Glendale Avenue in Detroit. It was not that
we were religious Jews who declined to ride on the Sabbath.
We walked because my father was afraid we wouldn’t find a
parking space.
Sharreth
Zedek was a great and mighty synagogue, with old fashioned
assigned seating, not the new fangled notion of first-come-first-serve.
Children were sent off to the junior congregation in another
part of the building. When we separated, our parents, caught
up in the adult distractions of preparing to enter the sanctuary,
straightening ties and seams and hats, dismissed us without
a word regarding a rendezvous.
A
boy I knew from school, David Hermelin, was acting as cantor for the junior congregation.
His voice, which had not yet changed, was clear and sweet
as he sang the holiday liturgy. David was the smallest person
in our class. He would grow up to be larger than life, an
important business leader, an owner of a major sports team,
national President of United Jewish Appeal, even the United
States Ambassador to Finland when Bill Clinton was in the
White House, but on that day he stood on two milk crates so
his skinny shoulders and curly head could be seen over the
top of the lectern as he solemnly bent and swayed. He was
a miniature version of the real thing, except he did not wear
a kittel or a high hat, but a scratchy brown suit and
a white silk yalmuke.
Eugene
and I found seats and tried our best to follow the service.
Both of us were learning to read Hebrew but we were still
novices following along with one finger as we tracked the
words. We were grateful when the pages were announced and
we could catch up. After what seemed like hours, Uncle Eugene
and I were bored and hungry. We had refused breakfast saying
we were old enough to fast. Our parents agreed saying half
a day would be a good try.
We left the service and stood around outside the building
for a while watching the teenaged boys leaning against the
building calling to the pretty girls walking up and down the
stairs arm-in-arm. Now and then, they would favor a boy with
a smile or a nod
“Hey Sharon, how’s by you?” one boy calls out.
A pretty girl in a red pleated plaid skirt and black
velvet jacket gives a pretty little wave.
“Going to the dance tonight?” he asks.
She nods and keeps on walking.
His friend elbows him in the ribs. “Tough
luck, Boychik. She’s taken.”
He doubles over in laughter.
Eugene
and I finally decided that our parents had already walked
home and we ought to do the same. We knew the way and it was
a glorious fall day. The leaves had not begun to fall and
the dark green shrubs on the well-tended lawns were rich from
good weather and loving care. As we walked toward home we
passed an empty lot that had been turned into a vegetable
garden. While the bean and pea stalks had started to turn
brown the last of the summer’s tomatoes hung heavy on their
staked up vines red and ripe and luscious
“If
they aren’t picked soon they’ll probably rot,” I observed.
“Watcha think?”
Eugene
shrugged.
We
both looked around. There wasn’t a soul to be seen. The street
was quiet and deserted. In this neighborhood on Yom Kippur
the world stopped.
“I’ll
bet they taste almost like the tomatoes on grilled cheese
sandwiches.”
“I
guess so.”
We
looked at each other. I gave a little nod of encouragement.
Eugene stepped boldly into the garden getting dirt on his
shiny, brown oxfords.
“Hurry,”
I hissed.
He
yanked two tomatoes off the vine, scrambled back to the sidewalk,
and offered me one. The tomatoes were pretty dusty, but gloriously
ripe.
“Here,
give them to me.” I carefully wiped the tomatoes on my white
cotton eyelet trimmed underslip. They felt heavy and warm, polishing up perfectly
when I rubbed at them.
What
if someone saw us eating stolen fruit on Yom Kippur?
Hadn’t we just atoned for our sins? Was stealing on the list
of sins one read pounding your chest with your fist? I didn’t
think so.
“ What kind of a sin
is stealing?” I asked.
“It’s one of the Ten Commandments,” Eugene said,
“a really big sin.”
But didn’t his mother, my own grandmother, say
over and over that it was a sin to waste food with children
starving in Europe? Maybe we should eat the damn tomatoes.
“They’re already picked.” I argued sensibly.
“They’ll just rot.”
“You’re probably right.” Eugene agreed. “Might
as well eat them.”
Still, we took the precaution of pulling
our jackets over our heads just in case someone who knew us
happened by. We counted on their not noticing two kids innocently
walking down the sidewalk in the middle of the day, their
heads tucked inside their clothes. Under cover we happily
devoured our pilfered treasure..
We arrived to a locked house. Our parents
had not returned. Willa Mae, the housekeeper, must have taken
my younger sister and brother on some kind of errand.
From late spring until the first frost, our front
porch was shaded by a heavy maroon canvas awning with a painted
letter “M” in the center to make it an outdoor living room.
We sat side by side on the glider in the shade of the awning
silently waiting.
When our parents returned sometime later
in the afternoon, pooped from the walk home, hungry from their
fast and relieved to find the two of us alive and asleep on
the porch, they didn’t even bother to wake us. They too wanted
a nap until it was time for the men to return for the Nillah
service and the women to prepare an elaborate, break-the-fast
feast.
“It was dumb of you to leave” my mother scolded
later as she arranged a platter of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.
“I expect you to be more responsible. We were worried to death”
“Yes,” My grandmother agreed, looking up from
the jar of pickled herring she was spooning into a cut glass
bowl. “And, we had such a nice treat planned. We were going
to give you money to have lunch at the Chinaman’s.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t think.”
The next year I actually did fast. A
new house was built on the vacant lot to replace the now obsolete
victory garden. But I have never again tasted such a perfect
tomato.
—Miami,
Florida