…The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake.
So I did.
My family practices a kind of compensatory Judaism… Their support for Israel borders on the fanatical: Next fall, my 57-year-old father will use his two weeks of vacation to volunteer in the mess halls and warehouses of the Israeli Army; my mother has kept her menorah lit well into January. (It can’t hurt.) My parents are like the animists of Brazil or New Orleans: Their blend of the pagan and Abrahamic disturbs only the purists on either side of the fence.
I am a purist.
“You’re going to Cooke City?” an acquaintance in Livingston, in south-central Montana, asked. “That’s where all the varmints hide out!”
The hyperactive Jewishness of New York has never been a relief to me.
Unlike many immigrant parents, Olga Rivera, who moved from Guatemala to New Orleans in 1965, wanted her son Cesar to become one thing and one thing only — a barber. Cesar, growing up amid the culinary splendors of the Big Easy, wanted to be a chef.
Mothers know best…
“Fifth Sunday in a row,” the ski instructor in the blue staff jacket said, shaking his head and pointing at the fine powder descending peaceably all around us. “There’s 90 inches of snow at the top of that mountain.”
The mayor of a drill-town in Texas tries to persuade an economically battered corner of upstate New York with recently discovered gas reserves to stay away from drilling.
“Ten to six, Saints — second quarter,” our server at Elizabeth’s said by way of greeting. “I’ll be right back with your menus.” A lady of a certain age, she wore construction boots, cargo shorts and an oversize Saints T-shirt beneath a pixie crop of salt-and-pepper hair.
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After World War II, when my grandfather returned to Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus, his parents suggested he become an electrician. He refused and became a barber instead. “I wanted to work in a clean smock, not a dirty one,” he said. (Barbers in the Soviet Union wore smocks.)