1/1/23
Newsletter #206
The Crack of Dawn
When I was in 3rd grade, I came home from school one day holding a yellow flyer. I tossed it on the counter and headed for the TV. My mother asked, “What’s that?” I said, “It’s some father/son thing, so it has nothing to do with me.”
Smash cut to me and my father attending a meeting of Indian Scouts at the local YMCA. There were about a hundred fathers and sons, many wearing Native-American outfits, some with stripes of warpaint on their faces. The other fathers were in casual dress. My dad was of course in a suit and tie. We sat through over an hour of fathers and sons, dressed as Indians, coming up on stage and being awarded extra feathers for their headdresses because they’d done a good deed, or tied a complicated knot. My father and I patiently sat there, occasionally throwing each other a glance that said, “Can you believe this horseshit?” Beyond that, for the first time in my life I felt strongly that my father and I were definitely the only Jews in the room.
When the meeting was over and fathers and sons were signing up for Indian Scouts, my dad and I just left. He asked, “Want some ice cream?” I said, “Sure.” We went to Howard Johnson’s. Neither of us ever mentioned the Indian Scouts again. We both understood without having to verbalize it that if we had to dress up like Indians, award each other feathers for good deeds, and hang around with gentiles, we’d both prefer to skip the whole father and son relationship entirely. And that’s exactly what we did.
So, having skipped nearly every class in Hebrew school for the previous couple of years, as my 13th birthday and Bar Mitzvah approached, something had to be done. A Hebrew tutor was hired to drill my Bar Mitzvah piece into my head in Hebrew, and it didn’t matter what it meant. It could just as easily have been in Chinese or Esperanto. My tutor was Mr. Marmelstein. I’m tempted to say he was elderly, but he was probably 60, which certainly seemed elderly to me at 12. Mr. Marmelstein was Eastern European, gruff, grumpy, always dressed in a black suit and tie, took his job of teaching Bar Mitzvah pieces to stupid Jewish boys very seriously, and had a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. I always wanted to ask him about it, but never had the guts. Nor was he particularly friendly or forthcoming. He had tutored by good buddy, a total juvenile delinquent named Robert, the year before, and Mr. Marmelstein often said in his thick accent, “Robert is a vooden head,” and he would knock on his yarmulka-covered head. My mother always gave Mr. Marmelstein a bottle of Faygo Red Pop or Rock and Rye, and a glass with ice. He would drink the whole thing and belch.
I skated right through my Bar Mitzvah, and both the rabbi and the cantor said I did a good job, so it must be true. It could just as easily have been in Inuit Eskimo as Hebrew for what I knew. I subsequently got kicked out of my own Bar Mitzvah party – a hayride and a barn dance, of all the absurd things – for smoking weed with Robert the vooden head and our mutual pal Jim.
Robert has since died. Jim is a multi-millionaire, retired investment banker living in Warsaw, Poland.
My sister Pam took Hebrew school exactly as seriously as I did, and thus ended up with Mr. Marlmelstein tutoring her for her Bat Mitzvah (a recent invention at that jucture in the 3,000-year history of Judaism). To Pam’s great consternation Mr. Marmelstein demanded that part of her instruction take place on his lap, to which my mother did not object. He would then burp Red Pop in Pam’s face. But she too did fine with her new-fangled Bat Mitzvah. That’s because Mr. Marmelstein knew how to do his job.
Shalom aleichem; aleichem shalom.