Moussaka and Shofar --A New York Evening

9/12/2013

The weather was gorgeous. Of course it was.

We were sitting up front in the Mykonos restaurant in Great Neck. The windows were out so patrons could enjoy the traditional glorious weather of the holy days.

The Lubavitchers were walking to their Chabad, the men in suits, some of them tropical white, the women in dresses. This was a week ago, the second evening of Rosh Hashanah.

A cluster of young people, boys and girls, stopped in front of our table. A young man, maybe 12 or 13, surveyed our table of four and asked the classic question, often posed by proselytizing men in the city: “You Jewish?”

We glanced at Mike, our DH (Designated Hebrew, to use Ron Blomberg’s felicitous book title.)

“Have you heard the shofar yet today?” the young man asked.

(The shofar is the ram’s horn, blown all over the world at the Jewish new year.)

Mike had been to temple in New York, but he was not about to spoil a good scene.

No, we all said.

The one adult in the group, I am assuming a rabbi, began to blow on the horn, for two or three minutes, his notes undoubtedly reaching the shopping mall across the street.

Then he led Mike in a Rosh Hashanah prayer, as all four of us joined in.

They wished us not only a good Rosh Hashanah but a sweet Rosh Hashanah. A good Rosh Hashanah could sound like a root canal, the rabbi said. But Rosh Hashanah should also be sweet. The young people smiled sweetly and we thanked them, and then they were gone.

The manager brought our dinner, just perfect, like New York weather at the holy days.

Ed Martin

9/12/2013 07:47:46 am

Mazeltov, and Good New Year.

Thor A. Larsen

9/12/2013 01:33:35 pm

As we made our many calls to our Jewish friends during these holidays, we feel especially blessed for having grown up in the New York City area and developed close friendships in our teenage years that have remained very strong even after living Upstate NY for the last 50 years. May we also add that we especially share with the Jewsih people these Holy Days the hope of LONG-TERM PEACE SOON between Israel and it neighbors in the Middle East.

George Vecsey

9/14/2013 03:32:02 am

Thor, remember how quiet it was on the holy days at Jamaica High?
GV

Thor A Larsen

9/14/2013 04:10:07 am

George,

I certainly remember well those quiet Jewish Holidays at Jamaica High, George. That was when I focused real hard to try to catch up or briefly pass those very bright students !!

Charlie Accetta

9/13/2013 12:48:18 pm

My grandfather was a young immigrant Italian, a tailor. His first jobs were in the Lower East Side, working for Jewish employers. They taught him, as well as many others, their particular brand of English. It is a vestigial dialect that he carried with him to the Bronx and to his eventual brood and it remains a part of our heritage in this, his adopted country. I join the crowd in wishing a sweet New Year to all of our friends.

George Vecsey

9/14/2013 03:30:32 am

Charlie, I delivered newspapers for a Russian guy who had picked up a few Italian phrases for emphasis. Capisce? Then again, what New Yorker doesn't pick up the perfect Yiddish words?
GV

Alan Rubin link

9/16/2013 07:42:05 am

George—I can relate to your quite classes during the High Holy days. My mother was always concerned about what others thought.

The five years that we lived in Washington Heights, she made my sister and I go to PS 187 on the second day of Rosh Hashanah so that people would think that we were taking advantage (don’t ask why because I never received a satisfactory explanation)

So, each year I would sit in class with three catholic friends who could not figure out why I was there.

Charlie—My maternal grandparents were from a small shetle near the Russian-Poland border, which was always moving. He was tailor who also worked in the Lower East Side. They lived in a section of the Bronx that was mostly a Jewish-Italian mix.

They told stories of how their Italian co-workers and neighbors often helped each other. I learned these stories through very broken English and my mother’s translation of Yiddish. However, it was very clear how people cared for each other.

There might be more compassion in our country if less people lived insular lives.

George Vecsey

9/16/2013 08:03:14 am

Alan, I totally agree with you. We pop back into Baysiee, Queens, for lunch now and then -- get reconnected with roots.
(plus ethnic food)
At junior high in Rego Park, the SP class had four kids on the holy days -- O'Grady, McDermott, Lorraine, and me, as I remember.
GV

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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Moussaka and Shofar --A New York Evening

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