Searching for an Old Familiar Face

The other day we chatted with friends from our Old Country, close-in suburbs of Boston Massachusetts. The conversation turned to Veggie Crust.

For those from other Old Countries, Veggie Crust is a restaurant in Cambridge, Boston’s neighbor across the Charles River. The first Veggie Crust was crunchy granola, like Cambridge itself. The owners opened a second branch in Brookline. Noting Brookline’s Jewish community, they sought kashrut supervision.

Once the rabbis set terms — separate ownership for the kosher branch, closure on Shabbat—Brookline’s Veggie Crust came to be. You could call its cuisine eclectic, or just odd: several varieties of pizza, alongside Indian specialties with unfamiliar tastes and unsayable names. Other features were ugly décor and barely any parking.

For context, Boston expats discussing Veggie Crust is like the Jerusalem Gourmets devoting their quarterly plenum to a cholent take-out joint in Rechavia open only on Thursday nights.  Yet we and our friends savored the recollection. Kosher Bostonians would understand. They celebrate every eatery they can get until it goes under.

Sharing such recollections took me back to a time even before my time, when my grandparents immigrated to the US over 100 years ago. Back then immigrants formed and joined Landsmanschaftn — groups of fellow Old-Countrymen. These helped members with free loans to get started in business, or affordable cemetery plots so they could be buried together. Immigrants also founded shuls to preserve local the local customs of wherever they came from.

Landsmanschaftn lasted a couple of generations. By then their children had gone native, with little knowledge of, and less interest in, where their immigrant ancestors came from. Cemeteries have sections for long-defunct burial societies named for villages no one remembers. Immigrant shuls had to shut down, or else evolve by alphabetical amalgamation. One midwestern shul is named BIAV. The “V” stands for Voliner, Yiddish for “from Volhynia.” Look it up. No current member would.

To society, immigration status is transient; it passes. To immigrants themselves, it lasts. As long as they do.

Now that we have moved to Israel, we see the same dynamic. Ask Israelis who speak American English where in the US their grandparents lived, and they shrug, “New Jersey, I think…or maybe Duluth.” Ask Israelis who speak Russian where their family lived in Belarus, and they say, “I came when I was a baby. I have no idea.” People remember the past they find usable.

We had officially come on aliyah some time earlier, but when we were selling our home in the Old Country, we were so physically and emotionally drained from dismantling a house filled with our joint lifetimes that I happily accepted an invitation to speak to a group of fellow-retirees at a Thursday morning breakfast. This was run by Itamar, an Israeli visiting with family for a stint, who organized shul programming. His proposed topic: “What is aliyah like?”

After I said what I said, there were questions. One, posed by an old friend, brought me up short.

“In Israel,” asked Gina, “how often do people ask where you come from and what the community there is like?”

I was not expecting this, but my answer came quickly. “Never,” I said.

Itamar looked stricken. “When we come back to Israel in a few months,” he said, “I will show you places where that is not the case.”

I could see that as an Israeli, he was offended. But he need not have been. What I said applied to people in general, not just Israelis. When you move anywhere in midlife and beyond, you leave behind your most vivid recollections, along with the people who shared them: parents of your children’s classmates, co-workers, the friends who sat with you through interminable committee meetings.  These memories have no broad significance; they are important to you just because they are your memories, savored and validated by the people who remember them too.

Wherever you end up, luxury condo or assisted living, the people you meet come from other places. They have their own memories, and scant interest in yours. That is why immigrants hang around with others from the same place. That was true of my grandparents. I understand them better than I ever could as a child, because now it is true of me.

My Zeyde ran away to the US from northeastern Poland in 1913 to avoid conscription into the czar’s army.  He davened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Peylishe shtiebel, where they spoke his kind of Yiddish. (Peylishe is the Lithuanian pronunciation; Jews further south would have said Poylishe.) After Shabbos, he tuned in Rabbi Pinchas Teitz intoning, “Lomir lernen a blatt Gemura” on radio station WEVD, “The station that speaks your language.”

Almost everything about our respective immigrations, mine and my grandparents’, is radically different, but one thing is similar. He lived in a neighborhood where speaking the local language, beyond the needs of doing business, was mostly optional. And now, so do we.

Where we live, speaking Hebrew with an American accent often elicits a response in English. People want to be helpful. They also want to avoid the frustration of talking to someone who looks lost, misses the point, stammers and hunts for words. In this way a lifetime of careful cultivation of cultural competence washes away most every time you open your mouth.

Fiddler on the Roof, a very Jewish story, has been a hit all over. Its themes—tradition, children who go their own way, dispersion and loneliness–resonate far and wide. As its final song goes:

Soon I’ll be stranger in a strange new place
Searching for an old familiar face….

The old familiar face you find may belong to someone you never got along with in the Old Country, but never mind that now. Here, he will recall some of what you recall, and you both will smile in mutual recognition.

As it was in Anatevka, so it is for whatever corner of whichever Old Country you and yours once occupied.

And so, whatever else you do, it is nice now and then to join someone who says, “Hey remember…

….Remember the time Sammy saw a coyote trotting down the middle of Centre Street early Shabbat morning, possibly scoping out a quick hashkama minyan? Or remember when that Rosie lady, back before they took women runners seriously, apparently won the Boston Marathon by starting with the pack and taking a train to the finish line?  And how could you not remember 2004, when weepy Bostonians visited Grandpa’s grave to tell him that, after 86 years, the Red Sox finally licked the Curse of the Bambino and beat the Yankees? Or what about the first day of Rosh Hashanah, when everyone came to tashlich at the local pond, and members of the Conservative temple showed up at the north end to make an infernal racket with every possible noisemaker—shofars, plastic birthday trumpets, kazoos? And what about that Friday night the word went out that a moose had escaped from wherever moose escape from and was grazing by our very own pond, and we all went outside to look, but never found it….? Sure you remember!  Wasn’t that something?”

The memories themselves, like Veggie Crust, are not the point. The point is finding the fellowship of other people, while you still can, who remember them too, and can smile as you share them.

AI/Wikimedia Commons