The date is my brother's bar mitzvah party, summer 1964. Everything you'd want to know about this event is in this picture. It's the most Jewish photo I have. Look at my dad shoving a ridiculously large piece of cake into his mouth, his lips and chin covered in frosting. He's probably had a shot or two of schnapps. His face is glowing. My father loved a simcha (Jewish event of joy). He knew how to party. He loved to dance and certainly loved to eat. And this was the first real simcha our family held.
My father wanted to show off it's true. We didn't have a lot of money at the time, but this event was important to both him and my mom. About 200 people were invited if I remember correctly, a mix of greener and American Jewish families my parents knew from business, synagogue, the Jewish Community Center and the neighborhood.
In Europe, Bnai Mitzvot were no big things. But America was different. Aside from a desire to show off, this event also represented a real effort on the part of my parents to try to assimilate and "act like Americans." In general, my parents weren't at all interested in assimilation and were more than proud of their background; they felt that in terms of culture most aspects of Jewish life in eastern Europe were superior to that found in the US.
It was my first event ever where I wore formal attire. I'm the little guy in the white tux. My brother is the big guy in the white tux. I'm getting a knip in bekl, a pinch on the cheek from the cantor, who presided over the ceremony. Look at my face. Do I look happy? Nooooooo. Actually, I had a great time at this event. But that particular moment was the low point. This is just a great shot, no doubt about it. The photographer for this event was fantastic.
But those pinches. They were awful things. If you were a kid, they were both painful and humiliating. The physics of it was simple. The adult - sometimes a relative, sometimes a stranger - said something like the following "eyir sayt oys a zoy zees, ich daph rasin oop a shtikl oyf fun bekl" (he looks so sweet I have to rip off a piece of his cheek) reached down, pressed the knuckles of his index finger and middle finger into your right cheek, squeezed the knuckles shut, and pulled. The pain was instant. It was supposed to be a sign of affection. But usually it was more than that. It was designed to put you in your place. It really was.
Humiliation was intrinsic to growing up in European Jewish culture. It's hard to explain, but the idea was that you were expected to rise above it, to develop a thick skin and confidence. You were knocked down and challenged, but you were expected to pop right back up. This kind of conditioning happened in the home. It happened in school. They beat you silly, literally. But it wasn't about breaking your will. It was all about toughening you up. The love was there. The expectation was that you were so good and talented that you needed to face adversity. Not everyone responded well to this approach, that's for certain. It worked for me.
I can't help but note that there is a huge discrepancy between the Yiddish world I knew and the nostalgia-laced thing you find in most books on Yiddish culture. The tendency in America is to sugar coat every aspect of shtetl life and focus on the cute turns of phrases and clever curses of Yiddish language. In contrast, the culture in my experience - and in a lot of ways I grew up in a shtetl airlifted to America in 1949 - was tough and practical. It was a no-nonsense thing. When people tell me that Israelis are different than their shtetl-based ancestors in their toughness, I just have to disagree.
OK, back to matters at hand. The guy giving me the knip, the cantor, was a character. He spent most of the night staring at all the women's boobs and even the boobs of the thirteen year old girls. He was brazen about it. My mom told me many years later that he didn't just look; he usually was keeping busy with one or two housewives when he wasn't singing. When I was in my teens, I aspired to be a cantor, but my role model wasn't this guy. Actually, it was Richard Tucker the opera singer. I had a problem, though. I was an atheist. I ultimately decided that being an atheist and a cantor were orthogonal. Later on I found out that many big name cantors in Europe before the war had, like me, no belief in God whatsoever. If had known that at the time, I might have kept up my singing and studies. In this case, my ignorance was a good thing.
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