A Whiff of the (Recent) Past

A smell, a feeling lingers. I’m still wrapped up in Yidish-Wokh.
At the Oyzere Pavillion,  the lake house, a slice of magic, nature.

Shabbes Morning
Here, said Perl, you can see what G-d has created. If shul were like that always, I would find myself there more often. I need to soak up the vistas and spend a few minutes each day watching bees swarm the tall purple flowers.

That Afternoon
I am walking there for Mina-Lifshe’s Songs of Travel and Courtship [my guess at the word I didn't understand] when a car pulls up. “You’re Eve Sicular,” I say to the driver, because she is. I can’t tell you how I know her. Years on the Jewish culture circuit. She’s a performer. I’m an audience member. After a while these things become second nature. It’s nice to see a friendly face and to blurt out something in English.

After Shabbes, Music
After Havdolah (we sniff besomim, spices, from an industrial sized plastic container of cumin, red cover pulled back), after Shane Baker’s monologue, I am one of the first to populate the night.

Music wafts from the lake with thin streams of white Christmas lights. I want to run there. A full beckoning. I want to be the first to be swaddled in these sounds, in an experience that revives something I never lived, that  gives not just lip service, but mouth to mouth resuscitation to an American Jewish tradition: the summer retreat, an act of pride and flocking with similar people.

I linger, I listen. I walk in the opposite direction to change my shoes, to eat the last granola bar. I am hungry.  I arrive when the hootennany is underway. Not divided so much by young and old but more by older and younger, I hem and haw on one side and then the other and near the back, with breaks for cookies and water. I am worried about the lemonade after it swelled its way back up my esophogus.

Step Lively
The lake house shimmers and glistens and jump-jitters with shoes. smiles, the antithesis of my catskills experience. where Velvel of Rio teaches me the steps of tango — [samba would take five months he says]  and passes off my tentative ayn tsvay drey fir finif (cross) zeks  zeben, repeat (huh?)  to  a youngrabbi from the Five Towns and a guy from the Upper West Side.

It has the warmth of a junior high school dance, the night is soft and I feel safe. I linger after the encore to chat with the man who showed me our page numbers in prayer  to talk about Yiddish. He has arranged an auditorship for himself in Yiddish at Harvard. I go on, in detail about the Yiddish program in NYC, in English, forgive me.

The young people, Pripitchik chorus alums (all under 25 if I’m not mistaken) break into some of their hits — Micky Mazl, which could give Annette Funicello a run for her money.  I am a member of a makeshift club of  maidele and yingele. And I am tired. Zise haloymes, I tell Perl when she heads off to schluffville.

I get there a little later — in bed before all my bunkmates and up before them.

So different from