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

Middleton, Wisconsin: Mustard Capitol

The National Mustard Museum. Middleton, Wisconsin

Just back from Madison, Wisc., and emerging from a mustard-induced haze.

Just when I thought I may be overdoing it with knish costume, I made a pilgrimage to the National Mustard Headquarters in Middleton, Wisc.
Barry Levenson’s yellow emporium recently migrated from the hamlet of Mt. Horeb, Wisc. to Middleton, right next to Madison and 20 miles from the original Dijon outpost in the Midwest. To commemorate the exile, Levenson enlisted the track teams — and mascots, a cardinal and a Viking — of both schools to transport “the Last Mustard” on foot, escorted by a yellow school bus.

What’s the connection to knishes? Well, mustard and knishes are mutually dependent. What’s a mustard without a vehicle? And what’s a knish without some spice?

Levenson has created an emporium, complete with an educational branch, Poupon U. (I kid you not) and has a cousin who lives three blocks from me in Brooklyn. Just another example of ingathering.

Mustard Pirate after the relay.

Most people at the Mustard Museum had no clue what a knish was. Levenson’s cousin suggested I head to Hillel, the Jewish organization on campus, for more name and sight recognition. But it’s good to remember what it’s like to be an outsider. Even the bedazzled Dutchess of Mustard could not identify her sister knish, but did appreciate my yellow nail polish and remembered tasting a potato pocket at a synagogue sponsored tasting day in Madison.

It’s not uncommon to use food to introduce culture, but what are we transmitting?

What can we hand over along with recipes and foods?

What are we really trying to share?

Thoughts — and more questions — welcomed.

Collaborative Performance: A Way to Escape the Narrow Places

In the spirit of down-home happenings, I humbly present a preview of the Knish Color Guard. Thanks Lee and Natasha.

All hail the underbelly.

Last week I went to two most amazing performances:

Commemoration of the 99th Anniversary of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Great Small Works’ most fantabulous Spaghetti Dinner

Great to be around old-time New York types who challenge the establishment and invite people of different ages, backgrounds, cultures, and money levels to share space and food. Bravo! Proof that New York is not just about glitz and glam but also about coming together and making a difference for people of all walks of life.

I like to think about this, especially on the eve of Passover, which is all about challenging the confines, structures and strictures we set for ourselves.

Pretty great how a bowl of popcorn or a plate of spaghetti can unite a crowd, spark a conversation, create commonality. I cleaned my plate at Great Small Works’ Spring Spaghetti and took in a smorgasbord of entertainment: a quartet of tiger puppets, a face-changing Peking opera performer, a story about the history of oil, an excerpt from a novel about online dating for the uber-hairy, and a sultry singer with a southern twang. But wait, I’m forgetting an important thing — the presentation by independent relief workers in Haiti and reports of their new projects.

At the commemoration of the 99th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Annie Lanzilatto placed a phantom shirtwaist on a stick in my hand when I walked in and urged me into the procession with a one-ply specter of a shirt dangling three feet above my head. All of them had names. Mine said: unidentified woman. Annie is Bronx-born Italian with the accent and heart to prove it. “What do you want to change?’ she thundered to the crowd. “Do something.”

What does all this have to do with knish culture? I love these events for bringing people together with a focus on what’s inside on a person. Spectacle is about surfaces and what we perceive, but both of these shindigs also gave light to the invisible — heartbreak, injustice, people and perspectives that can be tough to find in the hullabaloo of the big city.