Month: December 2018

This Christmas day I’m picking my sister-in-law up at the airport. She has insisted that upon her arrival I take her to a Chinese restaurant so she can buy takeout to bring for dinner for everyone else at our home.

Yes, it’s true of all the restaurants likely to be open on Christmas the odds are heavily weighted that they’ll be Chinese and yes, it’s also true that of all the customers buying and eating Chinese food on Christmas the odds are also heavily weighted that they’ll be Jewish. We are. So, you can accompany the rest of what I’m about to write with Zero Mostel wailing Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof. But how did this happen?

My favorite explanation for why Jews eat Chinese on Christmas and at many other times during the year involves a debate between two old men.

“Chinese culture is at least 4,000 years old and we are the civilization that has been in the world the longest,” said Zhang.

“I’m sorry but the Jews have been around for over 5,000 years so we have been here at least a 1,000 more,” replied Abraham.

“Ok”, said Zhang. “But if that’s true, I need you to answer one question.”

“So, ask.”

“What did your people eat to survive for that extra 1,000 years?”

The real answer is actually pretty logical. In the early 20th century Jews and Chinese were the two largest non Christian immigrant peoples in America. Many from both groups lived in close proximity especially in urban centers like New York and Philadelphia. For Jews Chinese restaurants were conveniently located and affordable and— and this was most important —they didn’t use dairy products.

Jews who keep kosher won’t eat dairy and meat at the same time— that’s the most defining feature of the kosher laws which also rule out shrimp, clams and lobster —but if the wontons had pork filling, they sure resembled kreplach (dumplings) from the old country and hey, does God have X-ray vision? Many Jews were becoming flexible in their new country. Many still kept kosher in their homes but weren’t going to ask about what might be in the fried rice when they ate out.

As Jews moved to the suburbs Chinese restaurants moved with them and I grew up eating takeout from the only Chinese restaurant in Reading, PA on nearly every Sunday night. In fact a woman I know who grew up orthodox and kosher told me her family had four sets of dishes. One was for dairy, one for meat, one especially for the week of Passover and a fourth for their weekly Chinese. I’ve known more than a few Jews who will fearlessly eat bacon for breakfast at home but are terrified by the thought of ham in their refrigerators. Bacon is a threshold that can be crossed. Ham is a bridge too far.

The matter of Jews and Christmas, however is more complex than just food. Take the issue of having or not having a Christmas tree. The founder of Zionism himself, Theodore Herzl, lived in Austria and had a Christmas tree in his house and this was before anybody thought of calling it a Hanukkah bush. After the chief rabbi of Vienna once came to visit him during the holidays he is alleged to have written in his diary, “I hope the rabbi doesn’t think less of me because of this. Then again what do I care what he thinks?” Herzl was a secular Jew like the majority of Jews in the United States today.

And herein lies the question, is having a tree or sitting on Santa’s lap an indication of Jews’ security or insecurity in their identity? Is it a sign of assimilation that’s harmless or harmful. I’m not sure many of us grapple with divining the answers. We do what feels right and that can be different for everyone. As a kid I got to sit on Santa’s lap but my son never did. My parents didn’t have a tree but instead scattered blue and silver ball ornaments meant to hang from a tree in bowls around our house. As a parent myself there were no Christmas decorations. As I said we all do what feels right.

In the meantime many of us can give the same answer that Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan did when asked at her confirmation hearing where she had spent Christmas.

“You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

Let me admit right off the bat that I prefer to watch movies that have happy endings. Sure, there are exceptions. My favorite film is one and so is my next favorite.

Ikiru, in English “To Live” and directed by Akira Kurosawa, is the story of a man confronted with his own imminent mortality and how he chooses to spend his remaining time on earth and Citizen Kane is Orson Wells’ tour de force that chronicles the rise and fall of an egomaniac— Neither pass for feel good movies. Neither would be a likely choice to snuggle up with Christmas eve.

Since my wife Jo and I have moved to Maine in 2010 Holiday Affair has been the movie I’ve asked her to watch with me every December 24th. The night before Christmas is my favorite night of the year actually. Nobody’s out and nothing is open. I sense a stillness  and peace like at no other time. 

Holiday Affair is, no surprise, a Christmas movie and Turner Classic Movies has to be the reason it pops up now on some lists of favorites in the genre. Come December it’s shown a number of times but when it was released in 1949 it was less than a success. In fact it lost $300,000 for its studio, RKO, which in today’s dollars is over three million.

The plot is cute and uncomplicated. A war widow with a young son played by Janet Leigh, a decade before her shocking demise in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, has not been able to move forward with her life. Wendell Corey plays a lawyer who wants to marry her but can’t get past being the patient boyfriend who is unable to exorcize the ghost of her dead husband. Robert Mitchum in an role twist for him isn’t the tough guy but a nice guy also trying to make his way after the war and when he and Leigh meet in the deparmaent store toy department where he works the sparks fly and you know what’s going to happen.

I’ve never teared up watching Holiday Affair. The end of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life does that for me. It hasn’t ever caused me to laugh out loud like Jean Shepard’s A Christmas Movie. But what it does do is make me think that in the post war years of the 40s and early 50s America must have been full of hope and optimism and as well as the desire to get back to normal. There seemed to be a bright future and it was possible to chase dreams.

Corey’s character wanted to take Leigh and her son from the big city to the suburbs and a house with a yard. It would have been a safe life. Mitchum on the other hand wanted to take a risk. He was saving his money with a goal of designing and building boats.

I grew up in one of those newly minted suburbs. The houses weren’t Pete Seeger’s “Little Boxes.” They were well built and are still standing. The neighborhood was full of kids and parents never supervised our pickup games of whatever sport was in season.

My father, unhappy that with his Harvard Business School education his father and uncle still wouldn’t listen to him, bought into and then bought outright someone else’s business and grew it. My mother volunteered and became the county head of the March of Dimes. I wasn’t coerced into eating TV Diners and watching Ozzie and Harriet, I wanted to.

If I sound guilty of romanticizing so be it. I was lucky to be a kid then. I’ve been pretty lucky all along. Most of my generation has. Did I chase my dreams? Yes, I think I did.

The final scene of Holiday Affair is on a train leaving the east coast for the west with Mitchum, Leigh and the boy on board on their way to the future to pursue their dreams. That was a happy ending. That’s maybe why I love the movie because I got to have one and wish the world were really like that for everyone else.

 

 

So here I am at the Maine Mall. My wife is shopping and a guy and his wife were sitting next to me and just got up a minute ago.

I wasn’t intentionally eaves dropping and could only hear the husband’s half of their conversation. It mostly went like this…

“Yep, yep… yep, yep.”

It’s actually a good feeling to just be here and not worrying about buying anybody anything.

Of the seven of us sitting here six of us are using our phones. Social interaction may be transpiring but not among us. I’m trying to imagine what this same “waiting around” environment might have been like 50 years ago. Would we all have been just as alone with our thoughts back then instead of our phones like now?

Straight in front of me is the Apple store. It’s long and narrow with large tables with small things propped up on them. Fifty years ago it would have looked very strange, maybe like a Russian supermarket with almost no food. The place has a sort of Maitre ‘d/traffic officer stationed in its center. I’m reminded of Jacques Tati’s film Playtime. He opened that film by tricking the audience into thinking people were sitting dolefully in silence in a hospital but when the camera pulls back you see it’s actually an airport.

Here’s Tati  in another scene from Playtime which he directed and starred in 51 years ago showing that he was most prescient in seeing how modern society was moving even then toward “alone together.” Tati would have had even more fun with our world today. So would have Buster Keaton.