Today I Am a Man!

I grew up in the third or fourth most secular household in human history. For my dad, born in New York City and brought up in southern New Jersey, being a Jew was more tribal than spiritual. He was Jewish as others at his high school were Irish or Italian. My mother, from Minneapolis, seemed to derive perverse pleasure from imagining that others were able to intuit that she was Jewish, and disliked her for it. I think they both had a sense of the High Holy Days being in the autumn. Beyond that, they knew as much about Judaism as I know about Zoroastrianism.

I was dragged along to synagogue for Yom Kippur maybe twice as a boy, and 40 years later composed a song, for my album of songs about holidays Irving Berlin hadn’t gotten around to, called “(Everywhere You Look) It’s Yom Kippur”. In my childhood home I learned that the goyim —gentiles — were prone to alcoholism and deficient personal hygiene. My maternal grandfather had gotten rich as a liquor wholesaler. 

I didn’t sign up, halfway through my 13th year, to be bar mitzvahed because i believed in Judaism, but because my sole friend, Ronald Siegel, was going to do it. If I were to be deprived of his companionship, I thought, I might as well enlist too. I had of course heard tales of boys being given large bagfuls of money for their bar mitzvahs, and the prospect wasn’t without appeal. 

We studied Judaism at Temple Israel of Westchester, the not-terribly-interesting southwest Los Angeles neighbourhood just north of Los Angeles International Airport. TIW was presided over by the most unpleasant old bastard in the history of organised religion. Mordecai I. Soloff. His breath could have decimated a small village back in the Old Country, or in the new one. His nostrils seemed being big enough to hide copies of his book When the Jewish People Was Young, which our parents were compelled to buy for us. I was troubled by his use of was rather than were. 

Mordecai I. Soloff seemed to have modelled himself after the vengeful, perpetually disgruntled, vengeful God of the Old Testament. He was perpetually pissed off, usually by boys behaving like boys rather than 45-year-old Talmudic scholars. Did I mention his room-clearing breath?

The only thing I liked about Hebrew school, which I had to attend one weekday afternoon every week, and every Saturday morning, was that a girl in the pre-bat mitzvah class wore seamed stockings, which I was pleased to discover I found enormously sexy, though I was of course too shy to speak to her. 

Came the big day, that on which I would wear a suit, read from the Holy Scrolls, and, in my little piping just-turned-13-year-old’s voice, declare myself a man. Pretty much no one came. Rabbi Soloff, furious about it, ordered his various instructors to end their lessons prematurely so that their little charges could fill some of the great many empty seats in the synagogue. I was nervous, and during my reading from the Torah, forgot for a moment that I was supposed to read each word before, rather than after, Mordecai I. Soloff pointed at it with a little golden pointer. Mordecai I. Soloff fairly trembled with indignation. Surely I was offending Jehovah himself.

Other boys in my class raked in $200 for their trouble. I got $12 (in fairness, $5,230 in 2019 dollars), a cheap wristwatch, and a nail care kit. But I did enjoy the after party, as there were delicious cold cuts from an actual delicatessen. Seamed Stockings Girl was nowhere to be seen.

Back at Orville Wright Junior High School, I, now a man in the eyes of my religion, walked from class to class with new confidence. Not. But I will point out that a favourite recreation of the sons of the local bigots, who otherwise amused themselves by torturing the school spastic, was to roll pennies in front of smaller, meeker classmates. By picking up the penny — and one could buy a delicious Tootsie Roll in those days for a penny — one exposed himself as Jewish. 

For his own bar mitzvah, I think Ronald Siegel got $500 and a Mustang convertible, though he would have to wait three years to be able to drive it legally.

If Judaism was Mordecai I. Soloff, I thought, a pox on it. When I stopped turning up at Hebrew school, he phoned and bellowed at me. I put forth the view that I owed him nothing. He bellowed more loudly. I could almost smell his ghastly breath over the phone. I stood my ground. It was one of the finest hours of my early adolescence, which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly jam-packed with fine hours.