Last night I was in the city walking around with a sense of
holiday cheer. No one has any money but itâs a good
thing, and then I walked down 47th
Street and liked the outfits of the orthodox Jews in the
jewelry district. It occurred to me I didnât use to like them, or I felt conflicted
about it. Felt more implicated by them. That they were mine, or a threat to me.
Donât feel that way so much any more. Feel: American at Christmas, thankful to
the Hasidim on 47th
Street for holding up their end of the economy in
the mishmash we call America .
Every winter I go to the Adirondacks
with a group of friends. Hut-camping. Weâve been doing it for years. Theyâre mostly
gentiles. I met them in media when I first came to New York, and Iâm close to them all. The
camping trip is a big tradition now and always a little tough. I got included
back when because Iâm tall and outdoorsy, and maybe also, because I'm odd; and that defines the
group, theyâre fairly independent guys.
I recognize there's a social component to it. I had a self-pride when I first went up camping with
them, a type of snobbery. Here I am with gentiles. There were other Jews but
tribally it was more of a gentile tribe, unpretentious, outdoorsy, a little bit
entitled too. I remember a Jewish friend saying to me, But Jews donât go
camping. I didnât like that, it upset me. Though at first I wasnât completely comfortable in
the gentile tribe. Hadnât done much time in that tribe then, didnât know their ways. My gentile (and anthropological) wife
was always coaching me in life anyway. Donât make personal comments. Over and over
again. Donât make personal comments. I would get my feelings hurt a lot because I didn't know the lines.
We often climb Mount Marcy, NY's highest peak at 5300 feet, which is always a battle with conditions, and one of the first years we
came down Marcy we were a little high from the experience, and I started channeling
a Jewish voice. I canât say now why it happened. I remember kicking rocks and
ice with my boots and jumping down the slope in triumph and calling out in an old ghetto
voice stuff about the mountain, and me and the mountain canât touch me, or we whupped
the mountain. Let me see what you have for me, come here, mountain. A little Yiddish
thrown in, and being intimate with the mountain. That's what I remember. And it freaked a couple of my friends out. It went on for a while, doing dialect, and
may have seemed anti-Semitic to them, or squeamish-making.
One of my friends still brings up the incident as The Antwerp jeweler. Remember
that time we came off of Marcy and Phil was acting the Antwerp jeweler. And he laughs, and I smile
too. (This same guy once said I have a yarmulke-shaped head. True enough. Iâve got a
pronounced occiput.)
Iâve often thought about the Antwerp jeweler on this blog but never
written about it. I've held out. Iâve always felt some shame about the incident. I wondered if
it was self-hating, if I wasnât offering up some ethnic caricature to my
American friends, as a concession to their culture. The dominant culture. The czar,
whatever.
Now I donât think so, and I donât really care. Donât feel
owned by that incident at all. It's something I did, and I remember enjoying it. Anyone can interpret it how they like. But I think Iâve got an Antwerp jeweler deep
inside me, crawling to come out. Fussy and lapidary and tenacious and
ethnocentric and yes, rich, heâs in there and I kind of like him.
Especially at Christmas.
