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.
Don't worry, Phil, just think of Baruch Spinoza.
Why should he worry?????? Rowan?
Fussy and lapidary and tenacious and ethnocentric and yes, rich, heâs in there and I kind of like him.
Many of the Hasidim on 47th st. have been implicated in money-laundering schemes for
drug-traffickers, as well as highly unethical financial schemes and dealing in
"blood diamonds." Anyone interested in their many other failings (e.g. pedophilia) should read the failedmessiah blog.
Hmmm. A strange case. Better kill yourself just to be on the safe side.
I don't understand your reaction to climbing a mountain, but it's nothing to be asahmed of, or to ridicule. I couldn't be with a woman who is ashamed of me.
Well, Phil is with a woman who is ashamed of him, at least significant parts of his personality. To keep her, he's tried very hard to turn himself into someone who is "disgusted" by his own Jewishness. Hell, he's made a career (not one that earns him a cent, but never mind that) out of his attempt to remove himself from Jewishness (and Jews from their land, culture, and religion). So yeah, Phil does have a pretty complicated relationship to self.
Why he can't just get over it, stuff himself into a pair of beige chinos, and become the fat Episcopalian hypocrital non-entity he was always destined to be . . .well, that's the question.
I shouldn't have made the remark about Phil's marriage, and would delete it if I could. Phil seems nice enough, and I don't know him or his wife. Phil does put himself on display in ways that I don't understand, but that's really his business. I'm sorry, Phil.
Jewish trolls, not surprisingly, given their reactionary politics and their incessant use of ad hominems, will usually sound like amateur psychoanalysts. However, a more sophisticated form of psychology would have a social dimension, and would deal with questions of plausibility. Phil, obviously, is more plausible than they are, so they try to counteract that with nonsense about his psyche.
SOG's playing pretend again.
Rabbi kook posts here? I went to Oberlin with his grand-daughter. She was a female mensch.
WHen I saw Antwerp jeweler, I immediately thought of Spinoza, although wasn't he a lens grinder? Or did the profession include both diamond cutting and lens-making?
I like this post. I like that Philip plumbs his psyche in public, for journalistic reasons. In an earlier generation he would have channeled it into fiction. Ayelet Waldman does the same with her personal essays but they're paying her for it at Salon, and she therefore gets about 20 times the abuse Phil does.
And I understand how you can have strange ancestral personalities that take over every once in a while. I've got a starchy WASP librarian, unfortunately; also a country-soul preacher's daughter who resembles Gillian Welch. In fact whenever my Southern personality emerges I make some of my California friends nervous. In Lebanon I discovered how easily I drop into Lebanese home-girl, laughing and joking with shopkeepers and housewives in the souk.
And my Lebanese self really appreciates Antwerp jewelers. The Lebanese are also big in the diamond business; I've always loved 47th Street. Yes, the corruption and cheating seems to go with it.