After 20 years, my cultural differences with my wife have softened considerably, and our own mixed, idiosyncratic culture is in the foreground of our lives, but tribal issues still arise. Two nights ago we were driving to Home Depot when she brought up an argument she was having (as an editor) with an entitled writer, and I asked if the person was Jewish, and of course she was, and because I struggle with entitlement issues, I asked if I shared qualities with this person, and my wife said, "Well, maybe her energy around a little question: her nudginess–"
I pointed out that my wife was using a Yiddish word, nudge, which means to pester or bore or nag (per Leo Rosten’s indispensable book on the meritocracy). My wife went on, "It reminded me of that half-hour argument you had with your mother about who gets all the stolen mustard."
I started laughing, but my wife said she wasn’t trying to be funny, and that she still doesn’t understand the incident.
I have a vague memory of it. It must have been 12 or 13 years ago. We had a family party at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, I think when my great-uncle was turning 90. There were a lot of coldcuts with toothpicks to carry away and we went back to my place on the Lower East Side and the stuff was divided. There were several little plastic containers of mustard of different type.
My wife says that we stole lots of little packets of mustard from the restaurant, and some bread too, but I don’t remember it that way. My grandmother used to grab packets of mustard all the time and stuff them in her pocketbook, but my mother and I aren’t that way. And I distinctly remember those little plastic containers sitting in my refrigerator, half-filled with mustard.
Anyway, my mother and my aunt and I had a conversation about… who gets the mustard. I think it went on for a minute. My wife says it went on for a half hour and she was called in. She says she didn’t get the logic of the conversation. "I don’t understand what it was about. I think it was about people trying to prove who was more generous. Your mother was pressing it on you, and you were pressing it on her. ‘No mother, you take the Gulden’s’"
"I never call my mother, Mother. You do that. I call her Mom."
"Well I still don’t understand it."
Looking back on it, I say there were two things going on. There’s way too much energy around things in my family. I relate it to insecurity, and to Kafka’s beautiful statement to his Catholic girlfriend, explaining Jewish anxiety:
"The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among peple, would make it above all comprehensible that they consider themselves to be allowed to own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only palpable possessions give them the right to live, and that they will never acquire what they once have lost but that instead it calmly swims away from them forever." Also, I’d quarreled a lot with my mother in the years before the mustard, in an entitled adolescent way, and now I was getting over that. I was patching things up, and I seized any stupid opportunity to engage her positively. I would have pressed the mustard on her.
