A friend and I email Jewish jokes to one another. He didn’t know the Minsk/Pinsk joke so I called my mother yesterday to go over it with her. I wanted to be able to do it justice if I saw my friend.
I spent a half hour on the phone with my mother, we laughed a lot. One reason I had trouble with my parents is that they weren’t wild about intermarriage, years ago. A couple of my mother’s jokes were on that theme. There’s the one about the guy who tells his mother he’s marrying a shiksa (yes I know that’s a racist word; notice the headline) and the mother tells her son about how when they come over they can have her bedroom and her bathroom. What about you mom? the son says, and the mother says, “Don’t worry about me. As soon as we’re hanging up the phone I’m putting my head in the oven.” Then my mother told me about a friend of hers who objected to her child’s marrying a non-Jew, and the friend had said, “She won’t understand our jokes.”
I love my mother. I thought the next time I see my friend, I’m going to tell him, you made a shidduch with me and my mother. I’m grateful to him. Shidduch is Yiddish for matchmaking/wedding. It’s got a lot of depth in it. Dowries are in it, the shtetl is in it. My grandparents bargained over my parents’ wedding, that was a shidduch, even though my parents had met on their own, at 138th and Convent Avenue.
Here’s some more of the meaning in shidduch: when I was working at the New York Times in the late 90s, I started to get crazy about the Vince Foster story. I have a theory about Foster’s death that I still believe that involves Clinton’s women issues. Anyway, I was developing that theory and I said to my editor one day, I want to talk to Jeff Gerth. Gerth was the guy who was doing the Whitewater stuff, which frankly I could never follow. My editor said, You don’t know Jeff? No. Well when you’re done this story I’ll make the shidduch.
I never did meet Gerth but the point is, Think of the power in our beautiful language. Think of the imaginative ghetto power and then think of the media power, the language being deployed in the main road.
Not in the shtetl, but in the main road. That power was not available to non-Jews.
