4 Jun 2003 @ 11:12, by waalstraat
Are You an Orthodox Jew Ray Pow? How Much of Your Family were exterminated because of their religion Ray. I lost 80% of my Aunt's and Uncles and 1st cousins over 40 people, most of them children in the holocust Ray Pow...how about reading this excerpt from my novel "I Do Art, I Do Life, Life does Me!" Ray Pow...Oh by the way a few of the cousins I have left are orthodox Jews. When they by accident use a knife meant for dairy dishes on meat or vice versa in order to spiritually sanitize it they immerse it in earth and say special prayers over it...I respect their practices but does that mean we should all follow suit because very religious sincere orthodox Jews do that and advocated it....
HERE IS THE PERTINENT EXCERPT FROM MY NOVEL....
Boris is talking about when he was 12 years old growing up in the good old USA.
"....I was as American as a Nathan's Hot Dog! I played baseball, football, basketball, boxball, and stoopball. I collected baseball cards, chewed bubble gum, and Double Bubble gum. However, it seemed to me that nobody but my family agreed with me that I was truly an American kid.
Sure, I loved gefilte fish, lox and bagels with cream cheese, smoked white fish, sable, chopped eggs and onion, chopped liver, both made with schmaltz (chicken fat), and Matzos, but I also loved Apple pies especially Mrs. Wagner's Apple Pie. If I didn't love my Mom so much I would have gladly taken rosy cheeked Mrs. Wagner as my adopted Mom. Well, that is only if Maureen O'Hara or Greer Garson weren't making any offers. I ate Kellogg's Pep, peanut butter and Jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, and grilled cheese sandwiches. True I also loved Borscht, Jewish Rye, Pumpernickel bread, and Kosher pickles and I had never eaten pig yet, nor drank milk with meat; still I don't thinks any of the Goy Americans knew that. However, though I doubted many Goys knew about those aberrations of mine and deviations from the American way of life, for some reason they refused to accept me as an American. Of course, they didn't say I wasn't American; they just treated me as if I was a foreigner like my Pop.
You've got the idea: therefore, I figured I was insecure in America, like my Dad was in Russia and my mom was in Austria-Hungry.
Like I said much earlier to you Nard, insecure was an understatement as far as both of them goes. After all that was just about the time we found out all our immediate family was wiped out in Europe: my dad's brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and his mom were all done in by the Nazis. My Mom's cousins and her oldest brother with his wife, children, and fortune were erased. At least we found out what happened to her brother (as opposed to nothing at all about my Pop's family) however, we heard two versions of Mom's older brother's demise along with his wife and children.
One version was they were thrown down in a trench and shot, and the other more sophisticated version was that they were sealed in a movie house with hundreds of other Jews and left to suffocate or starve to death…I wasn't sure which it was, since I overheard both accounts while eavesdropping on the adults. They didn't tell it to me directly. They could have told me! It was Josh, that pished in bed when he heard horror tales, not me I stayed dry.
"By the time we are through with this book Boris, you might lose Josh as a brother…."
"Nah, Josh knows I love him and I know he love me…besides since you have been doing the biography he has been telling his friends that although I'm a genius I'm a little meshuga and that sometimes my imagination runs away with me. I guess that's to cover himself for anything that might embarrass him like what a great belcher he was, but that habit Josh had cultivated-he didn't cultivate the pishing it came naturally. In fact, I'm proud of him for he also had to cultivate non-pishing and succeeded. Of course he was forty-five years of age when he succeeded…ah everybody knows I'm kidding now…it was forty four…"
"You better hope Josh never writes your biography!"
"What do you mean hope? I pray he doesn't. Anyway, like I said, I was feeling insecure in America, and I told my Dad that…"
What did he say?
He said quote-something like-"America is da best country a Jew can get for security, even wid doze KuKlutzyKlan guys with the pillow case heads, and dere giant crosses, and doze America First shmucks. But soon you vill be able to rest your over-large brain Tattalah! Because, you vill have a place you can go."
My Dad then told me that any day soon Israel would declare itself a state. Now, I remember! That was in the beginning of May. I guess I remember that because I wished Israel would become a state on my birthday, May 10. However, David Ben Gurion didn't oblige me, even though I was Jewish too, and we both had names starting with "B".
Although, I was only going on twelve years of age, I knew there was a deep well of emotion from which my Dad drew up that reassurance he passed on to me "…you vill have a place you can go."
For a year or two before that conversation, he spun the same record over and over again, on the phonograph and each time by the end of the song tears streamed down his face. That song whose English title was "Tell me Where Can I Go" was performed by the Dutch singer and songwriter Leo Fuld?" It went like this:
Tell me where can I go,
There is no place, I can see,
Where to go, Where to go, It's the same in every place,
To the left, to the right,
It's the same, in every place,
There is no place to go,
And it's me who should know,
Won't you please understand,
Now I know where to go,
Where my folks proudly stand,
Let me go let me go,
To that promised land,
No more left no more right
Lift your head and see the light,
I am proud can't you see,
For at last I am free,
No more wandering for me.
Boris sang the song and did it beautifully, not kitsch sincerely and from the heart. You can surf the web and hear the song, it has a beautiful plaintiff melody and it is song even better than Boris does it by it original performer Leo Fuld. I was touched. Moreover, Boris succeeded in touching more of my buttons that day in the form of rushes of memories.
I'll bet it would be like finding a needle on sand dunes, to find a Jewish family in Miami- in those days- who didn't own a copy in Yiddish or English of "Tell me where can I go?" I have made fun about Boris fabricating memories; but, the fact is he remembered every word of that lyric, and in spite of the fact I too, heard it over and over again, as a kid I could only remember the first line.
Anyway, Boris was elated when I told him that song was also played over and over again in my home. I told Boris he sang the song beautifully, and believe it or not-he blushed. I guess the way to inhibit Boris' extroversion is to compliment him.
The above was and excerpte from my novel "I do Art, I Do Life, Life does Me!© And all copywrite rights are being excercised by the author.
There will be another part published in the next couple of days, and a discussion that will respond to your report today...
By the way I have three questions for you. It sounds like you might be implying that there should be a state of Palestine but no State of Israel--is that Right? Are you an Orthodox Jew? Has your a majority of you family been exterminated...( I pray not)
By the way I am a peacenic but I am in favor of the existence of the state of Israel...and I am in favor of statehood for the people living in the West Bank and Gaza.
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