HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JEW AND A PARROT?

We can think of the Dropkin fart as a metaphor for Jewish history: however much Jews try to repress their origins, they’ve learned the hard way that what they thought was past always returns to embarrass them by slipping out one way or the other:

A Jew converts and becomes a priest. He gives his first Mass in front of a number of high-ranking priests who came for the occasion. At the end of the new priest’s sermon a cardinal goes to congratulate him. ‘Father Goldberg,’ he says, ‘that was very well done, you were just perfect. Just one little thing. Next time, try not to start your sermon with ‘My fellow goyim ...’

It can happen anywhere:

James and Gracie Carter put on their finest clothes and head out to one of London’s swankiest restaurants for their anniversary dinner. The waiter hands them the menu. James looks it over as if a habitué.

‘And what would sir like for his main?’ the waiter asks.

‘Whatever you recommend,’ says James dismissively, ‘just so long as it’s treyf [non-kosher].’

‘Oy vey!’ exclaims a nearby diner ... ‘Whatever that means.’

It’s a problem that Jews have even had to contend with in the new world – the reason, for example, why the Cohens of Boston decided to name their newborn son Luke Lincoln Cohen because Abraham Lincoln sounded too Jewish.

What such jokes – and there are many of them -seem to suggest is that there’s something unshakeable about Jewishness. ‘When you wake up,’ the American comedian Judy Gold was once asked, ‘do you feel more Jewish or more lesbian?’

I always feel Jewish. I get up and my back hurts, I’ve got to go to the bathroom, I’ve got to have a coffee. I’m a Jew. I don’t wake up and go, ‘Oh, my God, that girl’s hot.’ It’s ‘I gotta put some beans in the coffee thing. Should I make oatmeal? I need to go to the gym – no, I don’t feel like going.’ I wake up like an elderly Jew in assisted living.^*

A new day it may be, but still there’s the same old tsores (troubles, sufferings, oy oy oys) – and it’s that (plus the vague distrust of the coffee ‘thing’) that feels Jewish.

Which isn’t, of course, to deny that other people have their tsores too:

A formerly religious young man is attending Oxford University. When his father, with a long beard, skullcap and side curls, comes to visit him, he is filled with shame and tells his father in no uncertain terms that he feels all his success at fitting in at one of Britain’s elite institutions will be undone by this spectacle of difference. Wanting to aid his son, his father heads for a barber and has his side curls removed, his beard shaved off, and he even takes off his skullcap. At that point his father bursts into tears. Profoundly moved, his son says, ‘But, Father, I never meant for you to lose your identity entirely. I just wanted you to minimise your difference, not obliterate it. I’m so sorry for the pain I’ve caused you.’

‘No, no, it’s not that,’ says his father, ‘I’m crying because we lost India.’

Oy oy oy indeed.

But even when a Jew, such as the man weeping openly for the loss not of his side curls, but of India, does genuinely appear to have recalibrated his identity, the lesson of the Dropkin fart may still apply. Thus, if we say, for the sake of argument, that a Jew wakes up, goes to the bathroom, has coffee and oatmeal, and is looking and acting much like anyone else by the time they’re on the street, even then there’s usually some other Jew threatening to expose them. As Freud tells it:

A Galician Jew was travelling in a train. He had made himself very comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages in a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew, ‘Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement]?’

‘Oho!’ said the Jew, relaxing entirely, and put his feet up before answering.

But, who is the butt of the joke here? Is it the old world Jew as seen through the eyes of his assimilated cousin, or isn’t the Galician Jew just another shlemiel making a shlimazel out of the straight guy?

A woman on a train leans over to another passenger. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘but are you Jewish?’

‘No,’ replies the man.

A few minutes later she asks again. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘are you sure you’re not Jewish?’

‘I’m sure,’ says the man.

But the woman’s unconvinced, and a few minutes later she inquires a third time. ‘Are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?’

‘All right, all right,’ the man says. ‘You win. I’m Jewish.’

‘That’s funny,’ says the woman.’ You don’t look Jewish.’

For who but a Jew would dream of showing so little sign of it?

Then again, Jews are liable to find equally suspect the Jew who appears not to be hiding:

Two rivals meet in the Warsaw train station. ‘Where are you going?’ says the first.

‘To Minsk,’ says the second.

‘To Minsk, eh? What a nerve! I know you’re telling me you’re going to Minsk because you want me to think that you’re really going to Pinsk. But it so happens that I know you really are going to Minsk. So ... why are you lying to me?’

So you’re telling the truth? Well, isn’t that a good disguise!

Jokes about Jews on a train are jokes about Jews as passengers – as people who are always attempting to pass ... go along with ... assimilate ... parody ... parrot...

Meyer, a lonely widower, was walking home one night when he passed a pet store and heard a squawking voice shouting out in Yiddish, ‘Quawwwwk ... vus machst du ... yeah, du ... outside, standing like a shlemiel ... eh?’

Meyer rubbed his eyes and ears. He couldn’t believe it. The proprietor sprang out of the door and grabbed Meyer by the sleeve. ‘Come in here, fella, and check out this parrot.’

Meyer stood in front of an African Grey that cocked his little head and said, ‘Vus? Ir kent reddin Yiddish?’

Meyer turned excitedly to the store owner. ‘He speaks Yiddish?’

In a matter of moments, Meyer had placed five hundred dollars down on the counter and carried the parrot in his cage away with him. All night he talked with the parrot in Yiddish. He told the parrot about his father’s adventures coming to America, about how beautiful his mother was when she was a young bride, about his family, about his years of working in the garment centre, about Florida. The parrot listened and commented. They shared some walnuts.

The parrot told him of living in the pet store, how he hated the weekends. Finally, they both went to sleep.

Next morning, Meyer began to put on his tefillin [phylacteries], all the while saying his prayers. The parrot demanded to know what he was doing, and when Meyer explained, the parrot wanted to do it too. Meyer went out and made a miniature set of tefillin for the parrot. The parrot wanted to learn to daven [pray], so Meyer taught him how to read Hebrew, and taught him every prayer in the Siddur with the appropriate nusach [version] for the daily services. Meyer spent weeks and months sitting and teaching the parrot the Torah, Mishnah and Gemara. In time, Meyer came to love and count on the parrot as a friend and a Jew.

On the morning of Rosh Hashanah, Meyer rose, got dressed and was about to leave when the parrot demanded to go with him. Meyer explained that shul [synagogue] was not a place for a bird, but the parrot made a terrific argument and was carried to shul on Meyer’s shoulder. Needless to say, they made quite a sight when they arrived at the shul, and Meyer was questioned by everyone, including the rabbi and cantor, who refused to allow a bird into the building on the High Holy Days. However, Meyer convinced them to let him in this one time, swearing that the parrot could daven.

Wagers were made with Meyer. Thousands of dollars were bet that the parrot could NOT daven, could not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, and so on. All eyes were on the African Grey during services. The parrot perched on Meyer’s shoulder as each prayer and song passed – Meyer heard not a peep from the bird. He began to become annoyed, slapping at his shoulder and mumbling under his breath, ‘Daven!’

Nothing.

‘Daven ... Feigelleh, please! You can daven, so daven ... come on, everybody’s looking at you!’

Nothing.

After Rosh Hashanah services were concluded, Meyer found that he owed his shul buddies and the rabbi several thousand dollars. He marched home quite upset, saying nothing. Finally, several blocks from the shul, the bird, happy as a lark, began to sing an old Yiddish song. Meyer stopped and looked at him.

‘You miserable bird, you cost me over four thousand dollars. Why? After I made your tefillin, taught you the morning prayers and taught you to read Hebrew and the Torah. And after you begged me to bring you to shul on Rosh Hashanah, why? Why did you do this to me?’

‘Don’t be a shlemiel,’ the parrot replied. ‘You know what odds we’ll get at Yom Kippur?’

What kind of Jewishness is the parrot parroting? Not, it seems, the official text – the liturgy, the language and the law – but the subtext – the ghetto, streetsmart survival instinct and adaptability. Convert and get ten rubles! Or, as Groucho Marx had it:

These are my principles! If you don’t like them, I have others.

Hard not to laugh at such a luminous line. Still, there is, undeniably, a problem here: the problem as to why so many Jewish jokes and jokers depict Jews as charlatans or liars – so sneaky that even the honest ones are condemned as duplicitous. For if even Jews don’t trust each other, what are non-Jews meant to make of them? Aren’t Jewish jokes then guilty of stoking anti-Semitism?

In some cases, perhaps they are. But we can equally hear these same jokes, alongside Groucho’s quips, as engaged in something more subtle: by joking about the slipperiness of the Jew, what such jokes also describe is the inherent slipperiness of the outsider’s position. For in order to fit in with the dominant social group, the parrot will try to imitate the language of its hosts so as to get noticed, establish lines of communication and have its needs met. So if even for the parrot parroting is essentially a survival strategy, then the same, surely, may be assumed of the parroting Jew.

Do jokes about the slipperiness of Jewish identities appear less damning, then, if considered in such terms? The line to be drawn here is nothing if not blurry. Because it’s true: when jokes about Jews attempting to pass are told by non-Jews, they do sound suspiciously similar to anti-Semitic ones. And actually, come to think of it ...

*  Interview for Out Magazine (2016).