The Herz and Quat musical is about a Jewish bullfighter from Brooklyn: title, The Kosher-Killed Bull. Quat invites me to sit in with him and Herz as they work on their script. I hang around them as they write, and even contribute a joke or two, to my vast exaltation. Herz sits at the typewriter, and Quat roams around, sparking off jokes and ideas. They have a hilarious time, laughing hardest at Quat’s obscene suggestions which they can’t use. Peter displays gleams of his later form with those quips, and with that title; also with jokes about the Jewish matador’s big nose, his cowardice, his circumcision, his distress at learning he is eating ham, and so on.
The Deke who manages the show makes them change the title to Si Si, Señorita. “Nobody knows what kosher means,” says the Deke. The Deke house is some kind of ivory tower, obviously, but what the manager says, goes. The Deke manager also books a theatre for the two performances of the show on the two Passover seder nights. I find myself in a quandary. I’ve been counting on seeing both performances, but the Passover seders are sacrosanct, the one solid island of religion left in the year. Passover is Zaideh’s great hour, with the whole Mishpokha crowded at tables zigzagging through the book-lined flat. No matter how the old Mishpokha ties are weakening, everyone who is alive and within a hundred miles shows up. That Yisroelke should absent himself is unthinkable.
Nevertheless, after agonizing for days, I announce flat out that I intend to skip the second seder. Mom responds that it’s unthinkable. It’ll be a scandal in the family. The shock to Zaideh will ruin his Passover. She won’t be able to face him or the Mishpokha. I point out that in Palestine there is only one seder. The doubling up of the seder elsewhere is a mere survival of the moon calendar problem, from the days before exact calculation of orbits. So the second seder can’t matter all that much, can it? My own sister Lee isn’t going to two seders, is she? “No. So wait till you get to Palestine,” is Mom’s answer. “Now you’re in the Bronx. Two seders, and stop rolling your eyes and making those crazy faces.”
Protracted bickering on this topic comes to an abrupt end on Saturday, when Pop and I are walking home from the synagogue. He stops to catch his breath, and says, panting a bit, that he’s always felt he and Mom owe us the best of everything: a good home, a fine education, a trip abroad for Lee, a fraternity for me, and whatever else can advance us in life. Maybe I ought to consider, he says, whether in return we owe them anything at all. With that, he walks on again. He says nothing about the seders, but I am done for. I sit through the dress rehearsals of Si Si, Señorita, a show I know almost by heart, but I miss the performances. Peter afterward tells me that a couple of my jokes got good laughs.
***
Yet sometimes it is better not to win a fight. In the end, Mom loses more than she gains.
My slide from Jewish observance, as the reader will surmise, is now well along. Joining Tau Alpha has really greased the skids. We eat lunch every day at the house. I ask no questions about the lamb chops and pot roasts and stews which a black butler serves us. One day as we are finishing the meal, Peter Quat, who handles our finances, inquires, “By the way, does anybody here object to eating ham?”
“I do,” I exclaim. I may be a long way from worrying about the horse glue in Coca-Cola bottle tops, but I have never touched pork products.
“Well, you’ve just eaten it,” says Quat, raising a merry laugh among my Jewish brethren. I stare at the remnants on my plate of the peculiarly pink corned beef I thought I was having. The scene ends right there in my memory, so I won’t embellish it. Maybe that is what inspires Peter’s ham jokes in Si Si, Señorita. So far as I know, I’m not served pig again at Tau Alpha, and I go on eating there.
Now I trust that my non-Jewish readers know of another Mosaic food edict, the prohibition of leavened bread on Passover—a rule more honored in the breach than in the observance, perhaps, by some of their Jewish friends, yet a stern decree of our ancient law, actually stricter than the ban on pork. It’s the point of what comes next.
The first seder passed off well enough, but the second is a bust. Mom has invited the Brodofskys, all six of them. Added to our growing Mishpokha, they jam Zaideh’s small flat to gridlock. There is a shortage of prayer books. Zaideh’s tranquil voice is drowned out in the din from the women in the kitchen, and the chatter of bored youngsters without books. Pop and I keep up with the limping service, nobody else. By custom I sit on Zaideh’s right hand at seders, and for years I have made him happy by disputing fine points of the haggada text with him. Tonight I just mumble grumpily in Hebrew. My grandfather bears on in good spirits, all the same.
The big trouble comes at mealtime. Bobbeh’s matzoh balls, her annual occasion for praise and applause, turn out stony. They are really no more edible than billiard balls. The scoffers’ section, presided over by Cousin Harold, fires off a stream of matzoh-ball jokes. We are all convulsed, until Bobbeh turns blue and begins to cry. A frantic uproar to comfort her ensues, and during this crisis the food gets cold. Anyway, there isn’t enough to go around. Mama heaps up the Brodofsky plates; never let it be said the Brodofskys went hungry at a Goodkind meal! Young Goodkinds fare poorly.
The upshot is that Cousin Harold and I worm out of the jammed flat to take a walk; both ravenous, and I for once as full of heretical scorn as Cousin Harold. He proposes that we get ourselves hot dogs, and I am all for it. At a kosher delicatessen, we buy frankfurters on rolls. If a religious sophisticate breaks in here to ask how come a kosher place would serve leavened rolls on Passover, he doesn’t know what a mess Bronx Jewish mores were then. We are devouring the dogs, when out of the washroom in back comes nobody but Felix Brodofsky, fatter than ever. “Well, whaddya know! Davey Goodkind eating bread on Passover! What will Grandpa say?” He leaves, leering, to return to the seder. So the jig is up, the fix is in. The Brodofskys will rub Mom and Pop’s nose in this scandal, until they will wish they had never had a Yisroelke in the first place.
Cousin Harold, of course, is unperturbed. Wolfing another hot dog on the way back to Zaideh’s flat, Cousin Harold explains that the Jewish religion is mere primitive nonsense. He urges me to read H. L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. H. L. Mencken proves that all religion is nothing but mankind’s fear of the unknown, institutionalized as propitiatory magic, and perpetuated as a fat racket for priests. Cousin Harold is now a freshman at City College, majoring in psychology. But his real major these days, to hear him tell it, is fornication. Cousin Harold’s tales of his conquests are long and lurid, going into explicit details of contraception, positions, the cries of the females, oral variations, and so on, in a manner remarkably anticipating Peter Quat’s artistic breakthrough years later. It is a pity that Cousin Harold has no literary gift, and anyway is ahead of his time.
In point of fact, I never hear another word about the hot dogs. Did Brodofsky tell Pop? I get no hint of it. Pop has seen me go off to football games on Saturday. He has heard, in the way I argue about religion with Mom, abrasive echoes of my Columbia education. He himself was a rebel of sorts, a fiery young socialist who came back by degrees to his shammas father’s religion. If Brodofsky did say anything, I’m sure Pop shrugged it off with a sad smile.
America!
***
But the thing eats at me. Not so much the incident in itself, as the whole snowballing oppressiveness of the religion. At every turn the faith is beginning to nag at my conscience, conflict with my schedule, and clash with my changing views. In my comparative religion course I have been taught that the Torah is a patchwork of several documents of different eras and regions—J, E, P, D, and whatnot—which if true makes a joke of the Talmud’s minute analysis of the Torah as one seamless Mosaic unity. All religions, I now gather, are really a special sort of folkloristic literature. Whether you are a Christian or a Buddhist or a Jew or a Hindu simply depends on when and where you were born, not on the intrinsic content of this or that faith. Our comparative religion professor, a naturalized former Englishman named Dr. Vyvyan Finkel, vaguely Jewish, an amusing lecturer and a very tough marker, is clearly above being taken in by any of these naive myths—including, of course, Judaism—but thinks them all worth study, like the bones of dinosaurs.
My readings in philosophy, which Dr. Finkel also teaches, have further eroded the ground of faith. And a psychology course, in which we’ve spent a couple of weeks on the psychopathology of religious experience—that is, the study of nuts who think God talks to them—has cast something of a shadow on figures like Abraham and Isaiah. In short I am becoming an atheist. I have read H. L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. Great stuff. Why should an atheist who has read Mencken feel guilty about eating a frankfurter on a roll on Passover? Preposterous.