On Sunday, activists and supporters attended an event called “The Bialystoker Home: Past, Present, Future,” designed to showcase the building’s cultural significance and strengthen the arguments for landmark status. The Lo-Down reported yesterday:

The home, shuttered months ago, was until recently being marketed online as a development site. That listing has now vanished, amid rumors that the secretive Bialystoker board was close to signing a deal to sell the building. They have apparently signaled that the prospective buyer would surely walk away from the negotiating table if the the building is designated as an historic landmark. This afternoon there are new indications that a contract could be inked as soon as this week.

According to the same article, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has stayed out of the issue:

“Among the Speaker’s most ardent supporters on the Lower East Side, members of Grand Street’s Jewish community, there has been little enthusiasm for saving the Bialystoker, in spite of the building’s significance as a Jewish landmark.”

Preservation Groups Make Their Case For Saving the Bialystoker Home [The Lo-Down]
Sale of Bialystoker Home Could Be Imminent; Activists Hope For Political Intervention [The Lo-Down]
Closing a Nursing Home, and a Chapter of New York History [NYT]

The knishes there came hot, right off the warming block, and we took them to eat on the go. I savored my potato spinach knish, blowing on it before each bite rather than waiting for it to cool down, too eager to eat the dense, moist yet flaky-crusted dumpling as we wandered under the train tracks to the Coney Island freak shows nearby. Though Mrs. Stahl’s demise didn’t mean the end of the knish in New York City, it did mean, for many of the food’s devotees, the end of a knish worth traveling for.

But the arrival of a new knish maker in town might be cause to reconsider the lament that the golden days of the knish are over. This fall a quixotic 40-year-old Lower East Sider named Noah Wildman launched Knishery NYC, with the hopes of restoring the food’s glory. “The knish chose me,” Wildman told me. He has begun delivering knishes to customers in New York City by bicycle, and his pushcart start-up will soon be vending at street fairs around the city this coming spring. (An early snowfall in late October scuttled Wildman’s plans to debut seven types of his knishes at the annual Hester Street Fair.)

The revisiting of so simple a food as the knish—a doughy shell usually stuffed with potato, kasha, or cheese—has been a long time coming. Great knishes can be elusive, while adequate and sometimes disappointing ones, like those available at Yonah Schimmel in Manhattan and Knish Nosh in Queens, generally prevail.

Wildman has no plans to remake the knish, a staple of the working class, into haute cuisine. “Part of Jewish character is to see through the silliness,” he said. “To go for substance.” And few Jewish foods are as packed with substance as the knish. The baked dumpling came to the United States at the end of the 19th century by way of Eastern Europe, with competing accounts tracing the pastry’s origin to either the Polish town of Knyszyn or to a village in Slovakia. The knish fillings offered a terrific way to add variety to a monotonous diet heavy on potatoes, cabbage, and buckwheat. There were also knish varieties tied to the Jewish holidays, according to Joan Nathan, such as kasha for Hannukah and chicken liver for Rosh Hashanah.

At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish immigrants in the United States would bring knishes—a portable and filling pocket food—to lunch with them at their factory jobs. As the food writer Arthur Schwartz notes in Jewish Home Cooking, knishes, which were cheap, were also popular fare, often paired with hotdogs, at the beaches around New York City. Back then, Manhattan’s famous Second Avenue, home to the Yiddish theater, was known as Knish Alley. In 1910, Yonah Schimmel opened a knish store on Houston Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Six years later, the New York Times reported on a “knish war,” when rival bakeries on Rivington Street slashed prices and introduced cabaret sideshows to attract customers.

Now a new generation of Jewish chefs and bakers around the country are making their claim on such classic dishes. Kenny and Zuke’s, in Portland, Ore., offers a potato-and-onion variety with layers of flaky dough, topped with caramelized onions. Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, in San Francisco, has its own occasional potato-onion knish iteration, with the onions cooked down in schmaltz; the deli also offers potato with mushroom and kale, and potato with cubes of house-cured corned beef. “People go crazy for them,” Leo Beckerman, one of Wise Sons’ proprietors, said.

And then there’s Wildman. Raised in a Reform household on Staten Island, Wildman, who now lives just blocks away from Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, grew up eating frozen knishes but never imagined that he would one day be baking them. He had studied sociology at SUNY Albany but ended up working in the recording industry as the manager of a record label, after which his efforts publishing the zine The People’s Ska Annual led him to a job as a graphic designer for MTV. When he was laid off in 2008, Wildman enrolled in culinary school. After a few years making pizza at the much-loved Franny’s and Amorina in Brooklyn, and then working at Ignazio’s also in Brooklyn, he left last summer to pursue a project of his own.

A series of serendipitous encounters led him to the knish. Wildman visited Williamsburg’s weekly food festival, Smorgasburg, and was inspired by the new approaches to classic ethnic fare that he found there. Danny Macaroon, for example, had breathed new life into the coconut pastry associated with Passover, and various kimchi makers had successfully re-branded the Korean fermented vegetable staple for the average New Yorker. At the same time, Wildman stumbled into a well-timed lecture series on the knish taught by one of food’s greatest contemporary champions, Laura Silver, a writer in New York City.

Reawakened by Silver’s enthusiasm, Wildman tried out four different recipes to find a dough that balanced crisp and elastic textures with chewy and crumbly consistencies. “The dough is a vehicle for filling, but you need the vehicle first,” he said. He uses two kinds of dough—one for savory knishes and one for sweet ones, “a kind of Bubbe’s pâte sucrée.” Keeping the right proportion of dough to filling is one of the most critical elements of a perfect knish, Wildman said. His fillings range from high-quality versions of the standards to savory pumpkin, apple-cheese, and chocolate hazelnut. In addition, he plans future fillings of curry sweet potato, the crispy chicken fat known as gribenes, and mushroom-quinoa.

The Knishery NYC is in its infancy, but Wildman is already producing knishes to reckon with, with a sensible dough-to-filling ratio, and in sizes more baseball than softball. Served with a Lime Rickey and deli mustard, Wildman’s knishes could be a spiritual experience, or at least one that brings back the memory of Mrs. Stahl.

Day One of Parshas Bechukosai, May 18, 2008. The renovated beis medresh, or study hall, which seemed beautiful but stark, almost cold, when it was first opened last fall, is starting to acquire atmosphere. The floors have become a little bit scuffed. The half-flight of steps leading down to the beis medresh, which before the renovation were not only worn with decades of footsteps but also markedly tilted to one side, are neither worn nor tilted yet, but the dark stain that was intended to make the new ones look old is already somewhat scuffed as well. Meanwhile, the empty spaces begin to fill with sounds: A young man who grew up in the Belz Hasidic community in Borough Park, New York, who is in the neighborhood as a guest of Isaac Maxon’s for shabbes, sings snatches of luxuriant liturgical melodies of the Belzer Hasidic community as we wait on Friday evening for the minyan that never happened, and something of the echoes of his tunes remains in the air even after he has left.

I still have the overwhelming impression, though, that when the downstairs was renovated, all the ghosts departed, as well. Some I can and will recall by name or by some other characteristic: Moshe Sternberg, a former dressmaker (the only reason I know is because, once during my first years in the morning minyan, Mr. Sternberg was given the honor of covering the Torah scroll after the reading, and another member spoke up, “Mr. Sternberg was a dressmaker, I think he knows how to cover the Torah”); the gentle Itshe Duhl; nervous Mr. Teigman, who had a print shop in the neighborhood and bitterly opposed Rabbi Singer’s practice of opening up the ark to count the Torah scroll as the tenth for the minyan, threatening at least once to walk out so that there wouldn’t even be nine living Jewish men in the room, let alone ten; Heshy Gleicher (“Cheap Heshy”), who for decades owned a discount store around the corner on Clinton Street; Heshy Kolber (Benny was so contemptuous of him that once he muttered, un dus hot gehat a siti dzhob, “and this had a city job”); Shimen Perlman (a showman with snatches of Yiddish vaudeville and comedy theater; he could imitate a stereotypical Litvak Hebrew school teacher or a mock impresario announcing “Ladies and gents, katshkes un gendz,” “ducks and geese”); Mr. Berger, who used to yell at Heshy Gleicher and others, including me (Rabbi Singer calmed me down by saying, “He just talks loud”; when Elissa would walk in, he became a perfect gentleman; and when Jonah would come in as a toddler, Berger would call affectionately, “Hey, Pupik!”); Ari Lemkin (he should live and be well), a sad young man who eventually became Rabbi Singer’s right-hand man in the shul and resolutely sided with the Singer family once the dispute over the future of the shul broke out; other Heshies and Harries, Moishes and Abes, over the years.

I like to think of their ghosts as being available to make up the minyan, but no one thinks that’s how Jewish law works, not even among the minority of us who continue to accept the custom of counting the Torah scroll. May I share an image, without intending disrespect to any of them, simply because it continues to echo, insistent in my mind? It’s reported that, when the workmen doing the renovation tore up the old, badly worn floor of the beis medresh, they found nothing below it but dirt. Trapped in the dirt, along with a number of live rats, who scurried away but continued to trouble the building as long as the renovation work was in progress, were dozens of dead rats. I’m glad I didn’t see them, and I’m sorry to associate them with memories of past human residents, lehavdil b’elef havdoles, that is, to distinguish with a thousand distinctions. Blame the image on that endearing character, the Death of Rats, a sidekick of the equally colorful and sympathetic Death in Terri Pratchett’s Discworld novels, or maybe on a joke made by a character in Kugelmass’s The Miracle of Intervale Avenue, about another old shul in another borough, that you could put a yarmulke on a rat and include him in the minyan.

If we cannot count those who are physically absent, there is no apparent prohibition against one live male Jew doing double duty, attending one minyan and then moving on to fill the complement for another. This happened regularly, weekday mornings in the 1980s and early 1990s, when, in addition to the minyan at Rabbi Singer’s shul, the Chasam Sopher shul around the corner on Clinton Street had (as it still does) a morning minyan, and when Rabbi Heftler’s shul on Attorney Street still stood. (It has since collapsed, been demolished and replaced by an apartment building that, in its architectural detail, seems to me, at least, deliberately to recall the outlines of the neoclassical shul that once stood on the spot.) Occasionally, during the months after our first child, Jonah, was born, I would proceed on to Attorney Street after finishing at Rabbi Singer’s and come home around 9 in the morning, sometimes having had a shot or two with the old men, but Elissa put a stop to that after a month or two. More frequently, we would call Chasam Sopher and ask them to send one man, or maybe two, but we would always be careful to send them right back if another of our regulars straggled in. Occasionally, though not nearly as often, Chasam Sopher would likewise be short one congregant (they paid yeshiva students to come to the morning minyan, an option our even poorer shul didn’t have), and Rabbi Singer would be absolutely prompt about taking advantage of this opportunity to even the credit-debit balance of this Lower East Side shul economy. One winter morning, he personally left his shul to make the minyan at Chasam Sopher, in such a rush that he slipped on a patch of ice by the doorway, broke his leg, and was in the hospital for weeks.

This exchange system has broken down in recent years. The Stanton Street congregation is in some respects marginalized or even ostracized by the broader (though still rather narrow) Lower East Side Orthodox community, both because of bad memories left over from the struggle between Rabbi Singer’s family and the congregation early in this decade and because of certain issues in Jewish law (the appropriate realm of women’s participation; the possibility of creating an eruv, or boundary marker to permit carrying on the Sabbath, on the Lower East Side) that appear to some to put Stanton Street outside the Orthodox camp. Things came to such a pass that, about a year ago, the rabbi and the president—or perhaps just the president on his own—of Chasam Sopher declared that they would no longer agree to send men to Stanton Street when we needed someone to make the minyan; we had apparently been put under some kind of communal ban.

Well, yesterday in the early evening, at the time for saying the afternoon service of shabbes, Sol Decker decided that he would go to Chasam Sopher to see if he could borrow a tenth. I guess he just decided that the ban wasn’t necessarily going to last forever. He returned promptly with two young Lubavitch Hasidim that I hadn’t met before. One of them, Israeli, but with a reasonably good command of English, told me later that he and his friend had been walking around and went into Chasam Sopher. (He implied that they found the shul more or less by chance, though my assumption has been that when young Lubavitchers walk miles from their base in Crown Heights on shabbes afternoon, they know exactly where they’re headed.) A few minutes later, when Sol walked in, he was told by the Chasam Sopher regulars, “Let the Lubavitchers come with you.” Perhaps the ban is over. In any case, I suppose it was easier to ignore it this time because these two Lubavitchers, “surplus” Jews, were available for dispatch anyway—no regular member of the Chasam Sopher minyan had to be sent. And perhaps next time they need someone, they won’t be too proud to call us, and perhaps next time we need someone, they won’t refuse to send one of their regulars.

Reprinted from Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side by Jonathan Boyarin. Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Boyarin. Used with permission of the publisher, Fordham University Press.

Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, Lower East Side, Manhattan. No knishery gets more flak than Yonah Schimmel, though this Lower East Side stalwart practically invented the modern knish. So what if it’s not as good as it used to be, and so what if its knishes are too big? If you haven’t already, sit down in the century-old shop and talk to the French tourists and the Hasidic couple next to you. Enjoy your knish with pickles. Try the cherry-and-cheese knish for dessert.

Gottlieb’s Deli, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For a Hasidic deli in the heart of Satmar Williamsburg, Gottlieb’s knish is rather unorthodox. The dough is like a thick sesame seed challah bread crust, and the potatoes are incredibly moist.

Other notable knish-serving local delis: 2nd Avenue Deli, Pastrami Queen, Liebman’s, the Carnegie Deli.

Outside of New York: Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, San Francisco, Calif. Wise offers knishes on Tuesdays as it figures out how popular they are and whether they should be on the menu all the time. Head then to the Ferry Building in the Embarcadero to see what they’ve got. Offerings so far have included potato and onion, potato and corned beef, and potato with mushroom and kale.

Kenny and Zuke’s Delicatessen, Portland, Ore. Kenny and Zuke’s knishes have flaky pastry on the outside, peppery potato on the inside, and caramelized onions on top.

Jimmy & Drew’s 28th Street Delicatessen, Boulder, Colo. Jimmy and Drew’s offers a breakfast knish with scrambled eggs, corned beef hash, and cheddar cheese.

Some notable knish-serving delis outside of New York: Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, Berkeley, Calif.; Goldman’s Deli, Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Zingerman’s Deli, Ann Arbor, Mich.

William Dean Howells defined realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”—which is what the amateur photographer believes himself to be capturing when he takes a picture of personal distress. Inevitably though, he is attempting something more—and more slippery—than the truthful treatment of his material: He believes that his subject is symbolic of the grand scale of human suffering and that it is his responsibility to exalt it.

While snapping a picture can easily be construed as an objective reproduction of a pre-existing reality, photographers can’t help but edit the world. And the only thing more boring than amateur photography is obsolete propaganda, especially if it is praising the dignity of the working class. Individual hardship—but not death or all-out disaster—is difficult to care about too much after the fact; bygone squalor doesn’t seem worth our present-day tears. To age gracefully, documentary photographs must have artistic value in addition to historical value, and all too often one currency subsumes the other.

“The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951,” which opened at the Jewish Museum last Friday, captures better than any art exhibition I can remember the ways in which the propagandistic impulse both propels and stifles creativity. Mason Klein of the Jewish Museum and Catherine Evans of the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio have curated an exhibition that privileges the Photo League’s history more than its artistic legacy. It’s a little didactic: The photos are hung in mostly chronological order, the wall text is dry but information-rich, and the seven galleries are labeled with the expository concision of a high-school textbook (“Introduction and Precursors,” “The Great Depression,” etc.). It’s arguable that such pedantry is necessary: Though the Photo League launched tens of world-class careers, the organization itself is hardly remembered today.

Founded in 1936 by self-taught photographers Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman, the Photo League was an indirect descendent of the Workers’ International Relief, a Berlin-based adjunct of the Communist International established to alleviate famine in the Soviet Union. First and foremost, the League’s purpose was pedagogical: Its various Eastside headquarters gave students inexpensive access to a darkroom, along with a gallery to exhibit their work. Classes and lectures were held in on-site salons. When it opened, the Photo League was the only non-commercial photography school in America, and photography itself wasn’t yet quite considered a valid art form. (The Museum of Modern Art didn’t open a photography department until 1940.) Two coinciding developments enabled and inspired the League’s novice photographers: the relatively recent introduction of small, handheld 35mm cameras, and the new ubiquity of illustrated magazines like Look and Life. The League thrived for over a decade before being declared subversive in 1947 by Attorney General Tom C. Clark and placed on the U.S. Department of Justice blacklist. By 1951, it was completely dissolved.

The League’s members were mostly young, first-generation Jewish immigrants, and their goal was to record, through pictures, the daily activity of life in Manhattan. Aesthetically, the Photo League was to photography what the Ashcan School was to painting: Its members’ subjects were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. They took pictures of Lower East Side tenements instead of Fifth Avenue townhouses; men carrying bagels, not fine cigars.

The work on display in “The Radical Camera”—culled from the two museums’ permanent collections—is bafflingly varied in both its content and its quality, which makes sense only when you remember that the Photo League was a school, after all. The work appears admirably ambitious and earnest, if not hugely satisfying—you can see the members navigating the ethics of a new medium: Does formal composition mar truth? Are purely objective pictures even interesting to look at? Stoop scenes are bracketed by brass bands; portraits of architectural landmarks hang in galleries with portraits of rambunctious children—some seem scheming for our pity, others casual to the point of aesthetic negligence. The joyful and glamorous images are tokens, included, it would seem, only for the contrast they provide.

The League, with its roots in Communism and Depression-era radicalism (the photographers called themselves “workers”), produced photographs that served more as evidence for the virtue of their reformist politics than as actual artworks. There are exceptions of course: For every roomful of forgettable cityscapes, there are a few truly stunning compositions (Ruth Orkin’s “Boy Jumping Into Hudson River” is one; Arthur Leipzig’s “Ideal Laundry” is another), but if you were to take the body of work as some sort of sociological record, you’d get a pretty grim view of the city.

Of course a grim view of Manhattan in the 1930s, in the grip of the Great Depression, isn’t all that shocking or radical. The trouble comes when you realize the effect has been created cumulatively, by the simple multiplication of images, and not through the power of works of particular artistic merit. It’s difficult to walk through the show and not suspect the photographers of having selected for sorrow en masse.

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” Susan Sontag famously wrote in “On Photography.” Here it’s a coercive aggression whereby almost every person in every portrait is symptomatic of vague subjugation—there’s little humor, and almost no sexuality. “There was a sense at the time—this almost magical belief—that if you took a picture of oppression, you were somehow doing something to alleviate it or fight against it,” Luc Sante told me over the phone last week. “It leads to a lot of really dull work.”

Isn’t it possible, if not probable, that the youth in Rae Russel’s “Young Boy and Fire Hydrant” is looking down not because he is sad, but because he is anything else (tired, curious about the stain on his shirt, maybe even about to blink)? Lisette Model’s “Lower East Side” depicts a grizzled man in tweed so cartoonishly hobo-like that he could have been shot by Diane Arbus. Perhaps he’s just back from a grueling day on the job, where he is subject to dangerous working conditions and a draconian boss. Perhaps. Or maybe he’s squinting into the distance in search of his wife? Maybe he’s annoyed at a friend who is running late. The point is: We don’t know anything about these people, and the mere fact of the League’s political prescription taints the photographs’ powers of description.

In 1938, a group of League photographers, led by a 21-year-old Lower East Sider named Walter Rosenblum, spent six months photographing a stretch of Pitt Street: men at a flea market, boys playing on sidewalks, a group of women cooing at a baby. The most striking image is by Rosenbaum. It’s of a young girl, dressed in white, swinging at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. She’s suspended at the very crest of her arch, and the perspective is such that she’s the same size as the visible part of the tower. The Pitt Street series is one of the few Photo League projects that doesn’t reek of righteousness or reduce its subjects to the lone fact of their hardship. It’s no coincidence that the neighborhood was Rosenbaum’s own.

I walked down to that same stretch of Pitt Street one day last week. I was working in a coffee shop nearby and wanted a break; I thought I’d see if the blocks looked familiar. They did. The neighborhood is more Dominican than Jewish now, but it’s still a photo student’s dream. The Williamsburg Bridge casts dramatic shadows, and the street is almost as wide as a boulevard. Look south, and you can see the squat silhouettes of two twin Rosenwach water tanks. The blocks are littered (sometimes literally) with specious visual metaphors: empty bottles of Bacardi Arctic Grape in the gutters and a restaurant that serves something called “Big Party,” which only costs $1. As I was walking around last Thursday at 11 a.m., the only two people I saw were a mother and her small daughter, who wore a polyester carnation in her hair. The scene looked to me desolate in that way we’ve all been trained to see as tragic. But I was being a bad realist, not only not truthful but ignoring reality. Why should there have been anyone out and about at 11 a.m.? People have jobs.

The Photo League is more than just a bygone New York institution or casualty of McCarthyism. The New York School was born of it, and many artists affiliated with the League, such as Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Arthur Leipzig, went on to have celebrated careers. But as the League photographers tried—and often failed—to negotiate the boundary between their political obligations and their creative ambitions they produced a lot of facile poeticism. I suspect the real legacy of the Photo League, though, was to anticipate the historical course of our reaction to documentary photography—the sympathy that sours so quickly into antipathy.

“In other words,” she writes, “to be a good American, you had to eat like one.”

One big problem? The pickle, beloved snack of the Jewish immigrant community. “Pungent beyond all civilized standards, toxic to both the stomach and the psyche, the pickle was seen as morally suspect,” Ziegelman writes. More problematic than its existence, however, was its rampant popularity among all sectors of the Jewish population:

“Consumption of pickles was highest in Jewish neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, where Eastern European peddlers sold them from pushcarts. Their merchandise included whole pickled cabbages, string beans, green tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, apples, watermelon and, of course, cucumbers. All of these goods were produced within the tenements, just a few hundred yards from the carts that dispensed them.”

Luckily for modern-day pickle fans, not even bilingual cookbooks or cooking classes held in settlement houses could eradicate the power of the pickle.

Immigrant Identities, Preserved in Vinegar? [NYT]
Related: Motor City Cured
On The Bookshelf

• Sen. John McCain came out in favor of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s release. [JTA]

• Aaron David Miller on why 2011 “is going to be a great year for Middle East peace initiatives, but likely a very bad one for Middle East peace”—“a lot of process but not much peace.” [IHT]

• H&M sells tallit now. Punch-line not necessary. [Jezebel]

• The new Israeli left. [The Nation]

• Porn (artistic porn!) collides with neighboring Hasidim on the Lower East Side. [Art Info]

• Some Orthodox Israeli rabbis are marrying gay men to lesbians. [Haaretz]

News of Dan Snyder’s evil has reached Taiwan. This can only be for the good.

While I was living in New Haven a few years ago, I made plans to meet a high-reward, high-maintenance friend halfway at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Bridgeport. It soon became clear that this plan had all the charm of being inconvenient for both of us, and in a hateful place. My friend—I’ll call her Daphne, because that is her name—enlisted her brother to drive to the venue, and it was a great concert: This was during a time that Bruce was closing shows with an apocalyptic, prophetic version of Alan Vega’s “Dream Baby Dream.” After the show, Daphne and I went backstage, and for reasons that escape me, her brother went to move the car, which was ill-advised as there was no way he could get past security without me. Anyway, to bring this on home, we’d been chatting with the Boss for at least 45 minutes, he was telling us about how Philip Roth is his favorite author, and somehow Daphne’s lingering sibling comes up. So we reveal to a very astonished Bruce Springsteen that Daphne’s brother is somewhere in the parking lot waiting for us.

So here’s the takeaway: Bruce is gob-smacked that we have left this poor, lost brother somewhere out there, even though, truth be known, Daphne has issues with anyone she’s related to (and anyone she’s not related to, including people she’s never met), and her brother’s lonely parking lot exile is completely fine with her, I think, and possibly even a desirable thing. In any case, Bruce gets up off the couch, leaves the building, and goes and finds Daphne’s brother, and brings him back to his dressing room.

Now let me make this clear—I’ll even put it in Passover terms: It was Bruce himself and not an angel of Bruce who went looking for the errant brother, even though factotums and minions were here there and everywhere, and could easily have been dispatched.

I really don’t know why Bruce was so kind in this way to Daphne’s brother, who he did not even know, but this story is consistent with others that you’ll hear from almost anybody. People who live in Monmouth County who have been picked up in the Springsteenmobile while hitchhiking, and that sort of thing, is the most common version of this story. I’ve been bringing friends backstage with me to meet Bruce for maybe 15 years now, and he remembers names, he remembers their brothers-in-laws’ names when he signs autographs. He’s a hopeless mensch.

Bruce Springsteen really got any creative person’s dream career, and his good-heartedness and good-spiritedness are part of it: both because it made the people behind the scenes want to do their jobs that much better, but it also means that he connects with an audience in a way that holds them close. Is he really cool? No, of course not. I’m a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world’s hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan’s work for sure—he’s the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public. He’s disconnected and distant in a way that Bruce is present and close, which is, in itself, a talent.

All of this leads me to the strange case of Lou Reed, who makes Bob Dylan look like Will Rogers. Bruce Springsteen, with his good manners and total decency is kind of the nice Jewish boy that Lou Reed—and, of course, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota—ought to be. Which seems counterintuitive—after all, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan are Jewish, and according to Philip Roth (Bruce’s favorite author after all), the hardest thing for a Jewish boy to be is bad, and yet they are both legendarily unpleasant people.

But you know what? The anecdotal evidence—at least among our artistic icons—suggests that Roth got it wrong. I mean, Norman Mailer was not just a wife-stabbing wretch himself—he actually helped get another wretch out of jail to murder again. Woody Allen’s heart wants what it wants and … oh boy. Roman Polanski—dear me. Leonard Cohen—does he seem nice to you? Never mind Roth himself, who both bears witness against himself and has Claire Bloom and others to corroborate his self-accusations.

So all I can say is: What the fuck was Philip Roth talking about? Yes, yes: I know—the CPA who lives in a split-level in Demarest, New Jersey. All the same, as public figures expressing the notion of Jewish identity—or denying their Jewishness altogether, which is of course the most Jewish thing you can do—the creative Jewish man isn’t very nice at all. In fact, he has been an absolute dick.

To get back to the contrary and instructive example of Bruce Springsteen, playing the role of the Christian character known as the Good Samaritan—what could be less Jewish? All that good-natured generosity is way too open-hearted and even obsequious, it lacks the judgmental prickliness that makes Jews so picky and stingy with their love of human beings, despite a huge and unbridled passion for humanity. In any case, this is the best I can do by way of giving an ethnocentric explanation for the fact that I am trying to write a heartfelt tribute to Lou Reed on the occasion of his 69th birthday, and I can hardly find a soul alive who doesn’t have an unpleasant story to tell about some chance encounter that they had with Lou Reed.

If, like me, you happen to be a native New Yorker, there is a good chance that you take Lou Reed’s presence for granted, like the woman you see almost every day walking her Pomeranian when you are out strolling with your dog: He really lives here, he takes the number 1 train, he sees documentaries about R. Crumb at the Film Forum. The only other celebrity who comes close to being as present within the municipal bloodstream is Ethan Hawke, who proves Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said we are what we pretend to be, because Lou Reed has cultivated ordinary-creative-person-ness with such botanical intensity that it’s become who he is. And so it is, with Lou Reed living among us for many years with his wife Sylvia on West End Avenue opposite the Calhoun School, and now with Laurie Anderson on West 10th Street. An unusual number of people have had chance encounters with him, and apparently it’s been universally unfun.

Lou Reed stories are the opposite of Bruce Springsteen stories. No one’s brother-in-law is ever rescued from a parking lot and treated like a king. The pedestrian admirer or the average autograph desirer is greeted with derisive hostility, with the precise prototype of the punk-rock sneer that has made Lou Reed the precise prototype of the sneering punk-rocker. I remember buying a vinyl version of Live In Italy when I was in high school and getting into the 79th Street subway station on Broadway to be greeted by none other than Mr. Reed, who looked like none other than Robert Plant. Of course I was completely excited by the coincidence. It’s not like I’d bought something common like the first Velvets’ LP or something obvious like Transformer—and I was certain he’d be moved by my fanaticism. I started jumping up and down—I really was jumping up and down—and telling him to look and see what I had, which was no doubt annoying, but still, this was long before the reissue of all the Velvets’ stuff, no one cared about Lou Reed unless he/she was also claiming to be named Holly from Miami, and I was a teenager. Instead of responding, Lou Reed walked away and started kicking the tiled wall at the platform where people waited for the IRT, to show his displeasure with my enthusiasm for his work.

After that I learned my lesson. Many years later, I had an experience that might have been phenomenal if I hadn’t thought better of it at the time. At either the behest or the request of an editor I cared about, some time not long after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I was drinking at the legendary Lion’s Head in Sheridan Square with a young painter who had never been out of East Berlin. I don’t mean that he’d never been out of East Germany—for whatever reason, he had never even ventured beyond city limits, which he explained was strangely common in iron-curtain Europe. Somehow I asked who he’d most like to meet in New York City, and he said that the album Berlin had sustained his cohort for so many years, because it was the only way any of them know that anyone on the other side of the wall knew or cared that they were alive. Of course, the funny part about that album is that when it was made in 1973, Lou Reed had himself never been to Berlin, it was about an idea. And I remember sitting and thinking how great it was that this German guy’s misunderstanding—his idea—about someone else’s understanding—his idea—had such great force. And somewhere between thought and expression—go ahead, assume that I’m lying, if I were you I would—into the bar walks Lou Reed himself. If this were a movie, only no screenwriter trying to maintain anything like verisimilitude would put such an absurdity into a script.

Here’s the takeaway: Despite what has to be called a miracle—I will not call it a coincidence, because this was all too much—I did not get up from my barstool to walk over to Lou’s frosty gulag archipelago on the other side of the Lion’s Head. Even the potential for great beauty—it would have been pretty great, and maybe life-alteringly amazing—wasn’t worth what my cost-benefit analysis told me was a more likely outcome of pedestrian unpleasantness, accompanied by that sneer.

This is why Lou Reed’s career has been both extraordinary and uneven. This is why a lot of those RCA albums from the ’70s are not merely produced distastefully—the quality is also actually shoddy: because that is what the career of an asshole looks like. Sometimes incredibly good work will get done because talented admirers will show up willing to do anything, and so you get an album like New York (made in the ’80s for Sire, but same thing), which was good work all around. But too often one is confronted by something like The Blue Mask, a beautiful contemplation of sobriety and love and commitment that has mediocre production values. Lou Reed’s post-Velvet career makes it obvious that it really was a band, because it’s only in those live recordings at the Academy in the early ’70s, like on Rock n Roll Animal, when Mick Ronson is on guitar, that solo Lou comes close to sounding as interesting as VU Lou. For all his talent, Lou Reed’s recorded output would be a whole lot better if a good collaborator—or two or three—were not so hard for him to find.

Lou Reed, of course, ought to be able to behave like a human being. But he’s not in the service industry—he’s not the waiter telling you about the branzino special, he’s not your florist or your cobbler or your chauffeur. It really doesn’t much matter if he’s polite or rude. It ought to matter to those in his intimate circle, and in the media saturated world, we ought to expect a good persona, but why do we need a good person? Because that’s what we need. The Kardashians are a barely-human shrine to the testament that all that matters is Lou Reed’s personality, because ability to create great works of art is no longer as valuable as a family full of K-named girls.

And that’s what I want to say on behalf of Lou Reed—but you can throw Dylan, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, and a few others in there too: He came of age, went through a midlife crisis, and is now heading toward his shuffleboard Shangri-la days, in a time when a musician—and really, I should say, a person—truly could have a career. I mean, a substantial, lengthy career, one that allowed a relationship with an audience to develop with the same rhythms of a friendship, one that allowed for lousy work en route to genius, one that actually did allow the personality of the artist to become invested with meaning and significance that could be either delightful or deranged, one that made the music industry seem like a worthy enterprise and not just a bunch of schmucks who got lucky. And career in this context is a good word, it’s not a limiting notion like choosing to become a lawyer because what else is there; it’s a choice that is a real choice.

You might note that Lou Reed, and all the other people I pointed to almost parenthetically, have not hyphenated their lives. They aren’t designing a line of durable sportswear made of organic fibers for Kmart or running a small production company in a studio bungalow. They do the thing they do well, because it’s satisfying, and it’s a full life. And I’d say that people my age are the last group of Americans to know a life of creativity that can sustain a person financially, but also intellectually and emotionally. After us, it’s as if the world lost its ability to focus and stick to the plot. We will never know the life story of Vampire Weekend, because the curvaceous course of a life stretched out before us like a slinky unwinding is not a narrative that anyone knows how to sustain anymore.

What I think I’m saying is that what’s held my interest in Lou Reed through many anecdotes about his miserable personality and many albums that had maybe one good song on them, if that—“Coney Island Baby,” “The Bells,” I could go on and on—is the reality show that is Lou Reed was being expressed through all those albums, high and low, good and bad. He didn’t always get it right, but he tried to keep us informed, he tried to let us know what was up and what was what. He rightly titled an album Growing Up In Public, because that is what he got to do. Lou Reed gave us the first Velvet Underground album in 1965, when he was 23, which means we’ve had 46 years of living a tattered scattered life, one that was underneath the bottle, that involved waves of fear, that eventually brought him to the last shot, and that has gotten him to the point where he is living with and loving a woman who is his equal, who is a substantial person—an outcome about as unlikely as his recovery from heroin addiction (I’ve been told that about one in 35 manage it).

We got to hear this story. We got to hear a life happen in all its imperfection and misery and elation and contentedness, and realize again that the great thing about life is not that the future is predictable—it’s that you have absolutely no idea what will happen. Happy people consider that good news. And if you want to see that human story unfold, if you want to understand that only the unexpected life is worth a damn, spend some time with 46 years of Lou Reed’s work, music that leaped and then looked. Safety is for the godless and the faithless.

Cohen, who has curly brown hair and a round, brightly expressive face set off by a barely perceptible nose ring, turned to the band to count off “Limehouse Blues,” a showpiece of Goodman’s, authoritatively and at a swift tempo. After playing the melody, she began to improvise, building short motifs into longer, harmonically challenging disquisitions. Over the music she draped long tones that seemed to be kept afloat by drummer Lewis Nash’s rhythmic jabs. She bent and shook notes, projecting sound with a physicality that became a dance. The clarinet seems to have a plaintive, pre-modern quality built in, and her sound evoked at once the blues, antique worlds, and indistinct old countries. As the crowd applauded, Wein, 85, beamed at his protégée from the corner banquette where he was sitting, his hands resting on an upright walking cane. Cohen paused to look at her watch. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, smiling, before introducing the band.

Wein—a pre-eminent figure in the jazz world for five decades and founder of the Newport and New Orleans jazz festivals—met Cohen three years ago at a concert sponsored by the Sidney Bechet Society, named for the legendary New Orleans soprano saxophonist. “I heard her play ‘Shreveport Stomp’ and was blown away,” he said. “Her approach to jazz is total. She’s got big ears and respects the tradition but isn’t locked into it. She just played a festival in Puerto Rico and got a standing ovation from 3,000 people. She wasn’t playing salsa but ‘Memories of You.’ ”

For Cohen the last few years have been a blur, recording, performing, founding Anzic, her record company, and earning accolades. She’s been named Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association of America four years running. In 2007 and 2008 she placed at the top of Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll in the “Rising Star: Clarinet” category. This year she was named its top rising jazz star overall.

Watching Cohen play, it’s clear why her popularity is growing. Whether on tenor or soprano saxophone or clarinet, Cohen plays with an emotional directness that connects with the listener, which is rare in the New York jazz scene, where musicians are often more apt to display skill than convey feeling. Cohen entertains without pandering. If Cohen isn’t playing, she’s roving around the bandstand, rooting on the soloist, singing back a phrase she liked, doing a dance. She treats the bandstand like her living room, putting her audience at ease. At one gig, she played like a snake charmer, sitting cross-legged on the floor with audience members who couldn’t get a seat.

Listen to “St. James Infirmary,” from Clarinetwork, Live at the Village Vanguard:

***

While Cohen’s musical voice is highly individual, she is also one of a growing number of Israelis on the New York jazz scene today. If you look at the jazz listings, you’re apt to see the following names appearing regularly: Cohen, Avital, Degibri, Silberstein, Aran, Ravitz, Mor, Klein, Tal. And younger Israeli musicians keep coming. For the last few years, Israelis have made up about 9 percent of the student body at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. “Ironically, it’s the Israeli musicians that come who are keeping the flame of the bebop tradition alive,” said Martin Mueller, executive director of the New School’s jazz program. “When they come here, they’re able to take it in so many directions. And there’s an intensity to the music that comes from a culture surrounded on all sides by either water or enemies.”

The level of talent from Israel at times seems uncanny: A YouTube video of Gadi Lehavi, a 13-year-old piano prodigy, playing a duet with saxophonist David Liebman at Smoke, the uptown club, is a sensation in music circles less for the teenager’s prodigious technique than for his probing maturity at the keyboard. Recently at Fat Cat, the Greenwich Village jazz club and pool hall, the veteran black American drummer Billy Kaye led his group through a set of taut hard-bop that sounded as authentic and creative as any Blue Note record from the early sixties. It turned out that three members of the quintet, pianist Jack Glottman, bassist Ben Meigners, and saxophonist Asaf Yuria, are Israelis under 35. Between games of ping-pong, Amit Friedman, a young saxophonist who had come to hear his friends before returning to Israel the next day, commented on the level of jazz talent among his peers: “Maybe it’s a little bit corny, but Jews have had to improvise for thousands of years in order to survive. It’s natural to us.”

***

Anat Cohen, the middle of three children, was born in 1975 and grew up in Tel Aviv. Yuval, her older brother, is a saxophonist, and Avishai, the youngest son, is one of New York’s most prominent trumpeters; together they form the group 3 Cohens. Their grandparents fled Poland in the early 1930s, and their great-uncle helped found Kibbutz Ein Harod. “It’s very difficult in today’s society to live in this idea,” said Anat Cohen, referring to the collectivist ideal of the kibbutz movement, over lunch in Union Square. Earlier, waiting for a table, she’d chatted with a waiter in Portunhol, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “There’s always going to be someone who wants more, who wants something else,” she said. “I could never really figure out why people would live in a kibbutz. I’m such a city girl.”

Her now-retired parents, David and Bilha—he was in real estate, and she was a teacher—supported their children’s growing interest in music. “My father knew classical music very well,” said Cohen. “Driving in the car, listening to the radio he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.”

At age 10, Cohen started on the keyboard and at age 12 switched to the clarinet and began playing in a Dixieland band at the Jaffa Conservatory of Music, where she could begin to feel the rhythm of jazz while still following a written part. At age 16, she began playing tenor saxophone in the big band at the prestigious Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv.

Insipired by Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane records, Cohen began to absorb the jazz tradition, but she found few opportunities beyond school performances to develop her musical voice, and like many young musicians she was daunted by the prospect of improvisation. That changed when she met a saxophonist from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn who had immigrated to Israel and shaken up the music scene, Arnold Lawrence Finkelstein, or Arnie Lawrence.

“Arnie is very much responsible for me being here,” said Cohen, remembering him fondly. “I met him when I was a soldier. Something about Arnie that was always so pure. He would talk to you without any judgment or preconception. I’m a human being, you’re a human being, let’s communicate. That was his vibe. I was not used to that. Israel, as wonderful as it is, it’s a very intense place. The level of life there is just very stressful. People are always alert. They have a famous phrase in Hebrew: ‘respect and suspect.’ You always have to kind of check what’s going on around you. People are not always just, ‘We’re all here, we’re all together,’ because you never know.”

Lawrence, who was born in 1938, was a passionate figure. Tutored at a young age by the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, Lawrence at age 17 was leading bands at Birdland, once sharing a double-bill with John Coltrane. In 1986 he founded the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. Over the years, he would visit Israel with his wife, Liza, a native, making contacts and meeting musicians and performing. By the mid-1990s, Lawrence found himself with fewer gigs and increasingly at odds with the New School’s administration over his nontraditional teaching approach. Liza’s mother’s health was also declining. So, in 1997, Lawrence and Liza moved to Israel permanently to begin anew.

In Jerusalem, Lawrence founded the International Center for Creative Music, which welcomed Jews and Arabs alike. There he would hold his weekly “Harif” sessions, named for a spice. Whoever showed up would be the band that night.

“Every Wednesday we would go,” said Cohen. “I would get in the car, my two brothers and I, and drive to Jerusalem. It was the most special thing for us to do. Maybe there would be just bass or just drums, sometimes just seven saxophones. Arnie would call tunes, play open grooves, whatever, pointing at people to solo. I was the most insecure one at the time, because I was the latest of us coming into jazz. He gave me confidence. He would talk to me after sets about beauty, about people, wonderful vague conversations, not about this note or scale. He was the first one who told me there were no wrong notes.”

***

Walking south on Loisada Street in New York’s Lower East Side, toward The Stone, the experimental jazz club, one steamy evening in late May, you had to pass through music to get to music. The neighborhood, which long ago teemed with the street life of Eastern European Jews, was alive with the sounds of the Hispanic immigrants who followed. Two congueros sat drumming near East 4th Street as neighborhood folks, heads bobbing, some singing, gathered slowly to them like flower petals blooming in reverse. Sidewalk barbecues smoked.

Nearby, another crowd gathered on the corner of Loisada and East 2nd, outside The Stone. Approaching, you could hear English speckled with Hebrew being spoken by yet newer immigrants, young, hiply dressed, with black instrument cases slung over their shoulders. Inside, the small club—no liquor, no food, just music—was packed beyond capacity for New York’s first Festival of Israeli Jazz.

Listen to “Washington Square Park,” from Notes From the Village:

“If you have to lose liquid, let it be sweat and not tears,” said the trombonist Rafi Malkiel, from the stage. It was both a reference to the heat in the room and an epigraph to his composition “River Blue,” binds Jewish and Arabic melodic traditions together within the traditional 12-bar blues form. Malkiel’s newest music, heavily informed also by the Latin groups in which he’s played, is inspired by the concept of water, of life’s liquid nature, its currents of influence.

The ensemble, which includes Cohen and her brother Avishai, began to weave together in rigorously arranged polyphony, grooving muscularly through the Middle Eastern-tinged minor blues. When it finished, Malkiel, an Israeli of Moroccan heritage, thanked the festival’s organizer and curator, Roberto Juan Rodriguez, who stood in the back.

“It takes a Cuban to put on a festival of Israeli music in New York,” said Malkiel, smiling. “I promise you, next year we’ll have a Cuban music festival in Israel.”

Rodriguez, 51, whose close-cropped silvering hair belies his youthful enthusiasm, is a drummer, composer, and the founder of the Sexteto Rodriguez Cuban Jewish All Stars, which appeared this summer at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow (or, as he calls it, the “big powwow”). His group, accented by clarinet and accordion, combines Cuban son and klezmer, evoking an imaginary world where the Buena Vista Social Club and a chapter of the Jewish Labor Bund might exist on the same street.

“I grew up in the Jewish community. I did weddings, bar mitzvahs, and Yiddish theater down in Miami Beach,” said Rodriguez by phone from the Catskill home he shares with his wife, drummer Susie Ibarra, and their young son. “It’s interesting to see the similarities between their culture and mine. I’d go over to my friends’ houses, and their furniture would be covered in plastic. I’d go over to my aunt’s house and their furniture would be covered in plastic. ‘You can’t sit on it! You can’t touch it!’ They’re warm cultures, passionate cultures, and they both have a certain kind of schmaltz. It was easy to just blend in. I never considered Jews to be white. They’d say ‘I’m white.’ ‘No, you’re Jewish.’ ”

Rodriguez’s artistic enterprise, to showcase the various ways Israeli musicians are combining these influences with jazz, was not, however, immune to the political pressures that follow Israelis wherever they go, regardless of their politics. Shortly before the festival began, Rodriguez received an email from Andrew Fellus, a New York music producer and organizer of Artists Against Apartheid, a group that works in concert with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and its counterpart in the United States. Some performers have heeded the groups’ call to boycott Israel. Elvis Costello characterized his cancellation of a recent show as “matter of instinct and conscience.” Carlos Santana and the Pixies have joined in the boycott. Fellus’ email to Rodriguez read: “I noticed that you are curating the upcoming Israeli jazz festival, and curious if you realize this event is being promoted by the Israeli Consulate? You might not want to have your event associated with a government that is responsible for the ongoing ethnic cleansing, colonization and dispossession of Palestinian land.”

Rodriguez replied to Fellus by email: “I am a friend of all musicians and artists from all over the world regardless of what country they are from. I do not appreciate your actions against me curating a program of Israeli musicians who live in New York City, or anyone else for that matter.” He ended the letter: “Where politics and boycotts fall short, music and art goes a very long way. I am inviting you to come and listen to the music. I hope you can make it.”

The first Festival of Israeli Jazz ended without controversy. But the day after its last show, Israeli forces raided a flotilla of ships attempting to break its blockade of the Gaza strip. A battle ensued aboard the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, that resulted in nine deaths, sparking international outrage and further energizing the movement to boycott Israel. Next year’s festival, which Rodriguez hopes to expand into the Abrons Art Center, may not proceed so smoothly. Fellus’ group was planning to protest an upcoming concert by the Jerusalem String Quartet. The quartet’s April concert in London’s Wigmore Hall was disrupted by hecklers, which forced the BBC to stop its live broadcast of the recital.

***

“I have an ambivalent feeling about the Israeli army,” said Cohen. “Growing up in Tel Aviv, being involved in the arts, the last thing artists want to do is fight.” Young Israeli musicians can audition for a limited number of spots in Israel Defense Force bands; the result can determine whether you end up playing Ellington or invading Gaza. Cohen was accepted into the Air Force Band prior to her induction.

“Basic training was not fun, but it was an interesting experience,” said Cohen. “You’re finishing high school, summer vacation, everything’s beautiful, you’re an optimist, you’re a kid. You finish your exams and very quickly, in July, my mom takes me in the morning. I get on the bus, and they close the doors. Someone’s shouting, ‘Don’t look out the windows!’ Your parents are still standing outside the bus. Immediately”—Cohen snapped her fingers—“you lose your identity.”

Cohen hadn’t known that the First Festival of Israeli Jazz had become politicized, but it came as no surprise.

“I avoid as much as I can any political conversation mainly out of fear,” said Cohen. “It depends on the environment. I went to Dartmouth College to play and went to Chabad House. I had no problem engaging in talking about politics. But I’m afraid of hostile reactions. With cab drivers I always say I’m from Brazil. I don’t say I’m from Israel. It’s happened more than once that someone is blaming me for the government’s policy. And I say, ‘Listen, I live here. I’m a musician. I don’t call the shots.’ ”

As a kid, Cohen traveled abroad as part of youth orchestra. Its members were told not to wear yarmulkas or clothing with Hebrew slogans. “Just hats,” said Cohen. “Try to mingle. It’s a good rule in general. Why be a target if you don’t have to? I remember taking a cab at 3 in the morning, with a Muslim driver. He was explaining that he was not allowed to listen to music because it distracts attention from God. I revealed I was from Israel and as we were just near my street, suddenly he locked the doors. And I freaked out. ‘Please don’t lock the doors.’ I immediately imagined the worst. Maybe he wanted to intimidate me. That was the last time I told a cabdriver that I’m from Israel.”

***

Listen to “Hofim,” from Poetica:

Cohen returned to Israel last year during the incursion into the Gaza Strip. “Conflict is so rooted in the culture,” she said, pondering whether she would ever return to Israel to live. “Everything is a consequence of something that happened before, and not seeing the end of it, it’s so difficult. You cannot live there and not be involved in what’s going on. It got under my skin so deep I couldn’t shake it off. For the first time I told myself, maybe not.”

Now that Israel may face the existential threat of a nuclear Iran, many have suggested that its best and brightest will increasingly choose to live elsewhere. This summer, the Israeli Cabinet implemented a plan to stem “brain drain” among the country’s scientists. Academics are also choosing increasingly work outside of the country.

Cohen suggested that it’s nothing new. “They don’t have to wait for a nuclear weapon from Iran for people to say this is an insane place,” she said. “I keep meeting people who have been here for 30 years. They’re 100 percent Israelis, in their behavior, they way they talk. They visit Israel, they’re connected, and have families there. Israel is a wonderful place to visit. But think about raising kids there. Suicide bombers? Having to send your kid to the army?”

Cohen also noted that there are far fewer jazz stages to play in Israel.

“I’m having a great time and love being on stage, but the amount of stages in a small country is limited,” said Cohen, betraying what seemed like a faint twinge of regret. “Going back to live in Israel is a serious decision.”

“If people just understood that jazz is about life, it’s about taking people from different backgrounds, put them in one room and say, ‘OK, start talk, and communicate, make sense, explain where you come from, respect and listen, react and suggest and don’t take over, be polite,’ ” she said. “How many times have you heard someone playing jazz but not really communicating? I don’t get it, just monologuing. It’s about dialogues and conversations.”

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

But Yuter’s Internet presence is more than just an outlet for a self-proclaimed “geek” with a background in computer science. It is an important part of his strategy as a religious leader. Complementing liturgical and pastoral activity with a tech-savvy approach, Yuter seeks to engage online those whom he might not reach in his pews. After all, he explained, a rabbi’s task is to determine how to apply ancient traditions to the present. “It seems hypocritical to say you can engage in the modern world if I’m unwilling to do so myself,” he told me.

As proof of his belief that being religious means interacting with your world and your surroundings, Rabbi Yuter operates a lively Twitter feed and has regularly updated his blog for almost a decade. “Embracing Twitter is not in any way at odds with the religious side,” he maintained of his tweets, which are also synced to appear as status updates on his Facebook page (he’s been on that other social networking site since 2005, back when only college and graduate students were allowed to join and my grandpa wasn’t on it).

“If a rabbi knows Twitter, and knows it well, it’s reassuring for the people who engage with them,” he insisted. Although very few of his congregants are Twitter users, Yuter has gained quite a virtual flock: 1,399 Twitter followers, to be precise. With 9,262 tweets and counting (no, seriously—he’s probably tweeting right this second) since joining in 2009, Yuter has clearly embraced this new way to reach people.

A look through his feed reveals tweets about synagogue goings-on (“Shiur went for 1:20ish today, working on condensing the audio for uploading #whatrabbisdo”), general rabbi thoughts (“I really wish Rabbis would be better about footnoting their articles—sweeping statements w/o citations are not helpful”), and an awful lot of puns: “Don’t try riding livestock unless you know how to steer,” “Baritones and bassists tend to be low key,” and—my personal favorite—“The importance of Tu Bishvat in Judaism has gradually been reseeding.” Did I mention his blog is called Yutopia?

While Yuter credited Twitter with granting him access to a wider audience, he doesn’t think it’s the right approach for everyone. As a part-time rabbi at a small synagogue, Yuter has spare time to dedicate to his online efforts, including fielding various questions posed to him by random followers. And, of course, if someone discovers him on Twitter and then decides to check out Stanton Street Shul the next weekend, all the better (don’t forget to check in!) Still, he understood that his approach might not be for everyone. “I’m going to reach people that others can’t, and others will reach people that I can’t,” he said. “And I’m okay with that.”

“The [Lower] East Side is a volcano of superstitious ignorance,” read an article in the New York Tribune in the steamy June of 1906, referring to masses of immigrant Jews prone to the kind of mass hysteria that occurs every so often in the quarters of poor and ignorant.

In this case the volcano had erupted in a riot earlier in the month when 50,000 immigrant mothers descended on their local public schools demanding to see their children, having had heard that there was a Board of Health-sanctioned child slaughter taking place. Greeted by locked doors, the screaming throngs surrounded the schools and began smashing windows and pounding on doors. On Essex Street, some white-hot mothers clambered up ladders in an attempt to break into P.S. 137 through the second-floor windows.

During this rampage, gangs of immigrants cursed out principals, fought police, and attacked anyone in the street bearing the slightest resemblance to a doctor—and, according the Tribune, this meant anyone in a pair of spectacles. Some of them raided vegetable pushcarts for ammunition while others, like one young man who pulled a revolver on a member of the Board of Health, used more serious weapons.

Word had spread among the Jews of the Lower East Side that uptown doctors were coming into downtown public schools and were, as described in the daily Varhayt, “cutting the throats of Jewish children!” After a two-hour assault, the rag-tag army achieved victory: Their kids were released early and alive, proving that no such slaughter had taken place.

Thrilled at having gotten a miraculous half-day’s vacation, the kids didn’t even know what the ruckus was about. “I dunno sir, I t’ink the school exploded,” one boy told a reporter from the Evening Post.

As with many hysteria-inducing rumors, this one contained a kernel of truth. After cases of tonsillitis kept scores of Jewish students out of school a week earlier, one school principal recommended that these kids have tonsillectomies. The mothers complained that the trip uptown for such a procedure wasn’t possible for people who worked 12-hour days, six days a week. What’s more, the 50-cent doctor’s fee was too high. So, the principal kindly arranged for doctors from Mt. Sinai hospital to come to the school and perform quickie operations.

Just days before the riot, doctors performed 83 tonsillectomies at P.S. 100 on Cannon Street. Most of the kids were back in class the following day. According to the Tribune, none of the operations were performed without parental consent, and, they added, there were no complaints. A tonsillectomy was no big deal.

But the Yiddish daily Varhayt claimed otherwise, reporting that not only did many of the young patients fail to get their parents’ permission, they had been sent home with unintelligible permission slips. “First of all,” the Varhayt editorialized, “the poor and unhappy immigrant mothers who suffer the stifling heat and confinement of the tenements can’t even read. And secondly, they aren’t able to understand the technical English on the permission slips that was being read to them.” All they knew was that when the children returned home from school after their procedures, they did so drooling mouthfuls of blood, barely able to speak. Shocked, their parents asked what happened. “Doctors cut our throats,” the children replied.

Rumors of a wholesale slaughter leapt like wildfire throughout the tenements and shops. As the gossip wended its way through the neighborhood, the story grew from “doctors cut our throats” to “two children died” to a wild “83 children died.” Street-corner orators got into the act, screaming about the massacres in the schools, comparing them to the pogroms in Russian-ruled Poland.

Coming on the heels of a particularly brutal pogrom in Bialystok that had just been reported on—accompanied by gruesome photos—in the Yiddish press, the Lower East Side surgeries morphed, in the eyes of gullible parents, into evidence of an American pogrom. Accustomed to such violence in Europe, many of the recent arrivals believed such things could happen even in America.

But if the Tribune implied that the Jews were superstitious dupes prone to wild overreaction, the Yiddish Varhayt shot back that the fault lay with the Board of Health and the school’s principal for stupidly sending home permission slips not in Yiddish. The Varhayt also launched into a tirade about how Irish principals have no respect for Jewish immigrant parents and essentially do what they want with the children.

All the Yiddish papers decried the overwrought reaction of the mothers. But in an attempt to fully blame the Lower East Side’s Jews for the riot, both the Tribune and the New York Times alleged that there was a gaggle of local Jewish doctors who had spread the rumor because they were furious that uptown doctors were performing tonsillectomies on local kids for free, when they could be getting 50 cents a pop. The Yiddish press opted not to remark on that theory.

The Tribune also took the opportunity to bemoan the episode as one of a series of events that plagued the overcrowded and frequently obnoxious Jewish quarter. Four years earlier, they noted, Jewish women rioted against local butchers, and three years earlier, they rioted against doctors who were treating their children for trachoma. These same immigrant women joined together most consistently for “Landlord Riots,” which exploded every time rents were raised, and for bank riots, which occurred every time a Jewish bank went belly-up, leaving its poor immigrant depositors with bupkes.

The great tonsil riot fizzled quickly, as it occurred at the end of the school year and was forgotten almost immediately as students graduated and parents kvelled. The police, however, worried a little longer and, according to the New York Times, posted squads of cops outside heavily Jewish schools, on Essex and Grand Streets, where, on the last day of classes, graduates performed scenes from The Merchant of Venice to their Yiddish-speaking parents, none of whom rioted or even panicked. Well, maybe they panicked just a little.

• As House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) readies a book tour, a colleague predicts, “He’ll be the first Jewish Republican something.” Please don’t hesitate to suggest various somethings in the comments. [Politico]

• Hamas scion turned Christian turned Israeli spy turned California resident Mosab Hassan Yousef was granted asylum in America. [JPost]

• This American Life calls it quits after running out of vestiges of upper-middle-class American life to chronicle. Note the source, please. [The Onion]

• Eli Valley’s Stuart the Turtle flies to Israel. Chaos and anti-Semitism ensue. [Forward]

• Lower East Side Torah store Zelig Blumenthal appears to have closed. See some amazing pictures of this relic of another world. [The Lo-Down]

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) makes an awesome play at Nationals Park during the annual Congressional Baseball Game, landing him on SportsCenter.

I didn’t know the whereabouts of the fugitive they were seeking, although I did know who he was. I’d seen him on the floor below me in the red brick tenement building on Bleecker near Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The floor that served as the headquarters of what was invariably called “the extremist Jewish Defense Organization.” Extremist? I’d heard vague rumors of a connection with the attempted murder of an aging Nazi war criminal on Long Island, although I never knew if there was a real connection and still don’t know if that was why one of them became a fugitive.

But they were, in one way or another, extreme. Some might say extreme moralists, in a slightly Dostoevskian Underground Man way. Others might call them single-minded Jewish fanatics because the cause that gave them birth was the bitter struggle of millions of Soviet Jews to survive and escape vicious repression by openly anti-Semitic Russian authorities. A struggle given more emotional intensity by the fact that Americans, and particularly the human-rights wing of American liberalism, composed in great part by Jews, seemed detached if not disdainful of the plight of their co-religionists, content to follow the lead of the Nixon-Kissinger policy: Don’t make noise about Soviet Jews because it threatened the delicate preservation of detente between nuclear powers.

And so it was left to outsider Jews, to “fanatics,” to “extremists,” like Meir Kahane, to make noise about what was happening behind prison bars in the Soviet Union, the prison bars of the Soviet Union: the murders, the imprisonments, psychiatric lock-ups for dissidents, the deprivation of even the few rights of non-Jewish citizens of the Soviet police state.

The more one reads—as in Gal Beckerman’s forthcoming book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone—on the struggle to save Soviet Jews, the more one understands the frustration with official Jewish organizations that gave rise to the impulse to extremism.

Now, the “extremist JDO” is often confused with the original “extremist JDL,” the Jewish Defense League, founded by an extremist, Kahane, which earned its extremist label by being accused of bomb plots against Carnegie Hall and other venues for touring Soviet orchestras and ballet groups that were used as the window dressing for detente.

It should have been considered a universal human-rights cause, but it was often dismissed as a right-wing—because anti-Communist—cause. I must admit to my own guilt here.

In any case I’ve lost track of the details, but there’s extremist and there’s extremist and it’s my understanding that the JDO, my downstairs neighbors, broke off from the JDL because the JDL wasn’t extremist enough. It wouldn’t go the extra mile. And the JDO under its founder, Mordechai Levy, began to focus its attention on other American anti-Semitic manifestations, including neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Klan, and Holocaust-denier groups. And the alleged Nazi war criminals the Justice department was not pursuing vigorously enough for their notion of “justice.”

Perhaps for this reason, “the enemy of my enemy,” etc., the JDO found a haven in the various New and Old Left enclaves of the Lower East Side, long home to Jewish fanatics, now haven for the remains of the counterculture, including such figures as A.J. Weberman, the well-known “Dylanologist” who was a patron of the JDO and someone I became familiar with during my first reporting job, the perilous post of counterculture reporter for The Village Voice. It was a job in which one met all sorts of exotic characters. Indeed I recall when Weberman lived in the JDO building, I had occasion to meet a figure known as “One-Legged Terry,” an American-born Israeli who was said to be responsible for Bob Dylan’s pre-born-again engagement with Judaism.

But I was not seeking a cause, just a refuge, a place to lay my head after a divorce. And it sounded like a good deal, two floors in a solidly built brick tenement building. On the other hand, I didn’t realize the unwanted attention it would entail. I was not seeking to find myself frisked by the Joint Terrorism Squad, however mistakenly.

It was a strange arrangement and a strange episode in my life but, looking back on it, the mistaken-identity episode and my conversations and arguments with the JDO guys did cause me to think about my real identity and its lack of definition. And, eventually, through one Killer Question, gave me the impetus to write Explaining Hitler.

Mistaken identity? What distinguished my Jewishness from the vigilante Jewishness of the JDO?

Well, I was not an observant Jew, not even much of a believer, though not an atheist. Just not a monotheist. So, sue me.

But I loved Jews and Jewish culture and living for the first time in a Jewish city. (I’d grown up in non-Jewish small-town suburb and gone to school in New Haven and had not experienced much anti-Semitism in either locale; now I was drowning in philo-Semitism, and I liked it.) I will admit that what made me identify as Jewish more than anything else was the Holocaust, rage at it and its perpetrators. Even though I had no direct ancestors die in it, I knew they could have. And shortly before he died my father told me about a second cousin of his who lived in Paris and probably died in the camps. I came to feel Hitler’s victims were all part of my extended family.

I know I also had the vague idea for a novel that would attempt to exorcise this, an alternate history in which a group of Jews took on Hitler and the Nazis before they came to power—and won. I think it was derived from a legendary, probably apocryphal, story that back in the 1930s the Lower East Side’s own Jewish mobster king, Meyer Lansky, came to Fifth Avenue to ask august spokesman for the Jewish Establishment, Rabbi Stephen Wise, do you want me to put a contract out on Hitler? And the dignified civilized rabbi said no, it was not the right thing to do, it might backfire, be bad for his image, bad for the image of Jews, something. Too extremist. Lansky left, although there are stories that he didn’t entirely drop the idea right away. I haven’t either.

Still, from day to day it wasn’t visceral, my sense of Jewish identity and rage. I preferred the Simon Wiesenthal approach: hunting down ex-Nazis, bringing them to justice, and trying them (like Eichmann) for their crimes against humanity, not shooting them through Long Island screen doors. But could I utterly condemn the “wild justice” (as revenge is sometimes called) the fugitive I’d been mistaken for had been suspected of? What’s the morality of killing an 80-year-old Nazi war criminal?

• Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to the hundreds of “Jerusalem” (or “Zion”) mentions in the Bible. [Reuters/Vos Iz Neias?]

• “Masbia” are four restaurants in Brooklyn and Queens that serve kosher meals for free to impoverished Jews. [Brooklyn Rail]

• How to tell a schlemiel from a schlimazel from a schmendrik from a plain old jerk. [Forward]

• Noam Chomsky is taking a pass today. [The Onion]

• Rebecca Lepkoff, 94, speaks at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum tonight about her book of photographs (now out in paperback) of Lower East Side life many decades ago. [City Room]

A slideshow of Lepkoff’s photos is here. One is below.

The New York Times has the story. You have the Folksbiene group, which has been around for almost a century, and still insists, to some extent, on doing things the old-fashioned way—the old productions, acting troupes dominated by big burly men with big burly beards. And you have the upstart New Yiddish Repertory Company, which started only two years ago, and does things clearly outside the purview of traditional Yiddish companies. There has been talk of Folksbiene taking New Yiddish Rep under its wing; negotiations are mediated in part by Jack Lebewohl, the owner of the Second Avenue Deli. Of course, that’s now on Third Avenue in Murray Hill, which is as good a commentary on the evolution of old Lower East Side culture as you could find.

One of New Yiddish Rep’s productions is The Big Bupkis, the one-man-show from non-Jewish Yiddo-phile Shane Baker. Marissa Brostoff profiled him for Tablet Magazine a few months ago.

How To Say Theater in Yiddish? Two Ways [NYT]
Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]

So it’s hardly any wonder that when news of Rebecca Rubin reached my ears I rushed to order her, despite my advanced years. She is, as many of you may know by now, American Girl’s first Jewish doll; although she was preceded by one Lindsay Bergman, who appeared in 2001 as a “Girl of the Year,” she is the first such to be part of the company’s permanent collection of thematic dolls. Standing at 18 inches high and costing $95, she comes into her own well after other ethnic varieties—Native-American, African-American, Mexican-American and Chinese-American—have already been introduced. Since the world of American Girl is about infinitely cunning (read: costly) accessories as much as it is about the doll itself, I also ordered a boxed paperback set of six books, the better to understand all things Rebecca, as well as her school outfit, a school kit (featuring a lunch box accompanied by tiny rugelach, pickles, and a bagel with cheese) and, as befits a lapsed Orthodox Jew who still waxes nostalgic at the thought of Friday-night dinner, her “Sabbath set.” And now, just in time for Hanukkah, there is Rebecca’s Hanukkah set ($22), made in China, with an old-fashioned gold-plated menorah of her very own that looks like it was passed down the generations, nine blue candles, a wooden dreidel, and three coins for Hanukkah gelt. There is also a Hanukkah dress ($28), a kind of pinafore ensemble that is in a very au courant plum colored stripe, along with tights, a head band and wee white party shoes.

But first question first: Does she even look Jewish? This question of course raises the larger and always-vexed inquiry of what it means to “look Jewish.” As an article in The New York Times about Rebecca explained: “While other dolls represented ethnic backgrounds with distinctive visual characteristics, what constitutes a Jewish girl’s appearance is much more open for debate.” Are we talking about ethnic stereotypes here, the imputation of a kind of physical Shylockness, some grim image from 19th century Warsaw of a dark-haired, droopy-nosed female, uncomely in the extreme? Or do we mean something else entirely, some spirited essence of Jewishness captured in the flashing eyes, high cheekbones and sultry skin of a Levantine beauty? In the event, the marketing people at American Girl chose the safe middle road, having produced a melting-pot version of Jewishness with but the faintest Semitic taint in the choice of eye color, which is hazel, and perhaps in the slight pointedness of her chin.

Rebecca’s hair color was apparently pondered for years (preliminary research on the doll began in 2000) and while dark auburn was the first choice—think Katharine Ross in The Graduate, running across the Berkeley campus, her long shiny tresses flying—the decision was to go with what a spokeswoman for the company described as “mid-tone brown hair color with russet highlights.” Meaning, in plain English: medium Jewish brown. Meaning that Rebecca will start having her hair expensively blonded at the same time she considers a nose job. (Her nose looks pretty innocuous now, but you can never tell how it will develop during those all-important pubertal years.) My Polish housekeeper, for one, claims that Rebecca looks Irish—an assessment with which I don’t agree, but to each her own.

Like all the American Girl dolls, Rebecca Rubin—this Rebecca Rubin, for there is also a real-life Rebecca Rubin whose accidental namesake she is, a 36-year old eco-terrorist who is listed as “armed and dangerous” by the FBI—represents a particular time and place in history. A 9-year old living in a Lower East Side tenement in 1914, Rebecca arrives in a herringbone dress, black stockings, and two-tone boots, looking much like one of the sisters out of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family series. In Meet Rebecca, the first book in the boxed set (an additional $39.95 or $74.95, depending on whether you’re springing for the paperback or the hardcover edition), we discover that she is the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents; her father (known as Papa) owns a small shoe store and her mother (Mama) keeps house. Rebecca also lives with her four siblings and her Russian grandparents, (known, a bit confusedly, as “bubbie” and “grandpa,” one foot in the Old World and one in the New). Bubbie bakes challah for Friday night and ladles out “golden chicken soup” once everyone—including Rebecca’s cousin Max Shepherd, né Moyshe Shereshevsky—is gathered at the shabbos table, set with carefully folded linen napkins.

It may be my paranoid Jewish self speaking, always on the lookout for intimations of anti-Semitism, but I was immediately struck by the mercantilist subtext that runs through Meet Rebecca. Given that the Rubins are depicted as being strained for cash, it seems a bit odd that Rebecca would be in line for a new dress—and not even a hand-me-down at that—for a chag that doesn’t involve a lot of solemn shul-going. But for anyone who is interested in checking this out further, Candlight for Rebecca, one of the six books in the series, explains that her older sisters, Sophie and Sadie, altered her too-short New Year’s dress so it would fit perfectly as a Hanukkah gift. And, indulged tyke that she is, Rebecca’s also got a settee ($98), a phonograph set ($44), a movie dress ($32), a costume chest ($100), and an 11-piece bedroom collection—replete with two kittens—that’s available for a mere $170.

It’s hard for me to imagine that a similar emphasis marks the books about Felicity or Kirsten or Addy, who are probably busy learning how to milk the cows or iron up a storm, and it is no doubt meant to show the entrepreneurial genius that is often attributed to our tribe, but something about it gave me the willies. Money and the making of it, the insufficiency or enoughness of it, gleams through the pages of Meet Rebecca, vying with the haimish details about Sabbath customs, Yiddish theater, and “moving pictures.” Rebecca’s uncle Jacob sends a letter from Russia pleading for expensive ship tickets so he and his brood, who live in fear of the tsar’s army and don’t have enough to eat, can join them in New York. Even the Russian folk tales that cousin Max regales the family with hinge on the theme of money, with an avaricious wealthy neighbor vying with a poor farmer for his foal.

Without ruining the plot (although this isn’t The Sopranos), suffice it to say that wily Rebecca figures out more than one way to earn extra cash—both openly and on the sly—the better to purchase a pair of candlesticks so she can light Sabbath candles along with Sadie and Sophie. The goal is a pure-hearted one, to be sure, but the road to riches is awash in moral as well as pecuniary dilemmas; Rebecca has to withstand the disdain of a wealthy and spoiled boy her own age whose mother comes into Papa’s store to buy him a pair of shoes, notwithstanding the fact that the boy’s mother is the first to buy a piece of Rebecca’s needlework—one of the doilies she is crocheting for her future trousseau.

In the weeks that follow, other customers of her father’s store purchase Rebecca’s handiwork—a tablerunner here, a pillow cover there—while she works on her business plan, adding and subtracting minute sums in her head, trying to close the deal:“With the quarter from Mrs. Berg, she had saved just fifty-two cents. Even if she bargained with the peddlers, that wouldn’t be enough. Candlesticks would cost at least two dollars.” (Similarly, when her sisters read Hamlet aloud to each other—“To be, or not to be: that is the question”—Rebecca’s response is that of a true JAP-in-the-making: “To buy, or not to buy, Rebecca thought. That is my question!”) This being a mammon-worshiping household at least as much as a God-fearing one, when papa finds out about Rebecca’s secret business dealings he surprises everyone by being proud instead of angry: “When your daughter is a successful American businesswoman, what can a father do except sit back and watch?” And when the role model for young Jewish girls is Leona Helmsley, what can a reader do except hope that the goyim aren’t taking note?

Still and all, it’s probably more of a good thing that Jewish girls now have an American Girl doll to call their own. Put it down to the clarion call of diversity or simply to the calculated logistics of the marketplace, but Rebecca Rubin, with her ritually appropriate, overpriced accessories is undoubtedly here to stay. Clearly, the cunning marketing people at American Girl recognize a treasure trove when they see one.

Lawsuit Forces Famed Pickle Dealer Guss’ Pickles to Change Its Name [NYDN via Eater]
Previously: Guss’ Pickles Decamps for Brooklyn

Guss’ Pickles Packing Up for Brooklyn [Bowery Boogie]

Nadir’s Narayev—today a Ukrainian town—is a Russian compound of two constituents: na, meaning “to,” and ray meaning “paradise”—“To Paradise!” The name Nadir is also a compound, possessed of two meanings that seem to oppose: The Yiddish phrase na dir can mean either a polite, bourgeois “To you!” or else a gutter-sniping “Take this and choke on it!” In his writing, Nadir resides at the Lower East Side intersection of these translations—at the corner, say, of Grand Street and Grandiloquence.

I’ve plagiarized the above paragraphs from an essay I wrote in praise of Nadir’s previous book to have been translated into English—From Man to Man, which was published, as was the essay, in 2007. Mine was the only review of that book to appear. I take the obnoxious liberty of quoting myself because that is what Nadir would have done: An original in unoriginal circumstances, Nadir, too, had to write for money, and so borrowed generously from others and from himself. When it was time to emote, he emoted; he praised Stalin when it was appropriate to praise Stalin, and then condemned him, too, when it became convenient after Molotov and von Ribbentrop agreed to nonaggression in Moscow; he would sit down at his desk to write about sitting down at his desk to write; he fabricated excruciating love poetry to any woman who incited his lust: “How fine and how beautiful are all these things when put into a seven-dollar poem.”

Now the translator of From Man to Man, Harvey Fink, has given us a volume of Nadir’s selected stories. That Is How It Is offers more than fifty examples of the short fragments that Nadir wrote throughout his short life (he died of a heart attack, in 1943, in Woodstock, New York). These are stories concerned, almost entirely, with America—“a land where people do not go for strolls, where no one drinks wine.” All of these stories were written for deadline, for publication in the New York Yiddish press, in daily newspapers such as the Teglikhn Herold (The Daily Herald), Tog (Day), and Frayhayt (Freedom, the official communist newspaper), and in popular humor magazines like the biweekly Der Yiddisher Gazlen (The Jewish Bandit, which Nadir edited), Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Prankster), and Der Kibitzer (The Joker).

Nadir’s New York was the madcap capital of an unintelligible Amerike: “the land of prairies, watermelon,Yaka Hula dances, Theodore Roosevelt, the Singer building, habeas corpus, Coney Island, infantile paralysis, and breach of promise.” This new country came to represent a nadir for Nadir—a Fall not into gehenna, but into the mundane—and the darkest of his humor tells us that though life was better and easier here, it was somehow not as real, not as authentic, as it had been under the kaiser, or the tsar. Nadir’s best stories acknowledge that a freer life might be practically preferable, but theologically barren; that there can be no ecstasy in a nation where ecstasies can be mass-produced; and that only kitsch can comfort when the communal is usurped by capitalism, and by democratic enfranchisement:

Lost. Man here is lost. He has no value—like a wisp of smoke, like a piece of straw.

Yesterday a car ran someone over. I was in it. A crunch and a scream. No, not a scream, but a croak, like that of a frog. A tall man, crushed on the ground, his blood oozing out. One can’t touch him till the ambulance comes: the law doesn’t permit it. It’s important to know precisely in which position he was lying when the mishap occurred—necessary in order to be able to translate the tragedy into money. Money.

Then a woman bawling, shrieking, screaming, “Where’s his hand!” She is given the severed hand, pulls the diamond off, and then calms down a bit.

Elsewhere in this tale, “Meanwhile, I’m in the Land of America,” Nadir romances the Pale of Settlement:

Far from Broadway and Art will I kiss the earth—perhaps … (or not?) There I will sit upon the luminous mountain of the years of my youth and listen to the robin sing and to the sheep — praying to God …

And the shtetl, my home, will lay there before me: my luminous, small, still, rested world, which Time has only slightly erased and shrouded in mist and distanced, and yet—made closer and dearer.

Nadir made it seem as if the true work of writing Yiddish in America had been the living of Yiddish in Europe, and that the writing itself was mere transcription of the legacy of that past life—an offhand sort of paperwork. Fittingly, perhaps, many of his stories are no more than jokes or flitting character sketches; and many of his sketches are only catalogues of impractical advice: “Should a man live sitting down? Or should he live standing up?” (from “How Should A Man Live?”); “Give your children a good uneducation. Give your children an unschooling.” (“Uneducation”); “Live slowly, my friends!” (“Stop”). Concerned with the minor, with the corners of gardens and women’s mouths, with memories of Narayev’s lowly synagogue yards, Nadir felt no need to polish his folkways into what we call “fiction”; while the poetry that succeeded the sense of his sentences gives us, as if in explanation, the impetuous dashes and exclamatories of a heart that beat too intensely to bother with form. Here is Nadir’s own summation of his work, which embodies the practice it describes—beginning with a casual anecdote about an acquaintance, then turning to a fictionalization of the author, and ending, finally, with an encounter with the essence of writing:

B. Borchov was the first to pin me with the label: “a refined man.”

From then on I have been “a refined wordsmith!”

Although I no longer recall the year in which I used the word “fine” in my wordsmithing. Just as a hounded animal does not leap over a fence for the sake of leaping but in order to be on the other side, so too I employ words only in order to get over them all the quicker, in order to be on the other side of words.

Joshua Cohen, a contributing editor to Tablet, writes a monthly column devoted to literature in translation. He is the author of five books with a sixth, Graven Imaginings, a novel about the last Jew, to be published in spring 2010.

One of the items that historians have done a neat job of obscuring as irrelevant to the modern Jewish experience is the role of performance psychics in Jewish life. Legitimized as “prophets” in the ancient period, they have become, in subsequent eras, excused as products of their times or categorized as special “mystics.” But even by the time the Renaissance was in full swing, science and mysticism still mixed in weird and uncomfortable ways: mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton, for example, was a big fan of alchemy and divination, among other matters of the occult. (Apparently, rationality has never been beholden to the laws of motion and gravity.) In the modern period, where science and reason begin to edge out the occult, the terms “fraud” and “charlatan” are bandied about as terms to describe those who work as palm readers, phrenologists, and telepaths. But that didn’t make them disappear or make people any less interested in their abilities, including some with top flight educations.

Khokhmes hayad is an 1882 reprint of a 1799 reprint of a Hebrew palm reading manual that dates to the 16th century. This is just one of many examples of such Jewish occult manuals. The frequent reprinting of such manuals over many centuries is but one indication of their popularity.

Indeed, Jews have worked in the occult for as long as they have been Jews. Instances of necromancy and other occult activities are peppered throughout the Bible and the Talmud, as well as later rabbinical texts. Indeed, prophesying is hardwired in the tradition. Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 monograph, “Jewish Magic and Superstition,” for example, regales the reader with an excellent exposition of the history of Jewish occult activity.

With the advent of the Enlightenment and political and social emancipation it brought in its wake, Jews were expected to have abrogated this silliness. But shtetl superstitions simply migrated in variant form to cities, where—in an attempt to slap a veneer of sophistication on their ancient crafts—occultists often presented themselves as “scientists” or “professors.” They could be found in Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw, Krakow, and New York City plying their trades.

One such specimen, a man named Abraham Hochman, came to prominence in mid-1890s New York, following the 1895 publication of Fortune Teller, a popular booklet reprinted several times—as were his subsequent Yiddish publications on astrology and fortune telling. Operating out of a building he owned at 169 Rivington Street, Hochman was a Lower East Side fixture who told fortunes, read palms and foreheads, and found lost spouses and kin for people in the neighborhood. He kept innocent men out of prison, found lost property and, occasionally, knew which horse would come in at the track. When business flagged, he contacted journalist friends and pulled stunts, most of which were reported upon assiduously in the Yiddish press, to attract customers.

Occasionally, when Hochman did something really dramatic, news of his exploits would appear in the general press. The New York Sun, among other outlets, reported on an episode in May 1904, when a bushy-haired Hochman waltzed into the Essex Market Police Court and inexplicably paid the bail for Abie Langener, who’d been arrested with seven other youths on a burglary charge. The magistrate asked why Hochman was paying bail for someone he didn’t know.

“I can read the future,” he replied. “I have read this man’s mind and know he is innocent. I can also read your mind. You will discharge him when the case comes up before you tomorrow. If he were guilty, I would know it and I would not bail him out. I will be here tomorrow to show you that my predictions come true.”

Hochman did, in fact, show up the following day. And, sure enough, when Langener and another suspect were brought before the court, the magistrate released them due to lack of evidence.

“What did I tell you?” said Hochman.

The psychic was mobbed outside the courthouse by hundreds of friends of the accused who, according to press reports, practically tore off his clothes. It’s not clear why this would be necessary and, in any case, the courthouse bailiffs came outside to rescue him from his demonstrative well-wishers.

But Hochman was usually surrounded by a mob, though typically of what they called “wildly gesticulating women.” The stoop of his Rivington Street studio was frequently crammed with flailing ladies, often accompanied by children all desperately trying to find missing husbands and fathers. These men ranged from immigrants who had conveniently “forgotten” about their families in the Old Country, to guys who couldn’t tolerate the cramped quarters of their 300-square-foot tenements and their half dozen screaming kids, to jerks who ran out of money and disappeared. The situation was so bad, the Jewish Daily Forward, the largest-circulation Yiddish daily in the world, began running the “Gallery of Missing Men,” a page full of mug shots and descriptions of these nefarious characters to help locate them and bring them to justice. (The National Desertion Bureau was also founded to help women and children whose husbands and fathers were on the lam.)

Forverts’ Gallery of Missing Men, 1909

Locating missing husbands was a Hochman specialty. He gained quite a bit of fame for this ability when, in 1903, the press reported on the predicament of Minnie Cohen, whose her husband went missing for a month. Minnie decided to avail herself of Hochman’s services. With a dollar in hand, she made her way through the labyrinthine snarl of panhandlers and pushcarts to Hochman’s office. He informed Minnie that her husband would be up to no good at the corner of Pitt and Grand Streets at exactly 10 o’clock that night. So sure was he of his prophecy that he promised to give her 50 dollars if he turned out to mistaken. With unshakable faith in the Hebrew Seer of Rivington Street, and hope in the possibility of getting a wad of cash if her runaway husband didn’t show, Cohen pulled a cop out of the Essex Street Station and told him what Hochman had said. When they got to the corner of Pitt and Grand, Minnie’s truant husband was there, scratching his back on a lamppost. Officer O’Grady arrested Cohen’s husband and brought him into the station, where he was held on a $100 bond and instructed to begin paying his wife Minnie two dollars a week alimony. “Venus is ascendant—husbands beware!” Hochman asserted to the women gathered on his stoop.

News of his exploits made Hochman realize that he could expand his psychic constituency further than the local Hebrews. He went straight for the top: one day in the spring of 1905, Hochman went chugging into the Grand Street clubhouse of Tammany Hall thug Florrie Sullivan, grabbed the local strongman’s hand, and told him that he dreamed that the horse King Pepper was going to come in first, paying eight to one. Sullivan, who forswore belief in the occult, nevertheless took a bet on Hochman’s advice. King Pepper won, making Sullivan a small fortune. Hochman’s gambit worked; he became the Sullivan gang’s official mind-reader and phrenologist. Hochman was so successful that his son Frank’s 1906 bris, which brought out a full police battalion and included performances by Yiddish theater actors, was besieged by thousands of well wishers, who devoured 320 pounds of chicken and six crates of fruit. On account of this sumptuous affair, an entire block of Rivington Street was closed down for two days.

Even The New York Times was not immune to the lures of Abraham Hochman. Tongue in cheek as it may have been, the Times still reported on the 1904 story of how Hochman’s psychic abilities helped to locate Jacob Greenberg’s (of the Essex Street Greenbergs) missing horse, cart, and load of grapes.
Unlike most clairvoyants, Hochman was happy to share his secrets, publishing his prophetic techniques in books and articles. He based his method on what he called his “Astro-biblical chart,” which anyone could use to answer questions like “will I fall in love?”; “should I take dance lessons?”; “does my husband know I’ve been bad?”; “should I get a job as a tailor?”; “is my landlord in love with me?” Determining the answer required readers to hold some herbs or nuts in the right hand, count backwards by sevens with the left hand, add whatever remained to the number of the question, and find the corresponding number on the astro-biblical chart, which provided the name of a Hebrew symbol and a natural element. Then, inquirers were to take the Hebrew symbol and the element and consult Hochman’s system of charts for another number which led to the answer chart, whereupon a person would punch in the original number subtracted after the initial step of nut-holding and backward counting. That is your answer. How could it miss?

Hochman disappears from the papers around 1910. Nobody seems to know what became of him, though Yiddish-speaking clairvoyants, palm readers, and psychics continued to hold Jews in their thrall. In 1933, for example, a dybbuk was exorcised in a Harlem tenement. But that’s a story for another time.

Eddy Portnoy, a Tablet contributing editor, teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University.

Wonton & Kreplach Festival
Potato & Scallion Pancake Festival
Tripe & Kishke Festival
Cholent & Chow Mein Festival
Double Cooked Pork & Yesterday’s Reheated Chicken Festival
Beef & Duck Tongue Festival
Whole Steamed & Gefilte Fish Festival
Brisket & Bean Curd Festival
Grandma’s & General Tso’s Chicken Festival
Corned & Orange Beef Festival
Matzo & Fish Ball Festival
Chop Suey & Chopped Liver Festival
Five Spiced Beef & Alka-Seltzer Festival

Egg Rolls & Egg Creams Festival [EldridgeSteet.org]

The Eldridge Street Synagogue, whose story Annie Polland tells in her lively and insightful new book, Landmark of the Spirit, encapsulates the whole arc of this New York Jewish history. When the cathedral-like synagogue opened, with a public celebration on September 4, 1887, it was an unmistakable declaration that Eastern European Jews had arrived in America.

For the first time, the Lower East Side’s Orthodox Jews would worship in a magnificent, purpose-built structure—there was seating for 740 worshippers—instead of the usual shtiebel tucked away inside a tenement, or at best a rented church. “In 1887,” Polland writes, “nothing in the neighborhood’s architecture announced the Jewish presence as strikingly as the Eldridge Street Synagogue did.”

The building’s Romanesque design, reminiscent of so many Christian churches (and executed by Catholic architects, the Herter brothers), was given a distinctly Jewish inflection. The Moorish-style keyhole windows invoked the architecture of medieval Jewish Spain, while the central “rose” window featured twelve Stars of David, an allusion to the twelve tribes of Jacob. Nor were references to the building’s New World environment lacking. Flagholders at the windowsills featured five-pointed American stars, to complement the six-pointed Jewish ones, and were used to display American flags. (All of these architectural details, and many more, are beautifully documented in the book’s color photographs.)

Photos from the book, top to bottom: Lightbulbs on the Ark, Facade after Restoration, Women’s Balcony, Barrel-Vaulted Ceiling

When the Eldridge Street Synagogue was built, there were already some impressive synagogues in New York, like Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. But that was a Reform temple, built by and for the older, richer, more established German Jews uptown, who looked on their downtown brethren with a combination of concern and disdain. Polland quotes the exquisitely nasty report on Eldridge Street’s opening-day festivities published in the Reform Movement’s journal, American Israelite. Writing under the pseudonym “Mi Yodea” (Who Knows), a reporter contrasted the “elegant simplicity” of the synagogue with the noise and vulgarity of the congregation: “women sparring over a balcony seat, ‘gentlemen’ who retained their cigar stumps with the intention of smoking them on the street after the dedication, and babies incessantly crying. He also mentioned ‘loud talking’ during the ceremony and ‘the running to and fro of the trustees as well as the public during the lectures and singing.’”

In reports like this—and in the many court records, board meeting minutes, synagogue publications, and interviews that Polland has ingeniously compiled—we can see how Eldridge Street, thanks to its size and prominence, became an important venue for debates about how Judaism should adapt itself to America. Simply building the synagogue, at a cost of more than $90,000, was a way for this congregation of immigrant manufacturers and merchants to show that they had made it in the New World. Polland pays due respect to the rich men, and their influential wives, who made Eldridge Street possible: men like the banker Sender Jarmulowsky, the first president, who combined Talmudic knowledge with business expertise. In his day, according to the Yiddish Tageblat newspaper, “Sender Jarmulowsky was a name that was known to every Jew in the old and also in the new world.” Today, practically the only trace of the name that remains is an inscription on the façade of “S. Jarmulowsky’s Bank, Est. 1873,” on the corner of Canal and Orchard. Then there was Isaac Gellis, the kosher-meat tycoon, who boasted that his was one of the first Jewish businesses in New York: older than ALL of the existing Jewish institutions; “older by ten years than the Jewish mass immigration from Russia and Poland,” according to one of his advertisements.

These were the men who paid the pledges and made the loans that kept the Eldridge Street Synagogue afloat. They also coughed up for the star cantors who were, in the 1880s, a sine qua non for any fashionable congregation. Polland offers a fascinating capsule history of the period’s “cantor wars,” which saw Europe’s most learned and talented singers flock to New York for enormous salaries. Eldridge Street managed to hire one of the greatest cantors in the world, Pinhas Minkowsky from Odessa, who asked for, and got, $2,500 a year. As Polland shows, Minkowsky was as vain as any opera singer. He wrote in his autobiography that “the congregation often boasted that Minkowsky ‘beat’ all the other cantors,” and he eventually quit Eldridge Street when the synagogue refused to pay him a $500 bonus, declaiming, “You have shattered me for no good reason and you have hurt my pride.” Perhaps such prima-donna behavior was only to be expected at a time when one synagogue Polland mentions advertised its cantor as having a voice “five hundred times stronger and sweeter than Caruso’s.”

Here was another kind of Americanization, the craze for celebrity and the competition for status; and it did not go uncriticized at the time. Indeed, the Eldridge Street Synagogue itself was attacked for ostentation: One critic spoke of “a Judaism composed of carved wood and ornamented bricks and covered up by a handsome mortgage.” Yet as Polland shows, during its first 50 years, the synagogue found creative ways to reconcile tradition with modernity. Members were supposed to be shomer Shabbos, for instance, yet this was hard to keep up in a country where Sunday, not Saturday, was the day of rest. Women prayed in a separate section, but the curtains meant to conceal their balcony from the men below were usually left open. Conflict and compromise were the stuff of daily synagogue life, then as now.

Finally, however, demographics presented the Eldridge Street Synagogue with a challenge that could not be finessed. By the 1930s, with the immigrant flow from Eastern Europe cut off and local Jews moving up and out of the Lower East Side, the congregation began to age and shrink. In the postwar era, the main synagogue was boarded up and services moved to a chapel; the building itself began to crumble. It took the determined efforts of the Eldridge Street Project, launched in 1986, to raise the funds to restore the synagogue to its original state. The building reopened late last year as the Museum at Eldridge Street and is open to the public for tours during the week. But not on Shabbat: for the last 121 years, Polland writes, even at its lowest ebb, the synagogue has never missed a Shabbat service.

The popular matzoh will still appear in supermarkets each spring, alongside the macaroons and chocolate-covered jelly rings. But the family-run factory on Rivington Street is a landmark, and patrons who remember lining up outside its small storefront for their Seder supply will be sorry to see it go. And so, during what might be Streit’s final Passover production run in the neighborhood, we sent Sean Cole to take a look at how the operation works.

Streit’s matzoh factory

Photos: Sean Cole.

How I wish Puzo had given us more details. In his preface to the 1996 reissue of the book, first published in 1964, he states, quite straightforwardly, that the novel is autobiographical, that its long-suffering heroine is his mother. Did he, then, have a Yiddish poet for a brother-in-law? Did they stay in touch? And did this brother-in-law envy him the success of The Godfather, as he continued to scribble his poems in a language with only a tiny smattering of living speakers? His Yiddish literary interests, after all, were deemed useless—by Puzo, at least—before the beginning of World War II, when the world was still teeming with speakers of Yiddish.

Mani Leib in an undated photo

As an American Jewish poet, I’m no stranger to uselessness myself. But I can still remember my utter astonishment at coming upon an anthology of Yiddish poetry in a remainder bin. Or maybe it was one of those tables set outside used bookstores in the hope of theft and subsequent insurance payments for books with no chance of being sold. I bought it out of sheer amazement that there existed such a thing as Yiddish poetry. Up to that point, I associated Yiddish with being told to go to sleep, bad smells, confusion, a host of adjectives for everything sub-par, and, above all, mayne tsuris, which I was told I looked like for the first ten years of my life. (As a kid I believed Mayne Tsuris to be an actual unkempt person of my parents’ acquaintance and was shocked to discover, at 16 or so, that it was the Yiddish phrase for “my troubles.”) I grew up hearing everything wrong with the world labeled fashtunkeh and knowing that the misadventures of our Chevy Bel Air occurred because my father was fadrayt. How would you make poetry out of that?

And, yet, there it was: Howe and Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. (That particular copy has long since disappeared; the one currently on my shelf technically belongs to my synagogue library, of which I was once conveniently and, somewhat detrimentally, librarian.) And the poet I was first drawn to—immediately and irrevocably—was the man who used the name Mani Leib.

I suppose I would have found Mani Leib eventually. But my first chance encounter, at that particular time, probably changed the course of my life as a poet. In those few anthologized poems I heard a voice I knew intimately and loved with my whole heart—but which I’d never dreamed could be associated with poetry. Reading Mani Leib, I understood that it no longer mattered that I couldn’t sound like Emily Dickinson. My problem was I couldn’t sound like Mani Leib.

And so I stole my favorite of his lines, made a poem around it and brought it, excitedly, to a bunch of writers with whom I used to meet in a Chelsea apartment. Here was a poem, I thought, that was entirely mine, even if I had stolen it from Mani Leib. To a person, they hated it, with one exception: a Venezuelan lawyer of German extraction who would die a few years later on a rock-climbing expedition in Yosemite. Only this man understood what I was after in that first attempt at a poem called “The Yiddish Muses.” Mani Leib’s line—“I, unneeded, a poet among Jews”—resonated with me for a thousand reasons, all of which I wanted to express at once. Mani Leib, I suppose, had enabled me to see that I could be my parents’ daughter and my grandparents’ granddaughter and still write poetry. Reading him, I realized that not only did poetry not require the abandonment of my true linguistic inheritance—the inimitable Yiddish inflection—but that poetry could absolutely soar with it.

In short: I was in love with the very notion of a Yiddish-speaking muse. I still am. Why Gustavo Brillenberg, of all people, responded when no one else did remains a mystery to me. Perhaps because he was himself so alienated? A Venezuelan in New York? A poet in a law office? A rock climber in a crowded city?

In any case, the sonnet from which I lifted the line, “To a Gentile Poet,” became a great favorite of mine and I began to take an interest in some other Yiddish-American poems as well. So a year or so ago—a quarter-century after that Chelsea workshop devolved into a poker game (of which I have much fonder memories, honestly)—when a Jewish literary organization asked me to give a talk on the subject of my choice, I decided to speak on the concept of American Yiddish poets as American poets. I have this crazy idea that there should be a collection of Yiddish-American poets in the Library of America. They were Americans, after all. Not that I knew anything about them. I still didn’t know much more about Mani Leib than I had found out in that first encounter with those few poems.

My arguments were fairly simple: I looked at Whitman, singing America’s various tradesmen, and pointed out that Leib did him one better. He was the tradesman:

I am Mani Leib, whose name is sung—
In Brownsville, Yeheputz and farther, they know it:
Among cobblers, a splendid cobbler; among
Poetical circles a splendid poet.

I noted that the Yiddish novelist Joseph Opatoshu described the achievement of American writers in distinguishing themselves from their British literary forebears in terms that were even more appropriate for Yiddish writers: “they gave birth to a new language: unpolished words, lively, full-blooded, that drove out the genteel and rigid diction of the English.” Both traditions, I pointed out, were anti-intellectual. I also compared my favorite Leib sonnet to Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel”—outsiders writing in a traditional poetic form about their exclusion from the tradition—and went on to claim that Leib and his fellow Yiddish-American poets merged the two great strands in American poetry, the one from Whitman, the other from Dickinson. I was absolutely convinced that I was right, despite the fact—which I made clear enough to my audience—that I didn’t know anything. Didn’t speak Yiddish. Had only read what was translated. Knew nothing much about the poet’s lives.

But whereas ignorance may be an advantage for writers of poetry (poetry is, after all, like midrash; we write it to fill gaps in our understanding) it’s rather a handicap when one is giving a lecture. A few months after giving the talk, I finally learned a little something about Mani Leib’s actual life and realized I’d been entirely mistaken about him. In part, he was to blame. He had such a light hand as a poet, such a sense of humor, that I had a hard time truly taking in the genuine difficulty out of which his poems were made. But I, of course, was really at fault. I loved those poems so much that I couldn’t imagine the life that produced them as anything but, ultimately, a triumph. They were so good that I imagined them as the long-thought-out results of deliberate choice. Surely they were the ideal products of their maker. What else could he possibly have wanted to do?

But, in truth, it was no picnic to have been born Mani Leib Brahinsky in Neizhin, the Ukraine, in 1882, to a family so poor that Leib left school at 11 to serve as apprentice to a bootmaker. Four years later the bootmaker ran away to America with his customers’ money, leaving his young apprentice with the business. But Leib, at the ripe old age of 15, had been so taken with communist ideals that he had no interest in being an effective boss. He was eventually imprisoned for his revolutionary activities and fled Eastern Europe to escape a second imprisonment. After a year in England, he set sail for New York, where he found work in a shoe factory, and sent for his shy childhood sweetheart. The couple had five children in ten years, before Leib left his wife for the poet Rochelle Weprinski, who abandoned her husband for him. The strain of supporting two households made it even more imperative that he work long hours as a bootmaker, long hours that eventually ruined his health. At age 50, he came down with tuberculosis. He wrote much of his best work during an 18-month stint in a sanitarium.

Suddenly being a “splendid cobbler” doesn’t look so attractive, particularly when one wishes he could make a living as a poet. But Leib mediates the painful facts of his situation with humor. The poem ends:

In Brownsville, Yeheputz, beyond them, even,
My name shall ever be known, O Muse.
And I’m not a cobbler who writes, thank heaven,
But a poet, who makes shoes.

Of course, it is funny. How may poets long for immortal fame in Yeheputz? But Leib’s “beyond them, even” is not merely self-mocking, but wistful, full of longing for all the lost geography that the Yiddish language—with its Hebrew and Aramaic components—comprehends. For that matter, even “Yeheputz”—the old country—is “beyond” Leib now, from his new vantage point in Brownsville. I was wrong to think that Leib’s making shoes had anything to do with Whitman’s shoemaker. It’s the poet that Leib values in himself, not the cobbler.

And though I wasn’t exactly wrong to point out a similar anti-intellectual bent in both Yiddish and American poetry, there, too, I was slightly skewing things. Whitman’s bragging about having left “the learned astronomer’s . . . proofs . . . figures . . . charts and diagrams” and “look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” is a bit different from the anti-intellectualism of Yiddish, which comes out of a tradition in which “intellectual” means “religious.”

Yiddish poetry is, by definition, an anti-intellectual enterprise within a tradition that prizes the study of ancient texts in ancient languages, not poems written in zhargon. That said, Leib’s poor Hebrew and probably nonexistent Aramaic were marks of poverty, not of defiance. By all accounts, he profoundly lamented his lack of knowledge—even if Yiddish does refer to a Jewish intellectual as someone “who really understands the little black dots.” (The phrase is substantive as well as wickedly funny: unlike Hebrew and Aramaic, Yiddish is written out without the black dots that serve as vowels.)

In any case, Mani Leib’s incomprehension of the little black dots hardly kept him from engaging in intellectual discussions. And the one eyewitness account I’ve found of him is hardly a description of an anti-intellectual. According to Reuben Iceland, Leib could generally be found at Goodman and Levine’s, the Lower East Side dairy restaurant which was the hang-out of Di Yunge, the self-consciously innovative group of turn-of-the-centry American Yiddish poets, “a finger rocking in front of his nose like a pointer—his green, visionary eyes squinting.” Conversations with Leib, according to Iceland, would “boil—an hour, two, three. From one topic we would leap into a second, from a second to a third. Soon we were back at the first, each trying to prove a point with a quotation from an essay or a poem.”

Once I understood the demands of Leib’s day-to-day life, those intense conversations—at a place where you could sit all night over the cheapest possible cup of tea—took on a new pathos. Here was a genuine American tragedy: a man with a great gift, spending his days in a shoe factory, welcoming tuberculosis because it won him the time to write his poetry in peace. The sonnets that I argued were just like Countee Cullen’s—the work of an outsider proving that he can write the most traditional form with the best of them, even as his subject is his own artistic alienation—turned out to be Leib’s last burst of artistic expression. They were the compromise of a man who, in fact, always wanted to write an epic. And while this is a common phenomenon among the great lyric poets (Didn’t Petrarch want to write long pieces in Latin and just toss off those Italian sonnets? Didn’t Keats, genius of the odes, long to write an epic?) it was somehow sadder when I thought of all those hours spent making, however expertly, shoes.

But still, those sonnets are quite an achievement. My favorite remains the one I ripped off all those years ago. At first, Leib addresses the “goyisher poet,” who has a “yirish fun Shakespeare”—a man “who has only to twitter to receive a response” from the world. In comparison, Leib goes on:

And here I am, unneeded, a poet among Jews,
Growing from wild grass on a soil not ours . . .
In an alien world I sing of the tears
Of wanderers in the desert under alien stars . . .

Despite all his alienation, I’m not sure Mani Leib would quite change places with the goyisher poet. His “And here I am” certainly has something of the implication of, say, so this goyisher poet is living in a mansion on Long Island and here I am in my fifth-floor tenement walk-up in Brownsville, but Leib is also declaring a space for himself—even in the world that “inherited Shakespeare.” You may be his direct inheritor, he tells the goyisher poet, but, nonetheless, here I am—unnecessary though I may be. And he makes this self-declaration in Shakespeare’s own preferred poetic form. It’s not Leib’s world. They’re not his stars, but he is, nonetheless, here singing.

Mani Leib in 1952

But, as the sonnet’s last line makes clear, Leib’s problem isn’t the goyisher poet, with his inheritance from Shakepeare, but the great Hebrew writers of the Bible. After all, the true reason that Leib is a an “unneeded thing” is that his subject: “vagler in di midbar” (wanderers in the desert) has already been exhaustively covered in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It’s the enormous weight of his own literary inheritance and the fact that he—as a “poet bai yiddin”—must keep singing that same song. And yet Leib’s song has as much urgency as Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Ultimately, however, Leib’s tone more resembles that of the other great poet of 19th-century America—Whitman’s diametric opposite: the unpublished, unknown genius, Emily Dickinson. She declares herself with the same kind of irony, the same mixture of making a place for herself and announcing her uselessness, when she proclaims “I’m Nobody. Who are you?”

But Leib’s tragedy is profoundly different from Dickinson’s. Leib had many, many readers; she had none. But Dickinson had the luxury of devoting her days to poetry, while Leib spent his days making shoes. Still, who knows? Maybe it’s possible to see Leib’s life as inspiring rather than sad. Perhaps a tubercular shoemaker writing brilliant poems in his almost nonexistent spare time is not a tragedy but a miracle. Perhaps his poems flew to him, fully made, from some inaccessible place. Or maybe the miracle is poetry itself, and the way it defies the material world, even the very words out of which it’s made. Or maybe the miracle is that this man wrote poetry at all, much less great poetry. Perhaps the real lesson of Mani Leib is the extraordinary power and magic of his medium, how it enables someone in an alien country, slaving away with his hands, to rise above the burdens of his world, even though those burdens are his subject. For me the thrill of his work is the jokey conversational tone and the pathos, the way—in the course of a few lines—he can be both poet and shoemaker, both a good-for-nothing and a singer in competition with the narrator of the Five Books of Moses. That poetry can take a homey, hybrid language and make it truly sing.

Maybe, after all, he is singing America—maybe I was onto something in my talk, after all—as well as poetry and Yiddish and himself. Maybe he’s singing the remainder bin, from which I fished him out. And surely he’s singing my old friend Gustavo, not a lawyer who wrote poems, thank heaven, but a poet who wrote briefs. Maybe all American poets are wanderers in the desert.

On a summer morning in 1958, up on 126th Street in Harlem, Art Kane took a photograph of a group of musicians that included some of the greatest jazz players of all time, such as Dizzy Gilespie, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker. The photograph, titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” is now legendary and recently it served as the inspiration for another group photograph.

The new picture, taken on the steps of the newly-restored, 120-year-old Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, was of nearly 100 klezmer musicians from all over the United States and Europe. They came at the invitation of musician and ethnographer Yale Strom to celebrate the vitality of klezmer today. This photo (and a series of concerts planned alongside it) would be called “A Great Day on Eldridge Street.”

It seems like such a lovely idea, but could they really pull it off? And would it really, truly, be great? Here’s our report.

Photos courtesy of the Eldridge Street Project. Parading musicians by Jessica Schein. Group portrait by Leo Sorel.

When Jacob Gordin first arrived in America in 1891, he had no intention of writing for the Yiddish stage. The plays by Chekhov and Ibsen that had inspired the playwright in Russia had little in common with the melodramatic and vaudevillian charades that dominated popular productions on the Lower East Side.

Gordin was won over, however, by stars such as Boris Tomashevsky and Jacob Adler, and went on to write plays—like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Jewish King Lear—that unflinchingly portrayed the conflicts and difficulties faced by new immigrants. His often heartbreaking, sometimes incendiary works earned him a devoted following (they called him “the Shakespeare of the Jews”), and more than a few enemies, among them Forward editor Abraham Cahan, who made it his mission to destroy Gordin’s career.

Today Gordin is all but forgotten. But that may change with two recent publications: a biography by Beth Kaplan, Gordin’s great-granddaughter, and a new, annotated translation of his King Lear by Ruth Gay and Sophie Glazer.

Eric Molinsky speaks with Kaplan, along with Yiddish theater scholars Barbara Henry and Stefan Kanfer, about Gordin’s work and legacy.

Photos: From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Last Friday, Gertel’s Bakery—the most-loved of the Lower East Side’s three remaining kosher bakeries—permanently closed its doors, after 90 years in business. Joanna Smith Rakoff, the editor of Nextbook.org and a longtime consumer of Gertel’s prune danishes, talked to the shop’s final customers about rugelach, “water challah,” and the past and future of a neighborhood in flux.

We tend to think that Yiddish-speaking socialists brought their politics with them when they emigrated to the United States at the turn of the last century. But in A Fire in Their Hearts, Tony Michels argues we’re wrong. The Yiddish worker’s movement that came into being on the Lower East Side was a distinctly American phenomenon, argues Michels, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And its impact lasted well into the 20th century, even if it’s infrequently mentioned in today’s history books.

Illustration: N. Kozlovsky, “Russian Jewish Workers on a Tenement Rooftop,” from A Fire in Their Hearts, courtesy Workmen’s Circle.

Or it is the late 1940s in Manhattan, and Sydney Taylor—Sarah Brenner before she changed her first name at the age of twelve and her last name when she got married—is telling her young daughter, Jo, amusing stories about her childhood. Among them is the story of “find the buttons,” and all of the tales feature herself and her four sisters: Ella, Henny, Charlotte and Gertie. Taylor and her family are fully assimilated Jews who no longer keep kosher or observe the Sabbath, and Jo has become curious about her heritage. “Mommy, why is it every time I read a book about children, it is always a Christian child,” she asks. “Why isn’t there a book about a Jewish child?” Jo is an only child, and Taylor, who grew up with three brothers in addition to her four sisters, wants to compensate for both her daughter’s isolation and the lack of a vibrant Jewish community around her. So, she digs deep into her memory to “try to make up for the lack of a big family by telling her about my own…[Jo] was delighted with the tales of our good times together and the enjoyment of simple pleasures. She loved the stories so much,” Taylor recalled years later, “that I decided to write them down for her. The manuscript went into a big box and stayed there.”

And then it didn’t. Because now it is the late 1970s, still Manhattan, and I am an eight-year-old tucked into my bed, reading about Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie in a book called All-Of-A-Kind Family, the first in a series of five that Sydney Taylor eventually published, beginning in 1951. Though I am far, far away from the turn-of-the-century and the wide starched pinafores and solemn Sabbath dinners the children experience—not to mention the nickel fare on the subway, which, much to my shock and admiration, they ride alone—I am enthralled. I’m not Jewish, but there’s something about these girls and their upstanding parents—Mama stays home, Papa runs a junk shop—that makes me love and relate to them from the instant I open the pages of the first book and go along on their weekly trip to the library.

Maybe it’s Henny’s mischievous streak, which makes me feel better about mine. Maybe it’s Charlotte’s daydreaming, which later in the series will get her into trouble when she empties a pile of jewel-like burning coals from the kitchen stove into her apron, enraptured by their glowing beauty. It could be Ella’s natural elegance, or her lovely singing voice that draws me in even though I can only hear it in my own head. Or Sarah’s love of school, so much like my own, or maybe even Gertie’s comic desperation at being the youngest—something I understand viscerally even though I only have one older sister. It may also be the fact that even though the girls have to share a single bedroom—I have recently been given my own room, in no small measure to prevent my sister from killing me in my sleep—and big double beds (except for Henny, ever the rebel, who gets her own twin), they somehow lack for nothing and live in a world filled with imaginary games and adventures, a world in which everything—from dusting to appearing in a Hebrew school play—is touched with magic. Their Mama actually puts them all to bed at the same time, in spite of their age differences, in order to encourage this fanciful behavior, and there they lie awake for hours, building castles in the air and decorating the interiors of imaginary houses. I envy their camaraderie, which seems to come naturally to them despite the close quarters in which they live.

That I learn about Jewish celebrations from Yom Kippur to Purim to the simple Friday night prayer is just a fringe benefit of the books as far as I’m concerned, though I’m fascinated by them. These moments of rich family life reverberate with calm, quiet well-being. “In the lovely hush of the Sabbath eve,” Taylor writes, “they

once more gathered around the table, the children with their books, Mama with her magazine, and Papa with his Jewish newspaper.” Who wouldn’t want to be part of such an inviting scene? Over the course of the five books, the family does everything from explaining to their Catholic neighbors (a useful foil if ever there was one) how to make meat kosher, to showing them how to celebrate a bris and how to build a sukkah. In return, the neighbors invite them to see their first Christmas tree, which Papa tells the girls they can look at but not help decorate. I have plenty of Jewish friends, but, this being the 1970s, most of them are reform, and with the exception of a Bar Mitzvah or two I haven’t been exposed to any of these traditions.

Certainly no one around me speaks Yiddish, a decline that was already apparent when Taylor wrote her books, and one of which she tacitly approved. She makes a point of saying that “In this foreign land [the Lower East Side], it was Mama’s girls who were the foreigners since they alone conversed in a foreign tongue—English.” So when the girls venture out to spend their allowance pennies and the street vendors call out to them—”a nickel a schtickel!”—it’s like going on a tour of a strange land with happily familiar guides.

For their author, however, the Jewish aspect of the books was more than just a means of time travel. It was a way of preserving the past she had willingly given up, even though she never originally intended for the stories to be published. It was her husband who took that first manuscript out of its box and sent it off, unbeknownst to his wife, to a contest. “No one was more surprised than I when I received a letter from [a children's book editor] telling me she wanted to publish All-of-A-Kind Family,” Taylor recalled. “I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Thus was Taylor, who had been a Martha Graham dancer in a previous life, reborn as a best-selling children’s book author. Her books were the first to deal with everyday life in a Jewish family, and some fifty years later, they are still beloved by Jewish and non-Jewish children alike.

The secret of her books’ success, of course, lies in the truth that while they are steeped in Jewish culture and ritual, and serve as loving documents of a time and place now lost to a wave of trendy bars and boutiques, they also transcend it. They are deeply Jewish, but they are also about that great universal: childhood. The five sisters, and the brother who eventually joins them, get scared on the playground swings, lose their library books, and get in trouble with their parents. They even, in Ella’s case, have crushes on boys (her romance with Jules Roth, who takes her to eat in her very first restaurant and later goes off to fight in Europe, remains, in my opinion, one of the great literary love affairs though I’m willing to admit my judgment may be clouded by nostalgia).

In addition to these more obvious attributes, the All-of-A-Kind Family books also deal in a more subtle commodity, one that children never tire of reading about, as it forms the very foundation of their small worlds and in doing so allows them to venture forth. They tell readers, over and over again, that not having enough of some things in life—money, space, clothing—is more than made up for by having plenty of another thing, namely, the love of your family. In the same way that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books have enraptured generations of young readers with their descriptions of the sacrifices the Ingalls family makes in order to forge a better life for themselves in a strange new part of their country, Taylor’s books bring their readers along on another odyssey, one of assimilation in the promised land that America represented to European immigrants at the turn of the century. It’s a gentle ride, buffeted by trips to the penny candy store and other childish pleasures, but it leaves an indelible mark.

Redemption, Steven G. Kellman’s new biography of Henry Roth, explores a brilliant novelist with a deep secret—an incestuous relationship with his sister, Rose. Roth’s sexual shame informs Call It Sleep, Roth’s Joycean novel of the Lower East Side, which was published in 1934 but forgotten until the 1960s, when Irving Howe’s praise put the paperback reissue on the bestseller list. By this point, Roth was living in Maine, paralyzed by writer’s block. Finally, in 1979, he began working on another autobiographical novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream. This four-volume work and Call It Sleep have been rereleased by Picador.

Jonathan Rosen, the author of Joy Comes in the Morning (now out in paperback) and editor of Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters book series, met Henry Roth in 1993, two years before his death, and wrote an essay on Roth that appeared in The New Yorker earlier this month. Here he talks about Roth’s troubled life and work.