Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (3 page)

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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

BOOK: Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
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“
I
won't
HAVE KOSHER FOOD, IT TASTES AWFUL!” DECLARED Stephanie.
They were addressing the first hurdle related to the catering of the bat mitzvah: whether or not the meal should be kosher. Carla had assumed that it would be—since in her experience it always was. But she was judging from affairs held when formidable individuals like Grandpa Abe, Jessie's father, were still alive. Abe and his ilk were men of adamantine will for whom many things, the food at bar mitzvahs among them, were as immutable as the setting of the sun.
“There's Uncle Sid to consider,” Carla reminded Stephanie. Sid was Jessie's ancient uncle, so old that he no doubt ate very little except pablum. But he stood as the last clear support for keeping things kosher.
“You said Uncle Sid was in the hospital and probably wouldn't come,” Stephanie reminded her. For a girl who couldn't remember to put the juice back in the refrigerator, her memory could at times be surprisingly sharp.
“Yes, but he may recover,” said Carla. “We wouldn't want to offend him.”
“But he's like a hundred,” protested Stephanie. “He wouldn't
even notice. I don't see why we have to have the food taste horrible just because some dead people want it to.”
Though her logic was somewhat askew, the spirit of her argument was sound, Mark thought. He had never been one for the fine points of Jewish ritual and had gone along because his wife's family had found it important. Now that Grandpa Abe was dead and Jessie appeared to care less, he could hardly see the point of holding to the old ways simply for the sake of doing so.
“Your mother and I will discuss it,” said Mark, having learned through years of marital tongue lashings not to oppose Carla in front of the children.
“At least we can sample the kosher food,” suggested Carla. “It may taste better than you think.”
“I know what it tastes like,” said Stephanie. “David Schwartz's was kosher. The fake cheese on the cheesesteaks was gross, and no one would eat the make-your-own soy sundaes.”
“Well, I'm sure that there's good and bad kosher food, just like everything else,” said Carla. “The least you can do is try it. I have an appointment for a tasting with a kosher caterer tomorrow night who comes highly recommended, and if you finish all your homework, you can come with us.”
“I'll try it,” Stephanie said with a shrug, “but if it's awful I'm not going to have it.”
“You'll do what we say, young lady!” said Mark, who, though more on Stephanie's side than her mother's when it came to the food, was more prone to take offense at her tone—probably because he had less contact with it.
Stephanie muttered something under her breath and went off to do her homework.
“I don't see why we have to make the thing kosher,” said Mark, once she was out of earshot. “It's not that anyone would care anymore.”
“It's the principle,” said Carla. “I can't help but feel that a bat
mitzvah should be kosher. We're expressing our Jewish identity to our friends and family.”
“But we don't keep kosher,” argued Mark. “And Stephanie's right—the stuff tastes awful.”
“Some kosher food can be very good. Remember my mom's?” Mark had courted Carla in the days when the Kaplan family kept kosher, and he had raved about his mother-in-law's cooking then, as he did now. Though Jessie had let the custom lapse when her own father died fifteen years ago, Carla had remained sentimentally attached to the memory of those earlier times. The image of her grandfather presiding over the Sabbath meal that her grandmother—and later her mother—had scrupulously prepared for the occasion was one of the most compelling images of her childhood. “Having a kosher bat mitzvah is a symbolic gesture,” she explained now. “It shows respect for our heritage.”
The spirit, if not the subject, of this debate was a familiar one in the Goodman household. Carla was “more Jewish,” as the saying goes, and Mark was “less.” It was not that Mark had been raised in a lax religious household. On the contrary, he had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home and weathered years of religious training, trudging back and forth to Hebrew school, through snow and sleet, to be drilled in the prayers by aged rabbis with phlegmy voices. But though this intensive training had produced the expected piety in many of his peers, it had had the obverse effect on him.
There were two aspects of his religion (one could say of religion in general) that went against Mark's grain. First, were the supposed charms of repetition. Religion was predicated on repetition—on rites and rituals performed over and over again. But Mark had no patience for repetition. It bored him.
Second was the alleged superiority of one God over many. The idea had never impressed him in the way his teachers obviously felt it should. He could still remember being told what differentiated
Judaism from those benighted, earlier religions: “We believe in
one
God,” the teacher had said in a hushed tone while the other five-year-olds opened their eyes wide in reverence. But Mark had not grasped the advantage of this singularity. It seemed to him that there were definite benefits to having more than one God; indeed, the more the better, given how much there was to do.
Yet despite the practical and philosophical problems he had with his religion, Mark was not wholly alienated or disenfranchised from it. He identified himself as a Jew, was proud of his heritage, and, after his marriage to Carla, had agreed to join an area synagogue, though only under the stipulation that it be a Reform temple where the services were shorter and the relationship to the deity more metaphorical.
Carla, by contrast, was of a totally different view. She had strong feelings of affiliation and affection for the religion of her ancestors. Her mind was more emotional and impressionistic than her husband's, and she found the prayers and rituals to be enormously compelling and consoling. Judaism, as she saw it, was a vast, complex tapestry from which one might follow any thread to arrive at a profound truth.
She had tried unsuccessfully to convince Mark to join a Conservative synagogue, closer in spirit to the Orthodox one in which she had been raised. In making her case for this traditional affiliation, she relied on all sorts of arguments, and had even put forward the example of the area's notorious Reform rabbi, incarcerated for life for the contract-killing of his wife some years before. The case, when it first made its explosive appearance in the press, had been a source of morbid fascination and impassioned debate for the Jewish community of Cherry Hill. Many had voiced skepticism: “Okay, maybe he had a few women on the side—not a rabbinical thing to do, but it's been known to happen. But murder—Jews, and certainly rabbis, don't do things like that.”
There had been a trial (in actuality two, since the first had resulted in a hung jury, obviously possessed of a few jurors of the
persuasion that “rabbis don't do things like that”). And while the rabbi had eventually been found guilty and placed behind bars for the remainder of his life, the case continued to be regularly invoked by the Jews of Cherry Hill as an object lesson in any number of things—from the escalating dangers of adultery (said rabbi had dallied with numerous women before taking to murder) to the advantage of an open-office plan (many of the rabbi's trysts had happened in his locked study—specifically, on his cherry wood desk). But Carla might well have been the first to use the case to argue against Reform Judaism as itself a slippery slope: First, it was shorter services and less Hebrew; next, it was murdering your wife.
Such an argument, obviously, did not hold weight with Mark, and Carla had finally given up and agreed to membership in a Reform synagogue. To her surprise, she found that the services were not so different from the Conservative ones she had attended in the area—though they
were
shorter and the cantor
did
play the guitar.
Still, when it came to the bat mitzvah, Carla remained steadfast on certain points that pertained to the traditional nature of the event. She bristled, for example, when told of the
volkschuls
that existed in many affluent suburbs, where educated, highly assimilated Jews staged “special events” in honor of their children's thirteenth birthdays. These were celebrations of ethnic history and creativity in which the children could do such things as write a research paper on Ellis Island or perform a stand-up comedy routine in the style of Jackie Mason or Jerry Seinfeld (stand-up comedy being seen as a form of cultural expression as close to the actual practice of Judaism as one could get in modern life).
Events like these were not to Carla's taste. For her, the bar mitzvah was a sacred marker of the old ways, to be celebrated with all the conventional trappings. And a principal one of these was a kosher meal.
Fortunately, her friend Jill Rosenberg had done the groundwork
and sampled the kosher caterers across the Delaware Valley in preparation for her son's bar mitzvah the year before.
“If I have to eat another potato knish, I'll die,” Jill had reported dramatically in the midst of this evaluative process. In the end, she had declared that one caterer stood out from the pack and could hold his own with the best kosher chefs on Long Island. (Jill grew up on Long Island and saw its offerings in the way of food, clothes, and household appliances as the measure for all things.) This caterer, she said, was the king of kosher caterers: “His soy ice cream's ambrosia. Josh and his friends practically OD'd on it.” What better recommendation could there be?
“At least try the caterer,” Carla pleaded with Mark now. “If you or Stephanie don't like the food, we won't use him.”
A
nd so,
THE NEXT DAY, CARLA, MARK, AND STEPHANIE prepared to drive out to northeast Philadelphia to sample the handiwork of the Iron Chef of kosher caterers.
Jeffrey was left home with Jessie, who, despite her recent odd behavior, seemed the only person able to get him to sit still and do his work. None of his teachers apparently could, judging by the notes that cascaded daily from his backpack.
“Dear Mrs. Goodman,” read a recent note from his language arts teacher, “Your son appears to have a chronic need to use the facilities during the class period. His insistence that he ‘must go or else' is either an indication of some sort of physiological disorder or the sign of an accomplished liar. Kindly instruct him to empty his bladder before class. If the problem persists, I expect a note from a urologist.”
“Dear Mrs. Goodman,” read another note, discovered last week under Jeffrey's unwashed gym suit (no telling how long it had been there), “Your son's incessant belching in homeroom—whether the result of indigestion or misplaced theatrical ambition—has become a real nuisance. It is impossible for the other children to hear the announcements over the PA system. Please
speak to him about proper classroom etiquette and/or the importance of a healthy breakfast to settle his stomach.”
Only yesterday there had been a particularly dire note from the principal: “Dear Mrs. Goodman,” the missive read, “Your son has once again thrown an eraser out of the second-floor window. This time, it hit Mr. Fialkow, our vice principal, grazing the side of his head. A direct hit would certainly have caused a concussion—or worse. We cannot emphasize enough the seriousness of this infraction and the need to make sure that no such possibly fatal incidents occur again.”
The stress engendered by such notes was considerable, and Carla found herself in a continual round of meetings with the nurse, the guidance counselor, and the vice principal (now liable to be less understanding as the recipient of a potentially fatal blow).
Jessie, however, was one of the few adults with a surefire strategy for managing Jeffrey. It all seemed to hinge on her potato latkes. Jessie's method went like this: “Jeffrey, if you finish your math homework, you get a latke. No math homework, no latke.” Jeffrey would finish his math homework and get a latke. “Okay, the math is done.” Jessie would nod approvingly. “Now, to study the vocabulary. Study the first ten words, you get a latke.” The ten words studied, Jessie tested him; if he answered correctly, the latke was forthcoming; if not, it was back to more studying. This went on until all the homework was completed. The method was labor-intensive, and Carla worried that without the coveted reward to concentrate his mind, Jeffrey would accomplish very little—a fact supported by his performance at school, where there were no latkes to be had.
Carla told Jessie to make sure that Jeffrey was in bed by ten (with no Game Boy under the covers) and to take a message should there be a call from the elusive bar mitzvah entertainment motivator—the name now given to the once-lowly deejay, and much harder to get hold of under this more august title.
Jessie assured her that everything would be done, and they
were almost out the door when she called after them in a concerned voice: “I do hope the ostler remembered to saddle the horses!”
Mark had originally speculated that his mother-in-law's remarks might be a side effect of her blood-pressure medicine, and had advised her cardiologist to change her prescription. But Jessie had been on the new medicine for two weeks now, with no apparent improvement. The odd remarks kept coming, to the point that Carla had placed a large dictionary on the table in the front hall for consultation when her mother said something particularly cryptic.
“I think we'd better try a neurologist,” said Mark as they got in the car. “Not that it'll make any difference. Except for treating seizures and migraines, neurologists can't do anything but give bad news.”
“Maybe it's a seizure,” said Carla hopefully.
“Trust me, it's not a seizure.”
“So you think she's just losing it?” Carla said sadly. It was a thought that had occurred to her and she had tried to put out of her mind. Now she was struck by the depressing symmetry of the situation: Just as her daughter was entering the age of reason, her mother was leaving it. Time spent volunteering at the geriatric center had given her a vivid sense of where this process might lead.
“I wouldn't jump to conclusions,” said Mark, seeing his wife's distress. “It may simply be a passing phase. And it hasn't kept her from doing what she's always done. That was a nice sweater she just knitted for Stephanie, for example, and she's still one hell of a good cook.”
“There
was
the venison stew,” Carla reminded him.
“But it was tasty, whatever it was,” said Mark. “She hasn't lost her touch. Give it time. See how she is in a few weeks.”
They all got in the car, but before backing out of the driveway, Mark paused and turned to Carla. “By the way,” he asked, “what's an ostler?”

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