by Joel Deutsch
Manny Rothko’s wisecrack about his didactic brother was, Sasha realized, no exaggeration. By this time, Sasha had long ago cleaned his plate, down to the last crumb of rye bread. The spicy ghost flavor of pastrami still lingered on his palate, along with the garlicky chill of the pickles and the pungency of a few caraway seeds that were stuck between his teeth. With every sip of his lukewarm tea, and in the quiet burps in between, he tasted everything all over again, which was not entirely unpleasant. And still Marvin was holding forth about the rules of kashruth.
Fish with fins and scales you could eat but not otherwise, which left out the delicious whole catfish Eric’s father had ordered for everyone at a fancy Chinese restaurant at Eric’s 16th birthday party. And clearly excluded the shrimp salads Sasha had scarfed down plenty of at Nevsky Prospekt before Irina had started working there as a photographer, since which time the family had stopped having their birthday parties and such at Russian restaurants, altogether.
Where meat was concerned, an animal with cloven hooves and a ruminant gut was kosher, all the rest not. The knife that sliced through the jugular vein and the windpipe had to be mercifully sharp, the stroke quick and clean, the blessing recited properly by the licensed slayer. On and on Marvin went, constantly pushing up the black plastic bridge of his spectacles with his middle finger even though they didn’t appear to be slipping, which made it look as if he were flipping the bird to no one in particular in some sort of compulsive tic,and giving a senseless shake now and then to his glass, which had been devoid of soda and ice for a long time. Manny’s beer had run out, too. But neither brother had been able to catch their waitress’s eye to order more drinks.
“I don’t even see her for 15, 20 minutes,” groused Manny.”
“To be honest,” said Marvin, “it looks like they don’t even have a waiter or a waitress for this back section at all anymore, since we got our food. Everywhere you go, service is in decline,. Even here, which I’m sorry to have to hear myself say. Anyway, where was I, Manny?”
Milk and meat,” Manny said, glumly. He obviously knew the whole lecture by heart.
So then Marvin explained the origin of the prohibition against eating meat from the same plate or at the same time as milk products, then went on about this rule in Deuteronomy and that one in Leviticus, while Manny just stared at his empty plate and Sasha, not wanting to appear rude, looked in Marvin’s general direction although his gaze was actually focused just past Marvin to where servers and busboys were hustling their food trays and clattering crockery carts in and out of the swinging kitchen doors behind him.
“Sasha,” Manny interrupted. “pardon me, Marv. But I just wanna ask the kid something. Have you ever seen video of a kosher slaughterhouse? How it works in real life?”
“No,” said Sasha, managing to snap out of his haze. “No. I never have.”
“These days you can,” said Manny. On YouTube. You know, on the Web.”
“I go online,” said Sasha. “And I know YouTube.”
“Okay. So here’s what you’ll see if you watch this video,” Manny continued. “What you’ve got is a mass-production slaughterhouse same as the other ones. You’ve got your animal hanging upside down by one leg from a moving chain, blood and cow shit everywhere. And all the people you see are like the busboys here. Your Hispanics, just working for a living at a hard, filthy job that’s non-union and underpaid, if I know anything about those Chasidim who own these places. The only Jew you see on the killing floor is this bearded shochet, they call him, in his rubber apron and maybe a helmet that covers up his yarmulke and his tender Jewish skull. Sometimes the procedure doesn’t work right and you can tell the steer is really suffering, the way he flops around. It looks like a combination of a GM assembly plant and a torture chamber.
“Here,” he said , producing a ballpoint pen from one of the huge flap-covered pockets of his baggy cargo pants, scribbling something on a clean napkin, and handing the napkin across the table to Sasha. “here’s the Web address for that video. You’ll see. Such a holy thing it’s not. Believe me.”
“As my dear brother knows perfectly well,,” said Marvin, “I don’t believe in these rules, myself. I’m just explaining the foundation of these traditions for educational purposes. These are things a Jew should know, whether he believes or not. A Jew who lacks all knowledge what it means to be Jewish is a Jew without a roadmap. You know what I’m saying?”
“you mean you don’t believe?” Sasha asked, after getting up his nerve to be so impertinent, as it felt. In any of it? In God, even?
“‘Thank God I’m an atheist’ is my watchword,” chortled Marvin. “Now Manny here, he’s a believer.”
“Agnostic,” corrected Manny.
“That’s more belief than I’ve had since Vietnam, myself, is all I can say,” said Marvin. “you don’t want to hear the details. Not over food, anyway.”
“Then how come you’ve got these T-shirts and the Hebrew stuff and the Jewish star on your van,” asked Sasha, ” if you don’t believe in any of it?”
“Because,” said Marvin, “to be a Jew is more than believing. To be a Jew is to be a member of a family that goes way back. A big mispacho. You got your good Jews, you’ve got your bad Jews. You got smart Jews, you got stupid jews. Religious Jews, irreligious Jews. All family, never mind the details. So I’m a jew, and your Rabbi Schoenfeld’s a jew, and so is my agnostic brother over here. And you, too. Even, assuming I’m guessing right and I think I am, who’s from Jewish Russians who wouldn’t know Moses if he sat next to them on a bus, with the robe and the sandals and the stone tablets and everything, just like Charlton Heston in The Ten commandments. Which is a movie I know you don’t have any idea what it is, am I right?”
Sasha nodded his admission of ignorance.
“And you, too, my young friend,are a Jew of some kind or other. Irregardless.” Here marvin removed his glasses and fixed Sasha with his small, myopic eyes.
“But the problem is that here in America the believers won’t even look out for themselves, except for the Chasids in Brooklyn, which is of course what you’d expect from New Yorkers. But in general, especially in Los Angeles, the more religious they get, the more they stick their Yiddishe kopf in the sand and their Jewish schnozzes in the prayer book.
“Now your ultra-Orthodox over in Israel, your haredi and your chisidics,especially in the territories, they’ll terminate a hostile Palestinian with their bare hands if they have to. No sissy bullshit about ‘we’re Jews, and Jews don’t do violence.’ These Palestinians, when it comes to Jews, they’re like rabid pit bulls. They have the jew hatred DNA. Nothing you can do to them or for them is gonna change that. And half the time, they’re wired to blow themselves up. Which any Israeli knows. But here, the more religious Jews are, the more useless they are. Any Jew-hater can get to them, like shooting fish in a barrel. “”We’re in America,’ they think, and that’s that. La dee dah. Although take it from me, bubeleh, it isn’t. Which is actually why we’re sitting here, Sasha.”
“Finally, he gets to the point,” muttered Manny, who was holding his Budweiser bottle upside down over his glass again in a useless attempt to get another drop of beer out of it.
“Sasha, let me break it down for you,okay?” said Marvin. “The Midnight Maccabees is a very exclusive organization. A Jewish self-defense group, biggest one in this country outside of Brooklyn. We patrol the streets of West Los Angeles and the Valley, ready to jump into action at the first sign of any anti-Semitic hate crime. From a Jew getting mugged on his way to synagogue to some gang defacing headstones in a Jewish cemetery, to a Muslim group or some White Power skinhead trash planning attacks on the Jewish Federation or a Jewish community center. Weaponry we’ve got, believe me. My brother and I, both of us have commando training straight from the Army, too. We’re not just a couple of dumb shmucks with guns. And that truck, you look in the engine compartment, all I can say is what you’re gonna see is definitely not your pathetic little factory equipment V-6, which is good because with the armor plating, the vehicle weighs a lot more than normal . And we have manpower, too. Committed defenders of the Jewish Nation, on alert 24/7. But we’re always on the lookout for new blood, Sasha, which is why we’re talking to you tonight. Young people who might have the combination of guts, idealism and Jewish pride that we need.”
“I don’t know,” was all Sasha found himself able to stutter in response.
“No need to say anything right now, not yet,” Marvin assured him. “There’s more to be told. A lot more. I just wanted to jump-start the conversation.”
“Speaking of conversations,” said Manny, slipping off his wristwatch and holding it up in hairy sausage fingers to show Marvin. The watch was a massive black apparatus with multiple buttons, some sort of sports or diving model, Sasha imagined.
“Right,” said Marvin. “We’ve got a couple of calls we have to make immediately to two of our guys who are staking out this place where we think something shady might be going down. Operation heartbreak Hotel is the mission name.”
Suddenly Manny broke out in song, affecting what even Sasha could tell was a horribly bad hillbilly accent.
“Well, since my baby left me,” he drawled ridiculously, “Well ah’ve found a new place to dwell. It’s down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel. And ah’m so lonely, baby,” he went on, ignoring the dirty look he was getting from his brother, “Ah be so lonely. Well Ah’m so lonely, Ah could dah.,”
Marvin finally broke in. “Cut the Elvis shit, Manny. Why you have to do that all the time is beyond me.”
“You know I can’t help it,” said Manny, sounding hurt. “Every time I hear the name of one of the King’s greatest hits, it sets off the song in my head,” and I just start singing. It’s like I’m a jukebox somebody dropped a quarter into or something.”
“Whatever,” said marvin. “Just give it a rest, okay? Now ready?”
“yeah,” said Manny, halfheartedly. “Ready.”
Almost simultaneously, the brothers dug into their cargo pants pockets, withdrew identical platinum blue clamshell cell phones, flipped them open and poised index fingers to jab at keypads.
” We have to coordinate these calls exactly right to be sure our men are on full alert and a hundred per cent in synch,” Marvin told Sasha. And then to Manny: “Okay. Let’s rock and roll. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…”
Whereupon all hell broke loose.
To be continued…