THE SHORTEST BAR MITZVAH IN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH RELIGION (PART 2)
Second of a 3-Part Series
by Dell Franklin
Summer, 1956
In the spring of 1956, an ugly and vociferous insurrection shook the Compton Community synagogue, resulting in the suspension of all services and Sunday school classes when the rabbi and teachers quit due to a bankrupt treasury and chaotic leadership. Mother, like others, was upset because half a dozen squabbling yentas had reduced their husbands to cowering mice at emergency meetings, which, as mother attested to after one visit, were irrational shouting matches with nobody listening to anybody and nothing getting done. Two older women, a Mrs. Pearlman and a Mrs. Carp, were so pushy and abrasive that nobody could get a word in.
Mother urged dad to attend another emergency meeting and try and get the men organized. Dad, taking me along for a “learning experience,” dropped in at the stuffy drab synagogue to witness a ghastly shriek of babbling and bickering so virulent that people were standing foaming at the mouths and threatening each other, like Arabs and Jews.
Dad stood in the back listening for about 5 minutes and strode to the stage, elbowed a stocky butcher from New York named Moe Carp out of the way and ordered Mrs. Pearlman and Mrs. Carp to “shut your big fat loud mouths!”
“You can’t talk to my mother that way,” Carp protested.
Dad pointed a menacing finger at him. “Get your ass off this stage, Carp, before I give you a hair-lip! You’re ugly enough as it is.”
Carp crept away. Dad stood sizing up a full house of his fellow Jews. Then he spent a few minutes insulting everybody. Then he pointed to one of the milder men and informed him he was nominating him for the new president of the Jewish Community Center. The women began to put up a stink. Mrs. Pearlman wanted her mousy husband to be president, because he was one of the more scholarly old country Jews and adept reciters of Jewish prayers in the temple, almost like an assistant to the rabbi who had quit.
“Sit down!” Dad thundered. “Another word out of you, Mrs. Pearlman, I’m throwing you and Mr. Pearlman outta here on your ears. And that goes for anybody else who pops off.”
The meek little man whom dad had nominated for president stood and nominated my dad for president. Before dad could wriggle out of the situation, every Jew in the throng, save the malcontent couples and Moe Carp, stood and unanimously voice-voted dad as president. Dad took a deep breath and accepted. Then he called up the meek Jew who had nominated him (a brilliant civil rights lawyer who would go on to become a famous liberal judge) and informed everybody that this man would take charge of the money, and hiring new teachers, and the organization of all policy, and if there were any protests he would kick their asses out of the Compton Jewish Community Center.
“But we still can’t have services, Murray, without a rabbi. As president, this is your duty, sir.” said the lawyer.
“Just call up the rabbi who was fired.”
“He quit, Murray. He won’t come back. He’s with another synagogue in LA.”
“Then find a new rabbi and send him to my house.”
That Sunday morning an eager friendly young rabbi reported to the house and dad conducted an interview in our den, hiring him immediately after introducing him to my mother and sister, while I tried to hide.
“Your son, Mr. Franklin! He’s bar mitzvah?”
“Well, uh, he’s going to be.”
“He goes to Hebrew school?”
“He’s going to make his bar mitzvah.”
“Wonderful. How proud you must be!”
The very young smiling rabbi, whose smiling wife nodded at me, gazed around at all the baseball pictures and trophies in our den. “A baseball player, too, your son, like his father?”
“He’s a ball player all right.”
“Wonderful. I look forward very much to his bar mitzvah, Mr. Franklin.” I slithered away.
Later that evening dad came into my room. “Dell, you’ve got to make your bar mitzvah now.”
“It’s too late, dad. I can’t learn Hebrew in two months. And besides, nobody’ll teach me. And you can’t send me to that rabbi, because then he’ll really smell a rat.”
“I’ve worked something out, wise guy. Look, it won’t be that tough. You won’t have to miss any baseball. You’ve got to do this for me. I’m president, and it’ll be a disgrace if my Jew-hating kid doesn’t make his bar mitzvah. For once in your life you’ve got to stop being so selfish and doing only what you want to do and make a sacrifice for your pappy. Will you do that, son, for your old man?”
********
Ben Racowsky, a local butcher with a wife and two small children, had grown up in Chicago idolizing my father as an athlete and agreed to prepare me for my bar mitzvah as a personal favor to Dad. Ben worked at Bargain Town, a market in the black section of Compton. The owners of Bargain Town, two Jewish men, lived on the other end of town, and their kids were members of the Jewish Community Center’s teenage club and had been unsuccessfully trying to recruit me, for already Jewish mothers were trying to match up Jewish kids for future matrimony.
Ben came to our house after dinner and mother closed off the den for our first lesson. Ben was short, stocky, with a kind, puckish face, bulging forearms, big gnarled hands, an ex catcher.
“So I hear you’re an anti-Jew,” he said right off.
“Bullshit. I’m a good Jew. I just don’t hang around with Jews, because they’re nerdy brains and don’t play ball.”
“I hear you don’t study in school.” He watched me shrug. “Well, schmuck, I’m going to make it easy for you. You don’t have to learn a single word of Hebrew because it’s too late. We’ve got two lousy months to make your bar mitzvah, so you don’t embarrass your wonderful father.” He took out a notebook. “See, I’ve written out the prayers, and your personal prayer, in English. Since you don’t give a damn about Hebrew, or your religion, we’re going to fake it.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Can you chant?”
“I hate chanting. My father can’t chant. You’ve seen him—doesn’t know a word, turns red, and he’s president of the Jewish community center…he hates services…”
“You know all the answers, don’t you?” He shook his head, already disgusted with me. “Don’t you realize that learning Hebrew, and your religion, and making your bar mitzvah molds your character, makes you a man, and helps you out later in life?”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m not sure I can teach a meathead like you, but I promised your Dad, so here we go.”
We started reading idioms and nuances he’d written in English. After an hour of this I was yawning and daydreaming, and Ben jabbed me hard on the arm to snap me alert, and I jabbed him back, and then he punched me in the arm, and I punched him back, and he punched me harder, and I punched him harder, and he laughed and said I was incorrigible, and we’d meet again in two nights and go over the notebook, and for me to study and recite so I wouldn’t prove myself to be the hopeless dope everybody thought I was. We were both rubbing our biceps when we entered the living room where mom and dad perked up and asked how I was doing. Ben winked at them and said, “So far so good. He’s a real prize.”
*********
As I recited my prayers, Ben yanked the notebook from me and tossed it across the den. “What the hell is WRONG with you? Do you HATE your father? Do you HATE me? You haven’t studied one lousy minute…”
“I studied…”
“Bullshit!” He punched me hard in the bicep. “Don’t lie to me Goyim.” He rolled his eyes, lifted his arms to the heavens as if pleading for help. “I spend hours writing out this half-assed bar mitzvah, the shortest bar mitzvah in the history of the Jewish religion for this dummy…I try to make it easy for him, so even an idiot could learn it in two weeks, and what does he learn? Nothing! You don’t have one lousy hour in your life to learn this stuff?”
“I got other studies, and I’m playing ball…”
“Don’t bullshit me. You don’t study. Why should you? Won’t it be wonderful when you’re grown up and looking for a job, and you tell them you know everything?”
“I’m gonna be a ball player, so who cares?”
He smacked my arm. “Dell, your mother, your father, they love you so much, give you so much, and all they ask in return is you make this half-assed bar mitzvah so they won’t be embarrassed in front of all the people who voted him president of the temple…”
“I say Mickey Mantle’s better than Joe DiMaggio any day, Racowsky.”
He punched me so hard I almost left the chair. “Don’t try and change the subject. We’re here to study, and drum something into that hard head of yours, do you hear me?”
“Yeh yeh. Hey, Mantle’s gonna hit fifty homers this year. When did DiMaggio ever do that?”
“DiMaggio was a better hitter and all around player and hit in 56 straight games. Mantle strikes out too much to do that, dummy.” The he raised his fist as if to smack me, sighed, retrieved my notebook, stood over me. “Read, schmuck!”
I read and chanted. Ben nodded. “Better. You can do this. Millions of Jews have done this for centuries, and so can you.”
*********
A week later I recited and chanted and Ben listened. He made a sour face. “You studied a little, just enough to get by, a half-assed person, a person who, if he doesn’t wise up, will go through life half-assed and end up a bum on the streets mooching off relatives.”
“I told you, I’ll play ball, and afterwards be a broadcaster or manager…”
He punched me in the arm, and I hauled off and punched him back. “Damn, you got a good punch for a kid,” he admitted.
“Dad taught me the one-two.”
He sighed. “Let’s hear you recite, meathead.”
I faked it and put my heart into and he closed his eyes and listened and appeared content. “Ahh, good boy, good Jew, what a strong voice, maybe he’ll grow up some day and be a rabbi or cantor…”
It was our best session, and afterwards, he said, “Look, after you make this bar mitzvah, you’re 13, and I want you to join the teenage club so you can meet nice Jewish girls.”
“Yeh, so I’ll end up marrying one.”
“That’s right. Have you looked around? There are some beautiful girls at the teenage center.”
“Yeh, and they all end up like Mrs. Pearlman…”
He punched me in the arm. “Is your mother like Mrs. Pearlman. Is your mother a yenta?”
“No, but most of those women are biddies and crows, and my dad says the same, and that their husbands are pussies.”
He punched my arm, stood and yelled, “Chant, asshole, chant!”
*********
When my bar mitzvah was two weeks away, Ben became very quiet and sad. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. “I quit,” he said softly. “I can’t take it anymore. You don’t care. I’m sick of it, sick of you. I quit.”
He stood and walked out of the room. By the time I got to the living room he was at the door with dad, mom at his side. “I don’t care anymore, Murray. How can I care if he doesn’t care?”
“By God, Ben, if I have to beat him to do it, I’ll beat him. I’ll sit in that goddam room with him for hours and make him do it.”
“It won’t do any good. I beat him all the time. I’m so sorry.”
Ben walked off the porch and dad followed him to his car, where they stood talking quietly, Ben shrugging, throwing up his hands, shaking his head over and over. Dad finally came back in the house.
“I begged him, like a dog. He’s agreed to give you one last chance. You’ve gotta get up every morning at 6 and report to Ben at Bargain Town and study with him while he sets up his butcher shop. I’ve invested a lot of money for your bar mitzvah. Don’t let me down. If you do, well, it’ll be the lowest point in your father’s life.”
So, in a fog, I rose in the darkness and pedaled my bike 2 miles to Bargain Town. Behind the counter, Ben chopped meat and prodded me to recite, chant, making me repeat the same prayers over and over. The second week I stayed until after the store opened, and since Ben was the first one there every morning he ran the register for the black folks showing up early for eggs, bread, milk and bacon, and while they lined up waiting for Ben to ring them out, he made me recite, and chant.
“Louder, schmuck! Putz. Yutz. Phony. Louder!”
The blacks gawked at me as if I were a space creature while Ben smiled and wise-cracked with them as I chanted.
“What language that boy singin’ in, mistah Ben?”
“Chinese.”
“Chinese? He don’t look like no Chinaman.”
”He’s a different kind of Chinaman. He’s what we call a schwartza yid Chinaman.” He cupped an ear. “Louder, Chinaman!”
“Man, that junk he singin’, it sound awful, mistah Ben.”
“Po’ baby.”
“He’ll be a good Chinaman some day, and make his daddy happy.”
by Dell Franklin
Summer, 1956
In the spring of 1956, an ugly and vociferous insurrection shook the Compton Community synagogue, resulting in the suspension of all services and Sunday school classes when the rabbi and teachers quit due to a bankrupt treasury and chaotic leadership. Mother, like others, was upset because half a dozen squabbling yentas had reduced their husbands to cowering mice at emergency meetings, which, as mother attested to after one visit, were irrational shouting matches with nobody listening to anybody and nothing getting done. Two older women, a Mrs. Pearlman and a Mrs. Carp, were so pushy and abrasive that nobody could get a word in.
Mother urged dad to attend another emergency meeting and try and get the men organized. Dad, taking me along for a “learning experience,” dropped in at the stuffy drab synagogue to witness a ghastly shriek of babbling and bickering so virulent that people were standing foaming at the mouths and threatening each other, like Arabs and Jews.
Dad stood in the back listening for about 5 minutes and strode to the stage, elbowed a stocky butcher from New York named Moe Carp out of the way and ordered Mrs. Pearlman and Mrs. Carp to “shut your big fat loud mouths!”
“You can’t talk to my mother that way,” Carp protested.
Dad pointed a menacing finger at him. “Get your ass off this stage, Carp, before I give you a hair-lip! You’re ugly enough as it is.”
Carp crept away. Dad stood sizing up a full house of his fellow Jews. Then he spent a few minutes insulting everybody. Then he pointed to one of the milder men and informed him he was nominating him for the new president of the Jewish Community Center. The women began to put up a stink. Mrs. Pearlman wanted her mousy husband to be president, because he was one of the more scholarly old country Jews and adept reciters of Jewish prayers in the temple, almost like an assistant to the rabbi who had quit.
“Sit down!” Dad thundered. “Another word out of you, Mrs. Pearlman, I’m throwing you and Mr. Pearlman outta here on your ears. And that goes for anybody else who pops off.”
The meek little man whom dad had nominated for president stood and nominated my dad for president. Before dad could wriggle out of the situation, every Jew in the throng, save the malcontent couples and Moe Carp, stood and unanimously voice-voted dad as president. Dad took a deep breath and accepted. Then he called up the meek Jew who had nominated him (a brilliant civil rights lawyer who would go on to become a famous liberal judge) and informed everybody that this man would take charge of the money, and hiring new teachers, and the organization of all policy, and if there were any protests he would kick their asses out of the Compton Jewish Community Center.
“But we still can’t have services, Murray, without a rabbi. As president, this is your duty, sir.” said the lawyer.
“Just call up the rabbi who was fired.”
“He quit, Murray. He won’t come back. He’s with another synagogue in LA.”
“Then find a new rabbi and send him to my house.”
That Sunday morning an eager friendly young rabbi reported to the house and dad conducted an interview in our den, hiring him immediately after introducing him to my mother and sister, while I tried to hide.
“Your son, Mr. Franklin! He’s bar mitzvah?”
“Well, uh, he’s going to be.”
“He goes to Hebrew school?”
“He’s going to make his bar mitzvah.”
“Wonderful. How proud you must be!”
The very young smiling rabbi, whose smiling wife nodded at me, gazed around at all the baseball pictures and trophies in our den. “A baseball player, too, your son, like his father?”
“He’s a ball player all right.”
“Wonderful. I look forward very much to his bar mitzvah, Mr. Franklin.” I slithered away.
Later that evening dad came into my room. “Dell, you’ve got to make your bar mitzvah now.”
“It’s too late, dad. I can’t learn Hebrew in two months. And besides, nobody’ll teach me. And you can’t send me to that rabbi, because then he’ll really smell a rat.”
“I’ve worked something out, wise guy. Look, it won’t be that tough. You won’t have to miss any baseball. You’ve got to do this for me. I’m president, and it’ll be a disgrace if my Jew-hating kid doesn’t make his bar mitzvah. For once in your life you’ve got to stop being so selfish and doing only what you want to do and make a sacrifice for your pappy. Will you do that, son, for your old man?”
********
Ben Racowsky, a local butcher with a wife and two small children, had grown up in Chicago idolizing my father as an athlete and agreed to prepare me for my bar mitzvah as a personal favor to Dad. Ben worked at Bargain Town, a market in the black section of Compton. The owners of Bargain Town, two Jewish men, lived on the other end of town, and their kids were members of the Jewish Community Center’s teenage club and had been unsuccessfully trying to recruit me, for already Jewish mothers were trying to match up Jewish kids for future matrimony.
Ben came to our house after dinner and mother closed off the den for our first lesson. Ben was short, stocky, with a kind, puckish face, bulging forearms, big gnarled hands, an ex catcher.
“So I hear you’re an anti-Jew,” he said right off.
“Bullshit. I’m a good Jew. I just don’t hang around with Jews, because they’re nerdy brains and don’t play ball.”
“I hear you don’t study in school.” He watched me shrug. “Well, schmuck, I’m going to make it easy for you. You don’t have to learn a single word of Hebrew because it’s too late. We’ve got two lousy months to make your bar mitzvah, so you don’t embarrass your wonderful father.” He took out a notebook. “See, I’ve written out the prayers, and your personal prayer, in English. Since you don’t give a damn about Hebrew, or your religion, we’re going to fake it.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Can you chant?”
“I hate chanting. My father can’t chant. You’ve seen him—doesn’t know a word, turns red, and he’s president of the Jewish community center…he hates services…”
“You know all the answers, don’t you?” He shook his head, already disgusted with me. “Don’t you realize that learning Hebrew, and your religion, and making your bar mitzvah molds your character, makes you a man, and helps you out later in life?”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m not sure I can teach a meathead like you, but I promised your Dad, so here we go.”
We started reading idioms and nuances he’d written in English. After an hour of this I was yawning and daydreaming, and Ben jabbed me hard on the arm to snap me alert, and I jabbed him back, and then he punched me in the arm, and I punched him back, and he punched me harder, and I punched him harder, and he laughed and said I was incorrigible, and we’d meet again in two nights and go over the notebook, and for me to study and recite so I wouldn’t prove myself to be the hopeless dope everybody thought I was. We were both rubbing our biceps when we entered the living room where mom and dad perked up and asked how I was doing. Ben winked at them and said, “So far so good. He’s a real prize.”
*********
As I recited my prayers, Ben yanked the notebook from me and tossed it across the den. “What the hell is WRONG with you? Do you HATE your father? Do you HATE me? You haven’t studied one lousy minute…”
“I studied…”
“Bullshit!” He punched me hard in the bicep. “Don’t lie to me Goyim.” He rolled his eyes, lifted his arms to the heavens as if pleading for help. “I spend hours writing out this half-assed bar mitzvah, the shortest bar mitzvah in the history of the Jewish religion for this dummy…I try to make it easy for him, so even an idiot could learn it in two weeks, and what does he learn? Nothing! You don’t have one lousy hour in your life to learn this stuff?”
“I got other studies, and I’m playing ball…”
“Don’t bullshit me. You don’t study. Why should you? Won’t it be wonderful when you’re grown up and looking for a job, and you tell them you know everything?”
“I’m gonna be a ball player, so who cares?”
He smacked my arm. “Dell, your mother, your father, they love you so much, give you so much, and all they ask in return is you make this half-assed bar mitzvah so they won’t be embarrassed in front of all the people who voted him president of the temple…”
“I say Mickey Mantle’s better than Joe DiMaggio any day, Racowsky.”
He punched me so hard I almost left the chair. “Don’t try and change the subject. We’re here to study, and drum something into that hard head of yours, do you hear me?”
“Yeh yeh. Hey, Mantle’s gonna hit fifty homers this year. When did DiMaggio ever do that?”
“DiMaggio was a better hitter and all around player and hit in 56 straight games. Mantle strikes out too much to do that, dummy.” The he raised his fist as if to smack me, sighed, retrieved my notebook, stood over me. “Read, schmuck!”
I read and chanted. Ben nodded. “Better. You can do this. Millions of Jews have done this for centuries, and so can you.”
*********
A week later I recited and chanted and Ben listened. He made a sour face. “You studied a little, just enough to get by, a half-assed person, a person who, if he doesn’t wise up, will go through life half-assed and end up a bum on the streets mooching off relatives.”
“I told you, I’ll play ball, and afterwards be a broadcaster or manager…”
He punched me in the arm, and I hauled off and punched him back. “Damn, you got a good punch for a kid,” he admitted.
“Dad taught me the one-two.”
He sighed. “Let’s hear you recite, meathead.”
I faked it and put my heart into and he closed his eyes and listened and appeared content. “Ahh, good boy, good Jew, what a strong voice, maybe he’ll grow up some day and be a rabbi or cantor…”
It was our best session, and afterwards, he said, “Look, after you make this bar mitzvah, you’re 13, and I want you to join the teenage club so you can meet nice Jewish girls.”
“Yeh, so I’ll end up marrying one.”
“That’s right. Have you looked around? There are some beautiful girls at the teenage center.”
“Yeh, and they all end up like Mrs. Pearlman…”
He punched me in the arm. “Is your mother like Mrs. Pearlman. Is your mother a yenta?”
“No, but most of those women are biddies and crows, and my dad says the same, and that their husbands are pussies.”
He punched my arm, stood and yelled, “Chant, asshole, chant!”
*********
When my bar mitzvah was two weeks away, Ben became very quiet and sad. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. “I quit,” he said softly. “I can’t take it anymore. You don’t care. I’m sick of it, sick of you. I quit.”
He stood and walked out of the room. By the time I got to the living room he was at the door with dad, mom at his side. “I don’t care anymore, Murray. How can I care if he doesn’t care?”
“By God, Ben, if I have to beat him to do it, I’ll beat him. I’ll sit in that goddam room with him for hours and make him do it.”
“It won’t do any good. I beat him all the time. I’m so sorry.”
Ben walked off the porch and dad followed him to his car, where they stood talking quietly, Ben shrugging, throwing up his hands, shaking his head over and over. Dad finally came back in the house.
“I begged him, like a dog. He’s agreed to give you one last chance. You’ve gotta get up every morning at 6 and report to Ben at Bargain Town and study with him while he sets up his butcher shop. I’ve invested a lot of money for your bar mitzvah. Don’t let me down. If you do, well, it’ll be the lowest point in your father’s life.”
So, in a fog, I rose in the darkness and pedaled my bike 2 miles to Bargain Town. Behind the counter, Ben chopped meat and prodded me to recite, chant, making me repeat the same prayers over and over. The second week I stayed until after the store opened, and since Ben was the first one there every morning he ran the register for the black folks showing up early for eggs, bread, milk and bacon, and while they lined up waiting for Ben to ring them out, he made me recite, and chant.
“Louder, schmuck! Putz. Yutz. Phony. Louder!”
The blacks gawked at me as if I were a space creature while Ben smiled and wise-cracked with them as I chanted.
“What language that boy singin’ in, mistah Ben?”
“Chinese.”
“Chinese? He don’t look like no Chinaman.”
”He’s a different kind of Chinaman. He’s what we call a schwartza yid Chinaman.” He cupped an ear. “Louder, Chinaman!”
“Man, that junk he singin’, it sound awful, mistah Ben.”
“Po’ baby.”
“He’ll be a good Chinaman some day, and make his daddy happy.”
