A Jewish Christmas Tradition

American Jews go out to eat Chinese for Christmas. According to an article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jews heading out to Chinese restaurants on Christmas is not a myth. It’s science! It’s been studied. And they proceed to cite various services and agencies that have gathered statistics to prove it, with Szechuan chicken being the most popular dish.

They go on to mention Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2010 when she was asked by Lindsey Graham where she was on Christmas day and she replied, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

American Jews may not celebrate Christmas, but they do, apparently, have a Christmas tradition. Somehow or other, in the mid-20^th century, Jews in the Northeast, especially in New York, began to go out to eat Chinese.

Explanations of how Chinese food on Christmas came about all seem a bit wanting. This article says that Chinese food was acceptable because whatever pork or shellfish there may have been was chopped up into such tiny pieces that you couldn’t identify them. I don’t think so.

The explanation that Chinese restaurants were among the few that were open on Christmas is the standard explanation, but then why didn’t they just go to a kosher deli?.

In any case, being a non-religious, non-observant Jew who wants to participate in my people’s traditions, I decided to go eat Chinese on Thursday. I don’t particularly like Chinese food, but it was Christmas.

So I went to the big Chinese buffet, and it turns out that in addition to Szechuan chicken, spring rolls, and sweet and sour pork, they have paella, fideua, sausages, and all manner of Spanish and other food to choose from. The choice was substantial and so was the place, a huge space that sits 300 or more, and surprise, surprise, it was almost full with far more people than I expected. Some were speaking Spanish, but the majority were speaking Arabic and the women were wearing headscarves. Here, where there are no Jews (I am probably the only Jew in the city), it’s the Moroccans who go out to eat Chinese for Christmas. I wonder if they know they have adopted an age-old Jewish tradition.

 

 

Pumpkin

My cat Pumpkin died in Barcelona 22 years ago yesterday. I don’t have his ashes and I didn’t bury them anywhere. I was younger then and stupid and it didn’t occur to me that I could do that. But I still remember him and always mark the day; he is someone I will never forget and I have his photo up on my fridge along with my other little loved ones who have passed away.

All my pets seem to have marked an era. Pumpkin was the involuntary hero who flew with me from the Bay Area to Barcelona on my great adventure when I moved here in 2001. In fact, he flew with me twice because I came once in 1999, then again in 2001. He wasn’t a particularly brave cat but he was capable of enduring what had to be endured. The plane rides weren’t comfortable for either of us, but I did arrange for him to sit with me in the cabin, tucked under my feet, turning me into a pretzel and him into a yowling, unhappy passenger.

Pumpkin came from the Oakland SPCA. How anyone could surrender or abandon such a beautiful cat is beyond me. When he first came home with me to the apartment on Vine Street in Berkeley where I lived at the time, he was a scaredy cat who spent the first few days under the bed.

Pumpkin moved with me from Vine Street to Spruce, later to Bancroft, then to El Cerrito, then San Leandro, then Barcelona. For a scaredy cat, he did pretty well as far as traveling and moving home goes.

Pumpkin died an expat cat in Barcelona on 18 October, 2003. He was about 12 years old and one of the great loves of my life.

Millionaires and the Melting Pot

I’ve been meaning to post something for a long time, but somehow it hasn’t happened. However, today I got inspired. What is written below wasn’t written by me, I’ve just typed it up from the book I happen to be reading. The book is Letter from New York by Helene Hanff. It is a collection of beautifully written short essays that she wrote monthly, years ago, for the BBC Radio program “Woman’s Hour.” This one, from March 1981, seems particularly apropos today.

March 1981

I wish to enlist your sympathy for the poor millionaires who live on Fifth Avenue, in New York’s most expensive town houses and co-op apartments. With the coming of the warm months, they’re braced for a long succession of parades up Fifth Avenue, Sunday after Sunday.

These parades are ethnic. Take the Pulaski Day and von Steuben Day parades, in honour of European generals who fought in our War of Independence. Pulaski was a Pole, von Steuben was German, so the Pulaski Day parade is organized by Polish New Yorkers, the von Steuben Day parade by German New Yorkers. There are parades on Greek Independence Day, Puerto Rico Day, Salute to Israel Day, Philippine Independence Day, and so forth, including Captive Nations Day for Armenian, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Romanian New Yorkers.

All these parades go straight up Fifth Avenue, which means that at 8 a.m. of a spring Sunday the occupants of a town house are wakened by the boom-boom of the drum and the raucous blare of a trumpet, as the first marching band tunes up under their windows. It will be followed by twenty more marching bands and the millionaires will get no peace for the rest of the day.

The millionaires formed Community Action Groups and demanded that the city issue parades permits only for weekdays. But this was fought by Fifth Avenue merchants, since parade crowds impede shoppers and are bad for business. So the millionaires demanded that the city move its Sunday parades to some other Avenue. This, the city could not do. You can’t give one ethnic group the right to march up Fifth Avenue and tell all other groups to march somewhere else.

When a century ago the first ethnic groups held a parade, it had its right to use Fifth Avenue written into the City Charter. That group still holds the city’s biggest and most popular parade, popular even with the millionaires since it’s never on a Sunday. The parade is held on March 17^th, and when that falls on a Sunday it’s held on the 18^th because the parade is in honour of St Patrick’s Day, with a reviewing stand in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

St Patrick’s Day is unique in New York; for some reasons known to nobody, on March 17^th the entire city becomes Irish. But I have to tell you about the one never-to-be-forgotten St Patrick’s Day, back in the Sixties.

New York has always had a large Irish Catholic population and a small Irish Protestant population. But one year in the Sixties the Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, was to be guest of honour at the St Patrick’s Day parade and the newspapers announced that Robert Briscoe was not an Irish Catholic, nor yet an Irish Protestant, but – Heaven bless us – an Irish Jew. I mean to tell you, the Jewish population of New York went completely out of its mind.

Cohen’s clothing store and Goldberg’s Meat Market painted green O-aposrophes on their signs and became O’Cohen’s and O’Goldberg’s for the day. Delicatessens sold green bagels, kosher restaurants served green matzoh-balls and green noodles in their soup. Whole Hebrew schools turned out for that parade as the annual sea of green floats, marching bands, and schoolgirls in green shorts rolled past the Cathedral, before the three dignitaries on the reviewing stand: Jewish Mayor Briscoe of Dublin and Protestant Mayor Lindsay of New York, with the Catholic Cardinal between them.

Well, this year’s St Patrick’s Day parade has just come and gone and the long Sunday parade season looms ahead. Which brings us back to the millionaires. Why do they put up with it? Why don’t they move?

They’ll keep fighting to have the parades moved to some other day or some other Avenue. But they know that those ethnic parades, which would be unimaginable in any other great city in the world, are the essence of this one, the visible signs of that melting pot out of which New York was created. They know it, because millionaires, too, are descended from poor immigrants, beckoned here by the Statue in the harbour, holding out hope of a better life. So the millionaires and the marchers are all kin – all New Yorkers – like the rest of us.

Books and Roses

The 23^rd of April is the feast day of Saint George. George was the knight who slew the dragon and saved the princess; and a red rose grew where the dragon’s blood had fallen. The legend here is that he did that in Montblanc, a small town inland from Barcelona. He is a very popular saint, patron of many places, proclaimed the patron saint of Catalonia in 1456.

I live in Catalonia where the holiday has traditionally been celebrated by a man giving a woman a red rose. But in 1931, this changed. Both Shakespeare and Cervantes died on 23 April and here in Catalonia, that day was adopted as the day of the book, coupled with the Sant Jordi tradition, it became the Day of the Book and the Rose. In 1995, UNESCO adopted 23 April as World Book Day.

 Sant Jordi is by far the nicest holiday in Catalonia. It isn’t a bank holiday, but even when it falls on a work day, like it did this year, everyone spills out to the Rambla of their town to walk up and down, buy roses and books, say hi to friends, and enjoy the atmosphere. This Wednesday there were 2 million books sold in Catalonia (that has a population of 7 million people) and 7 million roses. Men give roses to their lovers and vice versa, people give roses to their parents, siblings, friends, co-workers. I didn’t see that many people walking around carrying books, but almost everyone was carrying one or more roses.

I was there for the books, specifically my own book about Catalonia. Last year was the first time I participated in the festival as an author and bookseller. I liked being on the other side of the table, and I did it again this year, once again sharing a table with my friend Teresa in the section for local authors.