Bar mitzvah boy (a memoir)

In 1953, when I was in fourth grade at Lea School in West Philadelphia, my parents enrolled me in Friends Central, at the foot of the Main Line. I loved Friends Central, but my father was ambivalent about having a Jewish son in a gentile school.

My father had come out of Tenth and Bainbridge at a time when ethnicity drafted one into bloodier wars than I would experience after we reached 46th and Pine. That ethnicity had denied him jobs and barred him from clubs and taught him, when our family stopped for the night on automobile trips, to send my mother into the motel to ask for a room because her eyes were blue. He took pride in the way he had established himself in the face of these blows and constrictions, and he expected at least a little of that ethnic loyalty from me.

"Jewish boys don't hunt," he told me, when I came home from Friends Central one evening, asking for a .22 rifle like David Kirkpatrick's and Peter Woerner's. "Jewish boys don't play football," he told me in fifth grade, when that option became available as a fall sport.

So partly because the contacts might help his law practice and partly because three doses of Hebrew School a week might immunize me against the identity-eroding effects of the Gentiles, who, for the first time, would form a majority of my associates, our family joined Beth Zion congregation in Center City.

The Center City schlep

I thought this a terrible idea. I don't know when I learned the word "hypocrisy," but once I did, I knew it applied here. If religion was so important, my pre-adolescent mind reasoned, why hadn't we always belonged to a synagogue? If we were going to belong, why didn't we attend services every weekend?

Then there was my desire, at age nine or ten, to fit in with my new Friends Central friends. I wanted to stay after school and play baseball. My ability to hit a curve ball mattered more to me than my mastery of any Four Questions. Nor was I eager to schlep by Red Arrow bus and elevated to 19th and Pine. (About two years into my tenure, Beth Zion moved to its present location, a former church at 18th and Spruce.)

Strange Hebrew letters

Nor did I look forward, once I arrived, to facing the glistening novelty of being considered stupid. I was placed with children who had already studied Hebrew for a year. I had no problem learning about Abraham and Isaac and Judah Maccabee in our history text— which, sensibly, like all good things, was published in English— but when it came to reading or writing or speaking those funny letters, I would have stood more chance wrestling, one-armed, the Zebra Kid and Mr. Moto. (From four years' attendance, I retain that baruch means "blessed" and yelda means "girl""“ unless it means "boy.")

The highlights of my matriculation were (a) Carol E., a classmate of great sophistication, who taught me about menstruation; (b) a take-no-crap teacher, recently emigrated from eastern Europe, who hypnotizied a trouble-making boy and set him clucking like a chicken; and (c) cutting class one rainy afternoon, spotting Stan Musial and Red Schoendienst in the lobby of a downtown movie theater, and getting their autographs in my lesson book.

Dad draws the line

The Minotaur lurking at the end of this labyrinth was my bar mitzvah. By eighth grade, my father no longer objected to the prospect of a football player in a Jewish family. But my bar mitzvah was non-negotiable. A part of my father scorned his friends who'd discharged their sons from this obligation. It seemed to taint them with a weakness he wouldn't allow others to perceive in him.

Once lessons began, my voice proved incapable of carrying a tune. Cantor Mandleblatt, a friendly and decent man, offered the dispensation that I might read my haftorah portion. But my reading was so strained and imbecilic that he was forced to reduce the portion by three-quarters.

I mean, I could sound out the letters, but I had no clue whether I was producing noun or verb or preposition. Emphasis? Intonation? Rhythm? I was adrift on a raft of squawks. The only portion of the experience that provided pleasure was reading the dirty parts of Battle Cry in the back seat of my father's Lincoln, with my fictitious "friends" Andy, Danny and Ski accompanying me in the blue-and-white chromed tumbril as we headed toward the guillotine.

A simpler ceremony

Of my bar mitzvah itself, I recall mercifully little. No cabbages were thrown by the assembled Levins and Levines. No guffaws issued from the Rothmans and Rosenbaums. Neither Kelner nor Kelmer nor Kessler nor Katz demanded the re-attachment of my foreskin.

This was a simpler time, before circus tests were required for post-ceremony festivities or acrobatic troupes deemed necessary to entertain the assembled. Instead, everyone marched upstairs from the sanctuary for a modest luncheon. I was released to a table with neighborhood friends who, their own days of reckoning looming, regarded me as if I was escaping from Guadalcanal just as they were wading ashore. My tablemates also included a few gentile buddies from Friends Central, who had come to experience another sect's rituals as if they were Margaret Mead on Pago Pago.

I worked the room, where assorted Buick dealers and GE distributors, car wash owners and cold cuts magnates thrust envelopes into my hand or pocket.

Five decades later

Even from the perspective of five decades, my passage seems to have had little to do with who I was— or was slated to become. Some youthful experiences I found painful (like inoculations) or demeaning (like having to wait an extra year for my driver's license), but by now I can grant that my parents acted in my best interests. But my bar mitzvah still seems mandated solely by my father's need to shape me in his image.

It doesn't surprise me now to think, given the cloak of infallibility within which my father presented himself in all matters— from the virtues of Adlai Stevenson to the uselessness of Del Ennis in clutch situations— that despite my protestations, deep down I may have accepted his belief as to the significance of the ceremony in question.

That afternoon, you see, my family flew to Florida for a week in Coral Gables. On my first swim in the Atlantic, a Portuguese man o' war lanced me squarely on the tuchis, painfully suggesting to me that there was indeed a God; that a recording of my bar mitzvah performance had just reached Him; and that He had just delivered to me His utterly fitting critical judgment.♦


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