By Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)
We were Jewish when I was growing up,
American-style, New York-style Jewish,
the way our nearby kosher deli was kosher
but not kosher enough to be patronized by
the more religious Chasidim.
We patronized our local Temple Beth-El annually
on the High Holy days and smiled at all the strangers
in the fully seated congregation, pretended to
listen to the Hebrew prayers, imitated davening
with the others and nodded greetings of the day
when we all left to comfortably return to our
secular homes and apartments.
We knew that we were Jewish by the way we rooted
for the new-born state of Israel to survive the cold-
blooded attacks on its inchoate survival, by the way
our friends celebrated holidays that others didn’t recognize,
by the pride we felt when we noted the success of Uncle Miltie,
the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Danny Kaye,
Red Buttons, Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas — and rooted
hard for Sandy Koufax (even as we privately kvelled
in the memory of the grand accomplishments of the player
and the man named Hank Greenberg, who, I later found out,
had attended the same high school as I did).
My father didn’t make a big deal about religion,
never spoke about his European youth, and called me
Chaim (never once using my American name).
It wasn’t till my own old age (sixty years after he
found his forever home in Jewish Heaven)
that the wisdom came to me to comprehend
my Jewish-Yiddish name.
He had escaped the hell of his Polish ghetto and
had married a Latvian beauty of a similar escape and,
after they thought they were done filling our home
with loving girls, ten years later, I appeared, a son,
to be loved without condition, a son who somehow
represented life, a promise of the continuation,
not so much of our Jewishness but of our name
and our mystical — more than mythical — connection
to Moses and David and our new heroes of the decade
of my birth, with names like Herzl, Ben-Gurion,
Eban, Dayan, Allon and Meir.
We Jews know well how to survive and thrive.
We understand the holiness and the value and vitality of life.
Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.
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