A (Yiddish) Street Fair on Madison Ave

Last Sunday my husband and I drove into Manhattan to meet friends at Yiddishfest, billed as an event of Yiddish music and social justice causes. These two things often go together, as fans of Yiddish have an historical predilection for underdogs, workers' rights and socially progressive movements.  (Actual surviving native speakers of Yiddish, on the other hand -- Hasidim -- have a historical predilection for rejecting public school budgets and voting en masse for whichever conservative politician gives them the best multi-family zoning variances.)

Needless to say, there were no Hasidim or even visibly Orthodox Jews at Yiddishfest.  There were not that many people of any kind, and most had just happened upon the Yiddish element by chance, while walking past the outdoor stage on Madison Ave. between 47th and 48th. 

Some literature tables broke up the long lines of
tchotchke vendors at Yiddishfest

The stage sat in the middle of the advertised ten streets of Yiddishfest, nine tenths of which turned out to be a generic street fair: the same old stands of gyros, zeppoles  and smoothies, "Murano-style" glass pendants, made-in-India summer dresses, sheet sets, socks, miscellaneous kitchen gadgets and grooming tchotchkes.    

Also, it was raining. It wasn’t too bad; we had umbrellas and the performers had cover. Pete Seeger's Walkabout Clearwater Chorus sang union songs, leaving the union-themed Solidarity Singers, a group my husband occasionally sings with, to do their political parodies.  The man I heard singing Yiddish standards -- starting with "Romania" -- was a Sean Mahoney -- "No Baloney!" (Ever see Jimmy Cagney’s Yiddish clip on YouTube? Priceless.) Totally convincing, he was lead singer of the Goldenland Klezmer band.

 I wandered off in search of a nice Jewish gyro.  Some Jewish organizations still clinging to the left had literature tables interspersed among the food and tchotchke vendors; I noticed HaBonim Dror, the Anne Frank Center, and the Workmen’s Circle (they of the afore-blogged Circle Lodge).  Not one trinket or smoothie being sold all around these organizations could possibly have been union made, an irony certainly lost on the vendors.

Back between 47^th and 48^th, a tall woman with long brown hair approached me with her iPhone, asking me if I knew how to take video with it.  She had just gotten it, she said, and wanted some video of the singers. I told her I had an Android, but I knew how to take video on that and I'd take a look to see if it worked the same way.  

"It's not in English," she said, as she handed me the phone. It was in Hebrew.

 “That's good, too,"   I said, in Hebrew.  I hadn’t detected an Israeli accent and sure enough, this Devorah had been born and mostly raised in New York, and had lived in Israel for most of her adult life. 

An interior designer, mother of three grown men, a divorcee and the widow of a famous soldier shot down over Lebanon in 1982 -- “that’s my yichus,” she said --  she was treating herself to a trip for her birthday.  She deserved “a little peace and quiet," she said, and admitted to being almost exactly my age.  I told her she must've stayed out of the sun all those years.  

I got the rear-facing video camera to work. We showed each other pictures of our kids the way people do nowadays, on our phones, chatted in Hebrew and of course switched to English. I was just thinking about giving her my card when she suddenly said goodbye, wished me a good day, opened her umbrella and walked away.    

Still using our phones, we also met up with my friend Mark and his significant other, a sweet man he's been with for 12 years.  Recently unemployed at 60+, Mark was pretty miserable.  Merely underemployed myself, I sympathized. Mark and I go way back and have several core things in common, including a good eye for the absurd and a strong but unmonetizable ear for languages.  We had both taken shelter in IT jobs soon after college, he veering off into training and tech writing, me into trade journalism and technical marcomm -- all Internet casualties, to one degree  or another.

We continued this New Yorky day in kind -- with the new Woody Allen movie in its first

View from Roosevelt Island -- UN is at left

weekend.  A line of my people stretched around the block.  If we hadn’t bought tickets online with mobile Fandango from 12 blocks further south, we never would have made the 2:45 screening.  After the film, in a moment of mad impetuousness and with Woody Allen's Manhattan vistas still in mind, we hopped a Roosevelt Island tram over the turbulent East River. Then with help from Yelp, we found the Japanese restaurant of this tidy little island refuge.  And it was good!

We trammed and then hiked back to our car, which was parked and neither molested nor ticketed at the end of Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, borderline distance from a pump. We stole back into New Jersey, feeling lucky.