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.

My Life in Air Conditioning

Most people my age probably remember a time before air conditioning.  Before central air, anyway.  My first  memories of air conditioning are all tangled up with ancient resentments. We lived in an attached house on a tree-lined street in Queens, but the house belonged to my grandmother.  The first of her two children had gotten married and brought their spouses home to live under their parents' roof for a couple of years, before buying a house a few blocks away, Italian-style, and producing grandchildren.  My father, the baby, did the first part, but some time between bringing his bride home and getting me started, his father died. 

That may or may not have made the difference.  I arrived, named for that grandfather. A few years later my sister arrived. We never moved out till we left home.  

The first air conditioner to move in went into my grandmother’s bedroom, which, being largest and in the back, with a double window onto the back yard, was the most comfortable to start with.  Huge, it went into a sleeve they built into the back wall. Her children from the other two houses often visited her there, if not downstairs, and that’s where she used to watch Divorce Court, the Defenders, and Queen for a Day, on the second TV. 

Of course, being a lot older than anyone else, my grandmother probably had more need of an air conditioner than the rest of us, but I didn’t quite see it that way.  For me, it was just one more proof of our relative unimportance to my father.  On hot nights my sister and I sweltered in a room not much larger than our bunk bed, while a small metal fan clanked back and forth.  With our window and the bathroom window open in the back, we theoretically had what my parents called “cross ventilation.”  They also must have relied on fans in the second bedroom, without cross ventilation.

But when it was miserable enough, I could also sleep on a mattress on the floor in my grandmother’s room, between her bedframe on one side and the bullion fringe of her grey upholstered chair on the other. Heaven! Comfort! Crisp, non-clinging sheets! And a nice even thrum of the AC to drown out any potential snores.  I think I was the only one to take this option.  I don’t recall if resentment kept me from sleeping there more often, at the time, or to whom I might have directed it.  I do remember the blessed relief of entering that room. And the draining heat of leaving it.

My sister and I eventually moved into the cooler basement room, half underground, after the tenant moved out. My grandmother died a few years after that. Her bedroom furniture lay in state for a year or so until my aunt finally took it, and my parents moved in. And some time before any of these things happened, they put a sleeve in the dining room back wall and air conditioned the downstairs.

The first house my husband and I bought in NJ, back in 1983, had an in-wall unit labelled "Vornado." This was a brand once sold by Two Guys, a department store, like Bambergers, that my NJ aunts shopped in while my New Yorker mom shopped at Macy's and Alexanders. I felt more rooted to New Jersey by virtue of that old air conditioner, which for many years after Two Guys had closed still did an ok job of cooling down the living and dining room and kitchen. It didn't reach the bedrooms too well, though.  We had a separate window unit for our bedroom. Also its switch no longer worked; we operated it through the circuit breaker downstairs.

Central air was a must-have for our second house.  Relief comes now from the humming outdoor enclosure and an octopus-like contraption in the attic whose tentacles reach the vents in every ceiling. Sanctuary, the moment you step in from the garage or the front door. The freedom to move from room to room in consistent comfort.  But wasteful; I wish I could seal off an unused bedroom or at least have two-zone control. We close off the laundry room and half bath just so we can visit the true temperature from inside and appreciate the difference. And as soon as the heat wave relents, we open the windows and turn on the paddle fans.  

Circle Lodge

We're going up to Circle Lodge tomorrow.  Here's something I wrote about the place two years ago, on a similar trip. 

           *                                              *                                              *

You can’t find Circle Lodge, the Dutchess County, NY resort established by the Workmen’s Circle in 1927, on Trip Advisor. I’ve tried and failed to add it there, in an attempt to forestall its imminent passage into American Jewish history.  

It would be a major mitzveh.  You only need enough people under 75 to find kindred spirits among the guests you meet there today – the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Arbeiter Ring’s Yiddishist, socialist founders.  With that fresh blood, the place could and should survive a bit longer, embracing a few more generations in its liberal, worldly Jewish literacy. 

They had a little fire in an air conditioning unit the last time
we were at Circle Lodge. We got to see some of Dutchess
County's Finest. Nobody was hurt. 

The food is great; you can gain just as much weight here as in the Catskills, which are on the other side of the Hudson and further north.  Come to think of it, Circle Lodge has outlived the Catskills that we non-Socialist Jews knew; those resorts all having closed or gone super-Orthodox.

Circle Lodge’s entertainment and cultural programming are secular Jewish, humanist and global in outlook. The lake is nice (once shared with a Jewish camp that leaned further left; they didn't speak to each other), the cottage rooms from another age but decently maintained, with screened in porches for reading and mah jongg.  And the guests, many 80-plus, are great role models: outgoing, intellectually active and curious, still sharing experiences and laughs over the table after careers spent as teachers, doctors, and other socially useful occupations.  The resort’s golf carts continually zip them from registration to cabin and up the hill to the dining hall and folk dances, movies, lectures and bridge games.

On our last two visits there, we were comped with a lakeside cabin; my husband came to give talks on topics of Jewish historical or linguistic interest.  This July about half that day’s guests attended, the rest having come for Bridge week. Yiddish Voch (Yiddish Week) is the biggest draw, a week devoted to Yiddish classes at all levels, literature and music.

The resort’s wooden buildings are large, decorated with murals and full of camp sports and cultural history, named for literary and historical greats and Workmen’s Circle luminaries known by previous generations.  The library, theater/social hall, gazebo, waterfront and one of the pools are shared with KinderRing, the children’s camp born out of the same secular Yiddish political and cultural outlook, also in 1927. 

This year I met Barnett Zumoff, 85, who had served as camp physician for over 50 years; the infirmary on the KinderRing side is named for him.  Today he’s still playing tennis and translating Yiddish poetry.  I also re-met Zisl Slepovitch, recently from Minsk and under 40.  Zisl has a Music PhD from Moscow, teaches at Brandeis and other places, speaks English, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish, and served as musical director of the latest show running in New York’s Folksbeine, the only surviving Yiddish theater in America.  

I’d first met him a month earlier, while riding Folksbeine’s float in the Salute to Israel parade down Fifth Avenue.  He was playing a mean klezmer clarinet.  I also met Helen Bloch Cooper, a pretty almost-90 actress on the Yiddish stage, who needed some help getting her email from one of the Circle Lodge computers, in the room next to the snack bar.  Most of the PC users are foreign KinderRing counselors, here for the summer, who Skype home to parents and friends.  After they sign off, the computers boot up with Cyrillic interfaces.  

An Irish-born counselor gamely tried to help Ms. Cooper get her AOL mail – she couldn’t remember her password – while she alternately showered him with thanks and apologies for her failing memory.  But the counselor wound up registering her to a whole new account, and she feared that all her messages were lost.  After he left, and with the help of AOL’s Indian tech support, I proved to her that her old account still lived.

Also at my table: two middle-aged women from Jackson Heights, Queens, who spoke Spanish and seemed a little self-conscious.  We got to chatting; one of them turned out to be the widow of a former Circle Lodge cook. She still thought it a fine place to spend a few days’ vacation, with trips to nearby Hyde Park (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family compound) and the Culinary Institute of America.  Also a couple, he 100, she 95, brought for the whole month of July by their 70-something daughter and son-in-law.  While the food is served buffet-style, the dining room staff served Max and his wife. Everyone, guests included, were eager to offer help he didn’t want. 

You also typically find a few Russian Jews.

This being a Yiddishist place, at least historically, the buffet room is decorated with posters of YiddiShpeil, the Israel-based Yiddish-language troupe. When I first came, over 10 years ago, program director Michal Baron  started our day at breakfast with a news summary in Yiddish. Michal and his wife are still working here, but this has been discontinued.  With a few holdouts, the fluent Yiddish speakers were today’s guests’ parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  But the 80-somethings’ children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren come as well, many of them KinderRing alumni.

Since I married into the Jewish left, I have no history or relatives among the regulars at Circle Lodge. But I did study Yiddish, in college.  So I know something of the philosophy and enjoy striking up conversations and poking around, in the library and at the wall hangings.