Members of the Tribe (29 page)

“I’m not really Orthodox,” Susan protested. She is a lawyer, and she has a scrupulous regard for fact. “I do keep kosher though, and I try to observe Shabbes. It’s the way I was raised.”

Susan was born and grew up in Cleveland, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. While Harvey was playing tennis and chasing girls at B’nai B’rith conventions in high school, she lived in the dark, melancholy world of the survivors’ community; when he was storming the Pentagon, she was at Case Western Reserve University, studying law and plotting her escape.

“You ought to interview Susan for your book,” Harvey said. He turned to Susan. “Ze’ev’s writing a book on American Jews.” “In that case, I can’t help you,” she said. “I’m not an American Jew.”

“What are you, then?” I asked.

“The daughter of survivors. That’s something completely different. My parents were ‘greeners’—you know, greenhorns. They lived with other greeners. We had nothing to do with American Jews,” she said.

To Susan, American Jews are, first and foremost, Americans—products of an optimistic, prosperous, and tolerant society. As a girl she felt uncomfortable around them; her family was poor, pessimistic, and wracked with pain from the Holocaust.

“When I was in high school I did great with the Catholic boys,” she said. “I liked them better than the immigrant Jewish kids I knew. You know how queer guys like that are.” I recalled what a sociologist once told me—in America, Orthodox Jews marry Catholics, Reform Jews marry Protestants.

Susan wasn’t about to marry any kind of gentile (“My father would have committed suicide”); instead she married, and later divorced, a Jewish doctor from a working-class family. Now she was with Harvey, who considers himself a Buddhist and whom she considers an American Jew.

At nine o’clock we turned on the TV to catch a talk by the Lubavitcher rebbe, which was being broadcast live by satellite from Brooklyn. The rebbe sat on a platform surrounded by black-garbed disciples. He spoke in Yiddish with an English translation that Harvey and I needed but Susan didn’t. Harvey was visibly
taken with the white-bearded Chasidic mystic, and from time to time he murmured an approving “Far out.”

After the broadcast, Harvey peppered us with questions about the Chasidim, which Susan answered with an indulgent fondness. He may have written eight books about America, but he knew very little about the modern history of the Jews. “Sometimes when I watch something like that I feel like a real goy,” he admitted cheerfully.

“If you were a goy, you wouldn’t be here,” said Susan. She turned to me. “You’re an Israeli, so I suppose you’ll understand this. I wanted another child but I didn’t necessarily want to get married again. Neither did Harvey. We haven’t decided what to do about that. But I had one absolute condition. The father had to be a Jew. Harvey’s great, I love him. But even more important, I could trace his family all the way back to his great-grandparents, and all of them were Jews.”

“Why is that so important?” I asked.

Susan’s dark eyes flashed, and the softness left her face. “I could never have a child with a gentile, or even someone with gentile blood. You see, somewhere in his genetic history there could be someone who put my family into the gas chamber.”

Susan and Harvey were still on my mind when I flew back to Detroit the next day, picked up a car at Metro Airport, and headed east for Grosse Pointe, a WASP suburb with a national reputation for bigotry. I had never been there before; when I was growing up, Grosse Pointe was a kind of forbidden city, enemy territory. In those days, Jews weren’t allowed to live in. Today it is still beyond the pale of settlement, and the tiny handful of Jews who live there are making a statement. I was on my way to see one of them, a young lawyer named Jody Kommel, who lives in Grosse Pointe with her Catholic husband and their small son, Scott.

It was Jody’s mother, Eve Kommel, who set up the meeting. Eve is a handsome, athletic woman in her fifties who came to America as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. She has achieved minor celebrity in Detroit as the commodore of the Great Lakes Yacht Club, probably the only Jewish yacht club in America. It was founded in the 1950s, when Jews weren’t welcome in the city’s mainline yachting associations. Now the club
faces an unanticipated problem—it has been so successful it is now flooded with Christian applicants.

This situation has split Great Lakes into two factions—those who favor a quota to retain the Jewish nature of the club, and those who oppose it as a form of reverse bigotry. Commodore Kommel favors open membership, and in the course of explaining why, she mentioned, without evident disapproval or dismay, that all three of her children were married to non-Jews and that one, Jody, lived in Grosse Pointe. “Why don’t you go out and talk to her about what it’s like?” she had suggested, and I readily agreed.

I arrived at Jody’s prepared to dislike her. Especially after Susan, the idea of a woman with a refugee mother living out in WASPland and trying to pass offended my Jewish nationalism. My first impression of Jody Kommel did nothing to change my attitude. She was tall, athletic, and blue-eyed, with long red hair and freckles. She greeted me in the direct, friendly manner of the captain of the girls’ field hockey team and steered me to a seat in her tastefully tweedy living room.

As she sat down across from me I was amazed to see she had a large Star of David dangling from her neck on a gold chain. She caught me staring, fingered the charm, and smiled.

“When we first moved out here, I was afraid that people wouldn’t know I was Jewish, and they’d make anti-Semitic remarks,” she said. “I wanted to preempt that, let them know who I was—I guess warn them, in a way. My husband was very much against it. His attitude was, it’s better to know if someone’s a bigot, then we can avoid them. But I don’t think that’s fair. So I wear it.”

The notion that the charm was to protect the feelings of anti-Semites annoyed me. “It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” I said. “Your grandparents had to wear Jewish Stars in Germany and now you’ve got yourself one out here in Grosse Pointe.”

She nodded slowly, thinking it over. “I guess it is ironic, yes. But, to be honest, we haven’t had all that many problems out here. Nobody seems to care one way or the other. Now, sometimes in my law firm people let go with a joke, little remarks about Jews being cheap or sharp in business, something like that. I wonder about people who kid around like that, you know?” There was an angry edge to her voice that surprised me.

“Does it really matter all that much to you?” I asked her.

“Does what matter?”

“What people say about Jews. I mean, you’re married to a Catholic, you live out here …” I gestured out the window in the general direction of the blond world of Grosse Pointe.

“No, no, no, you don’t understand,” she said in a soft, emotional voice. “I can’t even
tell
you how strongly I feel about this. I’m not here on purpose. I never intended to marry a Christian. It just happened, that’s all.

“See, when I was growing up I never dated Jewish boys—I was a jock and they weren’t. But I always planned to marry one. In college I dated a gentile boy for four years, and I broke up with him because I couldn’t handle his belief in Christianity.

“Then I met Jeff in law school. On our second date I told him, ‘I won’t love you unless you promise it won’t be a problem raising our children Jewish.’ He cracked up. ‘Why don’t we get to know each other first?’ he said. I must have sounded like a nut. But it was that important to me.”

Before the wedding, Jody took Jeff to Temple Beth El, Detroit’s upscale Reform synagogue, for ten weeks of classes on Judaism. The ceremony itself took place in the temple. “I told him that raising our children Jewish was a condition for getting married at Temple Beth El,” she recalled with a sour grin. “And then the rabbi told him it wasn’t. So I said, ‘Sorry, rabbi, I’m going to raise them Jewish anyway.’ ”

She was torpedoed by her mother on another issue. “Jeff wanted a Christmas tree, and I just couldn’t deal with that, I couldn’t handle the idea at all. We had a discussion about it that turned into a real argument. And then my mother told us that when I was small, we had a tree at home. That ruined my opposition. So this year we put up Christmas lights and had a tree in the basement. Next year it’ll probably be upstairs. But it still makes me uncomfortable.

“Listen, being Jewish is the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t know where the feeling comes from, but I feel it in my gut. I sometimes almost get sick. I’ll hear something on television about Jews, or maybe meet another person, another Jew I didn’t know was Jewish, and I get a hard lump in my chest, a
feeling of pride and a feeling that I need to protect this other person.”

Jody took a deep breath, and I looked around her living room. There was nothing there that gave even a hint of her attitude—not a single Jewish book, painting, or ceremonial object. Only the gold star dangling from her neck.

“Where does this feeling come from?” I asked her, and she bit her lip in contemplation.

“It’s strange, but I actually don’t know. It’s just something in me. Sometimes I even lay in bed wondering, would I give up my life to protect Judaism? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m going to keep the religion going and defend it. My son will have a bar mitzvah, he’ll know all the prayers and our history. He’ll be a Jew, I’m absolutely determined about that. When he gets older, we’re going to move to a Jewish neighborhood.”

“Why a Jewish neighborhood?” I asked.

“Why?” she said, and her clear blue eyes clouded. “So he can be with his own people. I don’t want him to be an outsider.”

O
n the shore of Lake Kiamesha, in the heart of New York’s Catskill Mountains, stands the Concord Hotel. Built in 1937, it is a monument to overstatement, the heavyweight champ of resort spas. The Concord has 1,200 rooms and a capacity of more than 2,000, three golf courses (one, known as “The Monster,” is 6,793 yards long), and five nightclubs, including the world’s biggest, the 24,000-square-foot Imperial Room.

The Concord’s attitude toward food makes Henry VIII seem like Jane Fonda. The main dining room can accommodate 3,500 at one sitting and offers a style of service that the hotel describes as “instantaneous feeding.” Patrons annually consume 100,000 pounds of butter, 450 tons of meat, and 4 million fresh eggs, not to mention 10,000 pounds of cream cheese. The Concord is the Alamo of cholesterol, the place where animal fat has chosen to make its last stand.

The hotel’s ideology of excess is designed to appeal to people with big appetites. For that reason it is the perfect venue for Singles’ Weekend, a Catskills institution that periodically
brings together 1,800 of the hungriest-hearted young Jews in America.

The Concord is exceptionally image conscious, and it does not want to be characterized as a Jewish resort. It would much rather be regarded as a plain old all-American Eden, nonsectarian and free of its one-time ethnicity. Its publicity, for example, does not mention the fact that the hotel is strictly kosher and that there are rabbis constantly on the prowl to make sure it stays that way. Instead, it discreetly informs guests that “any prescribed diet for adults or children can be arranged at the Concord.” There is a synagogue (but no church) on the premises but the hotel is not anxious to advertise it; its literature neutrally advises patrons to consult the desk for a schedule of religious services.

Hotel personnel are encouraged to play down the Jewish angle, but if pressed they admit that perhaps two-thirds of the Singles’ Weekend guests are Jews. In fact, the proportion of Jews at these affairs is pretty close to the percentage of Muslims in downtown Mecca. Gentiles who come to a Concord Singles’ Weekend come on its terms—gefilte fish, kosher wine, and all. For them the hotel may be a cheap resort, or a good place to pick up girls. But for the Jewish singles of Queens and Brooklyn, the Bronx and Long Island, it is a kind of secular shrine, a borscht belt Lourdes that offers a cure for the most painful of all American afflictions—loneliness.

To see this shrine in action I made my own pilgrimage to the shores of Lake Kiamesha, arriving on a snowy Friday evening. For weeks I had heard stories about the event from friends, some of whom refused to believe I would drive three hours through winter weather to a hotel full of single women just for the sake of research. “You’re not going to believe it,” one friend told me. “They jump you in the parking lot. You’re going to go wild up there.”

I braced myself, but when I got to the lot there were no sex fiends anywhere; just a pimply teenage boy who welcomed me in a friendly way and pointed me in the direction of the lobby.

“Lobby” fails to do justice to the foyer of the Concord. It is roughly the size of the Silverdome, and when I arrived it was the scene of mass chaos. Hundreds of young people stood in line for room assignments and hundreds more milled around the check-in
counter or surged through the room in aimless patterns. I was a guest of the hotel, and Mike Hall, the Concord’s publicity man, went to the head of the line to get my key. Some of the others saw this favoritism, but no one objected. Standing in line is a part of the Concord experience. “It’s as good a place as any to meet people,” Hall said. “A lot of couples have found each other waiting in line for room assignments.”

There are various ways to meet members of the opposite sex at the Concord, and few of them are subtle. On the other hand, there is no reason for subtlety. The hotel is a three-hour drive from civilization, and no one just drops in for a drink. People are there on purpose, and this makes them both bolder and more shy than they might normally be—torn between a fear of lost opportunity (not to mention wasted money), and the dread knowledge that if you make a fool of yourself with someone, you will undoubtedly keep bumping into each other for the entire weekend.

The most organized way to get acquainted is through the
Meeters’ Digest
. The
Digest
is the Concord’s contribution to fix-up journalism, a gazette of do-it-yourself personal ads, like the ones that appear in
New York Magazine
or
The Village Voice
. Submitted on Friday before dinner, the ads are numbered, collated by the staff in a frenzied, all-night effort, and distributed in the form of a thick computer printout in time for Saturday breakfast.