Members of the Tribe (35 page)

Both Rafa and Valerie socialize mostly with other Hispanic Jews. Rafa often attends the Cuban theater or goes to Latin nightclubs. Valerie, who loves to dance, frequents the Club International, where they play salsa music. Neither is married, and neither wants to marry an American.

“I have an affinity for Latin men or Israelis,” she said. “We seem to have more in common. It is hard for me to understand the American Jewish mentality, even after all these years.”

“How about non-Jewish Americans?” I asked.

“Never,” she said. “I would never consider marrying someone who isn’t Jewish. My identity means too much to me, my obligation to my people.”

“I once had an American Jewish girlfriend,” recalled Rafa, with a mirthless grin. “We were together for almost a year, but it did not work out. Why? She said that I was too macho, too Latin, ah, too
chauvinist
, although I do not consider myself to be macho. So I believe that I will be happier with a woman from the Hispanic community. And there is another reason. I do not expect to live all my life in America. I believe that it would be very difficult to take an American woman to another place.”

“Yes, me too, Rafa,” said Valerie. “I myself like America, but I see myself moving to Israel. My eyes are looking to Israel for the future.”

“I’m not certain about Israel,” said Rafa, “but I cannot see myself remaining in this country permanently, that is certain.”

For many Hispanic Jews, the United States has retained something of its “evil giant to the north” image. These Jews were raised in places where Yanquis are resented; many of them came to Miami more out of necessity than choice.

“It is not safe any longer for people like us in Latin America,” Valerie explained. “I know a man, a Jewish industrialist, who was kidnapped by the guerrillas and held for four months. His family paid the ransom of one million dollars and he was returned unhurt. Now he has a bulletproof car and bodyguards, and wherever he goes he carries a gun. But these will not protect him, and he knows that. He is just waiting to be kidnapped once again.”

“Why does he stay?” I asked. Rafa, who knew similar stories
from Guatemala, shrugged. “This man cannot legally transfer his money outside of the country. And many such people have businesses so large that no private person in the country can buy them. And so they stay.”

They stay, but their children are free to leave—and perhaps to take some part of the family fortune with them. They are safe and prosperous in Miami, but they are homesick, too; they miss the close-knit Jewish communities where they were raised.

“At home, on Shabbat, everyone went to the Jewish Center to be together,” said Valerie. “Here, except for the Orthodox, Shabbat is just another day. People go to shopping malls, health clubs. The Jewish Center is just a place to go for a workout. None of us is Orthodox, but we need more than that for our Jewish lives. And we need a place to be by ourselves. It’s nothing against American Jews, but we’re different.”

“American Jews think the Hispanic Jews are shit!” said Yosi Teitelbaum, the director of Hebraica, when I went to see him the next day. “The Cuban Jews have been in Miami for twenty-five, twenty-six years, and not one has been on the federation board. Why? Because they think we are shit. The truth is, we Latinos have been rejected by the gringos.”

Teitelbaum put his feet up on his cluttered desk and peered out the window at the manicured lawn. Hebraica is located in a former country club in one of Miami’s wealthiest residential areas. That day its tree-shaded grounds and spacious clubhouse were undergoing renovations. It is not the kind of place usually associated with persecuted minorities.

Teitelbaum is in his mid-forties, a potbellied man with a ready smile, a brash, bombastic manner, and more than a little charm. By profession he is a social worker, by temperament an activist with a confrontational style. Born in Argentina, he moved to Israel as a young man. The Jewish Agency sent him to Miami to help the Hispanic community organize itself; and he has chosen to interpret this task as a mandate for taking on the local establishment.

“The Cubans, who were the first to arrive, had a religious tradition but no community spirit,” he told me, speaking in Hebrew. “They established two synagogues, one Ashkenazi and one
Sephardi. Both of them were Orthodox, of course; Latin Americans had no concept of American Reform or Conservative temples, and they still don’t feel comfortable in them. The Cubans were happy just going to their synagogues and living their lives. It was enough for them.

“But then, the other Latinos began to come. They had a community tradition as well as a religious one. Most of them aren’t what you’d call Orthodox, but they have good Jewish educations, they know Hebrew, at home they were all wrapped up in the life of the Jewish community. The main thing was that they were taught from birth to feel different from gentiles, from the people surrounding them.”

Suddenly Yosi banged his hand on the desk for emphasis. “When the Latinos came to this country, they looked around at the American community and found a system that was a total disaster. Total shit! They want their own children to be Jews and marry Jews, the way it has always been. If the price of America is not being Jewish, or hardly being Jewish, they don’t want to pay it. They say, ‘Amigos, let us preserve our Judaism.’ This is why they founded Hebraica.”

Teitelbaum was interrupted by high-pitched children’s voices squealing in Spanish. He heaved himself out of his chair and led me into the clubhouse, where, in a side room, a nursery school class was in progress. We opened the door, which bore the legend, “
MIS HIJOS ESTÁN EN HEBRAICA
 … 
Y LOS SUYOS?
(MY CHILDREN ARE IN HEBRAICA
 … 
AND YOURS?)
.” “These are our children,” he said grandly, as if he and the nursery school teacher had produced them all personally.

We walked out to the clubhouse, where workmen were tearing up the dance floor. It is a kind of kosher Club Babaloo, where people like Valerie and Rafa dance to Rubén Blades, Roberto Carlos, and David Broza, sip strong Cuban coffee or rum punches, and feel the warmth of community in a strange land.

“This is an island,” Teitelbaum said, gesturing around the clubhouse. “American trends don’t affect us, and we don’t want them to affect us in the future. We want to be independent. And we will work to insure that independence. Believe me, these people know what it means to be Jews, to live real Jewish lives. It is something they will never surrender.”

It was a fine speech, spoiled only by the fact that Teitelbaum and I both understood that he was talking about doing the impossible. Over the coming decades the Hispanic community in Miami will undoubtedly grow in numbers and influence. It will fight with the federated establishment and eventually become a part of it. The Latin Jews will send their children to the Hebraica nursery school, dance to Israeli samba singers, support their synagogues, and stick to themselves. Some will dream of moving to Israel, and a few may even do it.

But no matter how much money they raise, no matter how hard they try to pass on their heritage to their children, no matter how stubbornly they struggle against America, America will win. Slowly, inexorably, their children and grandchildren will become American Jews—and then, Jewish-Americans. Like Jewish immigrants before them, the hijos of Hebraica will be enriched and impoverished by their new country. It is only a matter of time.

Forty minutes from Hebraica, along a palm-studded highway, is Century Village at Pembroke Oaks. Near its entrance is a billboard with the Century Village motto—“Where Life Has No Limits.” The village is the kind of place where you can dream of living for a century, although most of its elderly residents would be delighted just to make it to the next one.

Century Village is officially nonsectarian, but more than eighty percent of the people who live there are retired middle-class Jews from New York’s outer boroughs or from other large northeastern cities. (Midwestern Jews, by contrast, usually retire to Florida’s west coast.) Gentiles, mostly Italian-Americans, comprise a tolerated minority.

The village itself consists of low-rise apartment buildings whose one- or two-bedroom flats are priced to attract retired civil servants, small-time merchants, and widows living on fixed incomes. In early 1987, the population was 3,600, but a recruiting drive aimed at attracting an additional 4,500 people was in full swing.

Public relations director Shirley Klein, an elegant, fiftyish former New Yorker, took a few minutes to explain the Century Village concept. “We try to offer people a great place to retire,” she said with obvious sincerity. “Living here is like living at
Grossinger’s or the Concord. Retirees have their own activities, their own culture.…”

The phone rang. Someone in the New York office wanted to discuss an ad scheduled to run in Jewish newspapers that weekend. Before getting down to business, Shirley took a minute to gloat. “How’s the weather up there?” she asked. “Snowing? That’s terrible. Down here? Seventy-five today and sunny. Yeah, it’s perfect.” Climate is the constant preoccupation in Florida, the great justifier. “I couldn’t live up there anymore,” Shirley said when she got off the phone. “I mean, it’s nuts. Who needs that when you can have this?”

The complex at Pembroke Oaks is built for fun in the sun. It has elaborate sports facilities—a golf course, tennis courts, swimming pools, and in the middle of everything the Clubhouse, a multipurpose community center. Shirley pointed out the facilities on a map of the village. “You know why people love it down here so much?” she said. “Simple. This is the sleep-away camp they couldn’t afford when they were kids.”

Century Village is, indeed, a strikingly juvenile place. Gray-haired men with crooked brown legs wander around in play clothes, carrying golf clubs or tennis rackets. Women (there are four or five for every man) in leisure suits stroll the grounds in pairs, glancing flirtatiously at the geriatric Jewish jocks, or toss Frisbees to each other across the manicured lawn. Unlike the old people on Collins Avenue, the golden-agers of Century Village have energy to spare.

The local newspaper,
The Century Village Voice
, mirrors the obsession with fun. Its pages are full of articles about the acts due to play the Clubhouse nightclub—Keely Smith, Jack Carter, Patrice Munsel, and Freddie Roman—sports news, such as the results of the recent walkathon and exercise tips from the staff.

At first glance, Century Village seems to have everything. But something is missing. In this village of three thousand elderly Jews there are no children—no toddlers, no teenagers, and except for the staff, barely anyone under sixty. Nor are there any bearded elders on benches, gabbing away in Yiddish. The Century Villagers are a new breed of Old Jew—bronzed, vigorous, dedicated to a happy ending. Life without limits, Century Village style; a life
without family or the friendships and obligations of a snow-filled lifetime.

“Most people here don’t seem to miss their children very much,” Shirley Klein confided. “Our society has gotten away from traditional, close-knit family units. Young people go away to college, old people go away to retire. Now, a lot of them
do
miss their grandchildren, but we tell them, ‘Don’t worry about your grandchildren, they’re fine. Do what’s right for you.’ ”

Century Village has a number of rules, but only one commandment:
NO CHILDREN IN THE CLUBHOUSE
. And since the Clubhouse is the heart of village life, site of the nightclub, theater, sports facilities, and meeting rooms, the rule might just as well be: No children in the village. Sometimes grandchildren do visit, of course; but they are second-class citizens. Considering the traditional Jewish obsession with children, it is an astonishing policy.

But then, the residents of Century Village are not traditional Jews; they are the first generation of
American
Old Jews, people like Laura and Jake.

Laura is a crisp, rosy-cheeked woman of about sixty-five who left Brooklyn after forty years as a union clerk. Jake, a few years older, came down to Florida after selling his small clothing shop in Queens. A ferret-faced chain smoker, he has the teasing patter of a neighborhood retailer. Neither one lives within a thousand miles of their children.

“I came down here not just for the sunshine,” Jake said. “I came down for a new life, a brand new start. Sure it’s hard at first, but you meet friends, you forget about the street you lived on. As far as kids are concerned, it depends. Lemme tell you, a lot of people here created monsters. Plenty of them don’t even come down for a visit.”

Laura disagreed. She is a placid woman, and she discussed the issue with the detachment of a pop psychologist on
Donahue
. “It’s true to some extent that we created takers. We never taught our children to give, but that’s our fault, not theirs. Don’t forget,” she said, turning to Jake, “our generation was raised the same way. We were brought up on doing our own thing, only they didn’t call it that in the old days. Our parents came from Europe and they gave us what they didn’t have. They taught us to take care of ourselves first. And that’s the way I still feel today. You
have your own life. I don’t want to live near my kids. I brought them up to feel the same way I do. I love ’em, and I love those grandchildren, but I’ll tell you, I don’t want them calling me every time the baby has a stomachache.”

It was a perspective I had never considered. The people at Century Village are not Portnoy’s mother but Portnoy himself—selfish, individualistic, pleasure-oriented. Their accents are Flatbush or Jersey City, not Minsk or Vilna. Their furniture isn’t covered with plastic slip covers. Their kitchens have only one set of dishes (and that rarely used; they prefer to eat the half-price early bird special at the nearby mall). There are no kugel bakers, minyon makers, or cheek pinchers here—just guys and gals having a blast at summer camp.

“These people are in such good shape that you can’t even tell how old they are,” said Angela Varone, the clubhouse director. But they can easily tell how old you are, and visitors under fifty feel a certain amount of hostility. “They tend to be a little defensive with outsiders, especially younger people,” Angela explained. “A lot of people treat the elderly like they were retarded or something. But their attitude here is, ‘Hey, I’m no dummy, I’ve been around. I want some respect.’ We try to keep them from feeling inferior just because they’re getting older, but sometimes that feeling of inferiority comes out in a basic dislike of younger people.”