Killer Kiwi #1
In Venice I thought I would meet a pretty girl with a sexy accent, or at the least take several rolls of half-decent pictures I would later crop into masterpieces, then pretend I’d taken them like that in the first place. I never thought I would wander into the heart of the Jewish ghetto, into the past itself, and come out having officially become a man.
No, it wasn’t sex. It was a slim rabbi with a light-brown beard who said, “Son, were you ever bar mitzvahed?” As it so happened, I hadn’t.
We’d been what you could call occasional Jews. I was circumcised, I went to a couple years of Hebrew school, we had Passover and Chanukah…and then, somehow, my parents just sort of lost interest in it all, and I wasn’t going to argue with them as long as I kept getting holiday presents. Maybe my mother had a falling out with the Reform congregation, or maybe my father got some big idea in his head about Israel and politics and secular Jewry in America, or maybe they just never really believed and stopped thinking they had to keep up appearances for the kid’s sake.
Anyway, the result was I never had a bar mitzvah at the local hotel banquet room. I didn’t mind. I had a thirteenth birthday party at the local combination go-kart track and miniature golf course. It was awesome.
But I wasn’t thinking of that the day a friend and I walked along the Canal Grande and found ourselves passing through the gates into the oldest Jewish ghetto in the world, a place where they used to lock the gates at night to keep the people in. The buildings worn and scrunched close together, fading orange and yellow and brown, the ground stone. They couldn’t spread out, so they built the synagogues up toward the sky. We were standing in front of one, the Sephardic one, maybe, taking pictures when the rabbi came out and asked me that question – I guess I was giving off the vibe of the lost Jew – and I heard myself say, no, I hadn’t.
I’m not really sure what got into me. I believed in God, sure, still do, but I never really stood much on religious ceremony. I think it was the feel of the ghetto itself – proud, solemn, hundreds of years old – and some stirring I felt within about the idea that I had an actual heritage, that when random rappers with trucker hats and gold teeth started in about, like, ghetto booties, they were using a word from this exact place, from my people. I never felt that at home. And so I found myself following this rabbi into an interior room.
It wasn’t a big ordeal. I put on a yarmulke and a prayer shawl, and he had a phonetic translation of some Hebrew passages to read, and before you know it, my friend was taking a picture as this nice bearded stranger pumped my hand and told me I was now a man. At 20. What do you know!
So I still don’t go to Shabbat services, and I never did find an Italian girl to fulfill my study-abroad fantasies and loll in bed with me marveling over my pedestrian photos of the Piazza de San Marco. But I can look at the photo my friend took that day, and say with some pride that I am a Jew, and I am a man. Grazie, Venezia.
No, it wasn’t sex. It was a slim rabbi with a light-brown beard who said, “Son, were you ever bar mitzvahed?” As it so happened, I hadn’t.
We’d been what you could call occasional Jews. I was circumcised, I went to a couple years of Hebrew school, we had Passover and Chanukah…and then, somehow, my parents just sort of lost interest in it all, and I wasn’t going to argue with them as long as I kept getting holiday presents. Maybe my mother had a falling out with the Reform congregation, or maybe my father got some big idea in his head about Israel and politics and secular Jewry in America, or maybe they just never really believed and stopped thinking they had to keep up appearances for the kid’s sake.
Anyway, the result was I never had a bar mitzvah at the local hotel banquet room. I didn’t mind. I had a thirteenth birthday party at the local combination go-kart track and miniature golf course. It was awesome.
But I wasn’t thinking of that the day a friend and I walked along the Canal Grande and found ourselves passing through the gates into the oldest Jewish ghetto in the world, a place where they used to lock the gates at night to keep the people in. The buildings worn and scrunched close together, fading orange and yellow and brown, the ground stone. They couldn’t spread out, so they built the synagogues up toward the sky. We were standing in front of one, the Sephardic one, maybe, taking pictures when the rabbi came out and asked me that question – I guess I was giving off the vibe of the lost Jew – and I heard myself say, no, I hadn’t.
I’m not really sure what got into me. I believed in God, sure, still do, but I never really stood much on religious ceremony. I think it was the feel of the ghetto itself – proud, solemn, hundreds of years old – and some stirring I felt within about the idea that I had an actual heritage, that when random rappers with trucker hats and gold teeth started in about, like, ghetto booties, they were using a word from this exact place, from my people. I never felt that at home. And so I found myself following this rabbi into an interior room.
It wasn’t a big ordeal. I put on a yarmulke and a prayer shawl, and he had a phonetic translation of some Hebrew passages to read, and before you know it, my friend was taking a picture as this nice bearded stranger pumped my hand and told me I was now a man. At 20. What do you know!
So I still don’t go to Shabbat services, and I never did find an Italian girl to fulfill my study-abroad fantasies and loll in bed with me marveling over my pedestrian photos of the Piazza de San Marco. But I can look at the photo my friend took that day, and say with some pride that I am a Jew, and I am a man. Grazie, Venezia.
posted by Anonymous at 8:41 AM
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