Roberta wrote:georgele, Where are my manners? Come in. Setz ich avec. Can I get you a nice glass of tea? Maybe a piece of honey cake. Just a little nosh.
I'm glad this brings back memories for you. For me too. If you haven't already done so, I suggest you take a look at the first few pages of this thread. They explain alot. But who am I to tell you what to do?
I started on page one and found it hard to stop - that's what elicited my comment. Some priceless material there!
I grew up on the Irish Catholic side of Linwood, but, in fact, as young boys, we all lived in both worlds. Once, when the CYO recreation center was closed for a month, some friends induced me to go with them to the JCC, under the pseudonym of Alan Weiss, for Hebrew day school (boys aged 11 or 12), after which we could swim or play basketball. (They had been my frequent mates at the CYO) It lasted until my mother found the mezuzza (sp?) which I swapped for the scapular around my neck as we went in each day. Not a moment too soon as the JCC had by then caught up with the Weiss impostor. The experience was hardly novel for a young Catholic boy - memorizing things in an incomprehensible language wasn't new (except for the guttural sounds), and the morality stories were the same.
I had the impression then that the manners and expressions you have so well described here are more characteristic of Jews from Russia or Poland than those from Germany, Italy or France. True?
Yiddish was still a living language then - papers sold, conversations heard on the streets, and many words common to all. I liked the words because they so often sounded like what they meant - particularly the many references to human foibles, which the culture and the language seemed to so lovingly catalogue and differentiate.
A few years and puberty later I learned that the Jewish Boys, restrained from sowing wild oats with the nice JAPs, considered shicksas fair game. I rejoiced in the discovery that the JAPs had the same idea.
An education it was!
