How does one celebrate a Jewish Holiday in a foreign land, thousands of miles away from family and friends? Well, the first thing to do is to go to a really good party.... Now you must think that all I do in Berlin is go to parties, or crash parties, or get into parties....this is not entirely true - it just happens most of the time. If you lived in Berlin, you would party a lot too - not because it is really that fun to actually go to parties, but after walking around Berlin for a day and being confronted by all that History one really does need a stiff drink, or in my case a Rosh Hashannah reception at the Jewish Museum. I attended as the guest of a friend of a friend who is involved in their cultural programming... he is also from Canada, but a Polish citizen as well...his family comes from the same town that my family does - Lodz - where the people are known for their quick wit and dirty sense of humour. I gave him Yiddish magnetic poetry for his fridge because he is letting me stay on his couch while I find a place, and the other night we sat at his kitchen table and tried to see how many words we could find that meant "idiot". There were 15. Isn't Yiddish great?
So my friend and I went to this party in honour of the Jewish New Year at the Jewish Museum.
Except there were no Jews . We were there - my friend and I - and there was one other short person with curly hair, but he was probably Austrian. He looked like Schubert. For all intents and purposes, the reception looked like a party at the German Foreign Ministry. There was a buffet catered by the Inter Continental with exotic fruit and an approximation of kreplach (Jewish Ravioli! The server exclaimed). There was a swing band made up of members of the Berlin Philharmonic (they didn't really swing....too much Mozart). The woman who played the shofar was one of the most well regarded trumpet players in Israel (she still couldn't play the darn thing...they are tricky). There were, however, no Jews.
There were interesting cultural displays and everybody was very earnest and appreciative and clapped when the trumpet player tried to play the shofar....this made me feel a bit embarassed - like the time when I was 13 and the German guests of my mother's best friend wanted to video tape our Passover seder..... to put in their archive of bizarre cultural activities of endangered foreign peoples? Like Leni Riefenstahl photographing African tribes? A Yiddish word comes to mind: Feh!
My favourite part of the evening were the fortune cookies. Why they decided to have fortune cookies at a Rosh Hashannah, I'll never know -but I was looking forward to a moment of levity. However, when I read my fortune, I discovered - not some light-hearted assurance that I would be prosperous - but a quote from the 1920s German-Jewish Communist poet Kurt Tucholsky which read
" Tolerance is the suspicion that the other person is right".
God love the Germans...even their fortune cookies are filled with lead. But can you blame them?
After the party my friend and I went and had a drink with an Israeli musicologist and her husband. She told me that when she was a child her mother used to take her on a picnic on Yom Kippur. They would eat ham sandwiches. We have made a date to do the same, although I am of course conflicted about not fasting.
Old habits die hard
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment