Reject du jour: gasoonti!
(image: carolita johnson)
Last time I went to Brighton Beach to spend a couple of peaceful weekday hours in the sun with my New Yorker magazine, I stopped in a kosher deli to get a bottle of water. The man behind the counter was an orthodox Jew who looked at me with playful acuity and demanded outright: “You speak Yiddish? You look Jewish—are you Jewish?”
I explained to him that I was not Jewish, but that there was some question as to whether or not my father was Jewish.
“Ahaaa-a?” he cawed encouragingly.
“Well,” I said, “He says he’s not Jewish, but his mother’s name was Anna Blumenstein.”
“Aha.”
“And her mother, also named Anna Blumenstein, was remarkable for going to business school in Philadelphia in 1917 for business studies, and turned out to be a very shrewd businesswoman…”
“Aha.”
“And my father used to drink Manischewitz wine…”
“Aha!”
“But then he stopped.”
“Aha?”
“Because he found a cheaper wine…”
“Aha!”
“It came in Tetra-Pak cartons, and he’d transfer this cheaper wine into the empty Manischewitz bottles he’d saved and keep them in the refrigerator.”
“Ah…haaa…”
“So, what do you think?”
“I have a feeling,” he said with a mischievous smile, “It’s just a feeling, but I think ma-a-a-a-ybe…,” and here he paused with his finger in the air, and his eyes looking sideways at his finger, then turning back, nodding his head complicitely at me, “...your father’s Jewish. It’s a feeling I have.”
I speak as much Yiddish as the next New Yorker, which is plenty. In fact, when my South American grandmother came to New York, she thought that the English word for “God bless you” (as part of the sneezing protocol) was “gesundheit,” which she pronounced, “Gasoonti!”