The Cock's Comb

Sometime in September, I took the plunge and shaved my head, the better to conceal my balding pate. But I noticed that, though the back of the head is bald (more or less), the forelock is still growing, so I cultivated that and it turned into a sort of oddball Mohawk. The “faux-hawk” is currently fashionable among the young, so when the weather got colder, I let the sides grow back but did not chop the “hawk” down. This gave me a frankly eccentric look for the sort of places I frequent, opera houses and such. No one has actually spoken of their shock, but I feel I am an oddity, a Picasso in the Rembrandt gallery.

This look has produced the most astonishing reaction, though, in gay bars, where suddenly I am something to look at, flirt with, proposition. It’s rather a pity that this has happened just as my fires are failing – I often feel I’m leading them on, flirting because I’m lonely and want a conversation (which is the fact of the matter, when I go to bars), and have no intention of responding to their evident point of interest. (Although there have been exceptions to that rule.)

The question is: what is turning them on? I don’t think the look has made me handsomer (it wouldn’t appeal to me, for example). Perhaps the hairlessness draws attention to my thick muscular neck, another red herring: the once-hunky rest of me is no longer so muscular, and I work out seldom. Or is it that my eccentricity implies sexual wildness (as my wearing full leathers used to, back when I could fit into my leathers) that, in fact, is also misleading? Or does it imply “don’t-give-a-fuck,” which again is not true, but might arouse the latent sexual outlaw every gay man is expected to nurture in his bosom? (Maybe every man.) Or is the coxcomb effect somehow a trigger to lustful reflex, much as (for gay men) a well-proportioned, bulging, neatly outlined basket certainly is?

It’s maybe a pity that I’ve discovered this phenomenon at so advanced an age. When I was young and constantly horny, I had enough hair to cover my skull, and that stolid look is what I went for, complete with “clone” mustache.

I’m afraid to remove my goatee because I fear I have more chins beneath it than I had growing in. No: I'll be honest. It's a handsome goatee. I keep it because I like it, as well as because others seem to.

The hot spot on the melting pot expands

In today's NYTimes, there's an article on Europeans making themselves at home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This underscores my belief that while home prices may plunge everywhere else on earth, they will remain stable in New York because everyone on earth with a little cash wants at least a pied-a-terre in the Apple. But the article tells other tales as well, the tale of the expansion of (shall we say) the griddle under the perennial fondue pot of New York. (Also: the kind of cheese that gets melted in it: the couple at the article's heart are named Patel, him English, her Swedish - unmentioned, the fact that "Patel" is an Indian name, that his family can't have been in Blighty all that long, that perhaps they came there not from India but from East Africa ... Obama says we're all mutts; I prefer to say "mongrels.")

Another change in traditional New York is, however, demonstrated by this article:

I once unwarily boasted of New York as the mingler of nations; a guy at the next table in the (Polish) restaurant (himself of Italian deriv.) laughed in my face. "I live in Jackson Heights," he said. "There are 18 nationalities on my block. And none of them mingle. They won't even speak to each other. Different grocery stores, different restaurants, different social groups at the park." "But what happens to their children? They go to public schools together, right?" said I. "Oh, they grow up and mingle - after they move to Manhattan," he admitted.

A few years ago, it was fashionable to say the Great American Melting Pot did not actually melt, that immigrants remained in their separate enclaves. That's true - for a while. In my family (who arrived in the decades before 1900 from Russia and Austria-Hungary), everyone married, and before World War II, everyone married only other Jews, and Ashkenazic Jews at that. (Scandal in my grandmother's family when their Hungarian daughters married Russian Jewish men - but they all did anyway.) In the generation after World War II, the first marriages to gentiles, gradually reaching and passing fifty percent of the mizpochah. Not until the seventies and eighties were marriages interracial as well. (One marriage to an ethnic Chinese in the 1950s.) Now we're getting into interesting religions and far corners of the earth, never mind same-sex unions and unusual adoptions. And of course we live everywhere. But we're still Ashkenazim. I think.

Used to was, the New York melting pot was Manhattan, and only lower Manhattan at that (and only parts of lower Manhattan – my neighborhood, South Village-SoHo, used to be pure Italian). Everyone grew up in an ethnic enclave of one sort or another, then moved and married and joined the middle class, and sent kids to mixed schools, and - then the pot melted, Irish married German Catholics, their kids married Italians or (horror on both sides) Jews, their kids married WASPs or (horror on all sides) blacks or Puerto Ricans, their kids married Chinese or Koreans.

But now the region where the melting goes on is much much larger, and the enclaves are diluting and gentrifying and vanishing: no unmelted Jews on the Lower East Side or Italians around here or Irish in Hell’s Kitchen or Inwood (it’s all Dominicans now in Inwood) or even blacks in Harlem (gosh!); all those neighborhoods have melted and interconnected (and interfucked, a word of my own coining). And now (we learn from this and many articles) Williamsburg has ceased to be a Polish slum and is a major meltdown. (Nearby Greenpoint is still Polish, with Chinese fringes.) And Crown Heights is still Hasidic, but how much longer? (Another generation, I’d say.) And Astoria is still Greek, and Jackson Heights is Afghan-Greek-Indian-Turkish-Croatian-Pakistani-Bengali-Chinese-Hispanic, and FOR THE MOMENT 18 nationalities share a block without ever mingling or even speaking to each other - but their children will go to CUNY and melt and move to Manhattan.

So it melts, but not at once, but in New York (and other ancient towns) the hot surface expands, the fire burns, the cauldron bubbles.

A magic word to cheer you up: "McCain!"

A (white) friend in Chicago, who was raised in Alabama, says Election Night was one of the greatest of her life, and she was ecstatic to be in Grant Park for the victory speech. I am fascinated (as always, every election) by the nitty-gritty breakdown of who voted for whom. And why. (In Manhattan, it was half a million votes for Obama to fifty thousand for McCain. Who let those people in?)

Race turned out not to be a major issue (except to black voters, bless 'em, and some Republican whites) - largely due to the intelligence with which Obama tamped down the issue. This is also a major difference between him and such candidates as Jesse Jackson. Jackson was the blacks' candidate; Obama always headed the coalition of the young, the intelligent, the ever-so-slightly left of center. (He's a very moderate liberal and I do not expect - alas - terribly liberal policies from his government.)

There were inroads into the ancient bastion of the white racist South. My southern friends have always said to me: "You think it's exotic - we came up here to New York to escape, and we know it's all true." But they grew up there, and more like them who do not leave. And many other friends of mine have moved there, following jobs or something. The place has been changing. When I've been there, the few times I have, it has been a pleasure to see that integration of commerce greases all wheels - whites and blacks mingle easily and politely, whatever may get said at home. People's minds do change, however slowly. If you know people, went to school with them, work with them, fought with them (I mean served in the military), your horror of the unknown must fade. Virginia, North Carolina, Florida went for a black man. The vote was close in other states. It was predictable, but one is amazed and delighted to see it. The South had to change; it had to forget its past to enjoy the delights of the present and future. A lesson the Republicans have so far refused to learn: the young want to live, and their social programs are the liberal ones. Your policies might appeal to older, more close-minded voters, but their children will look askance. They watch too much TV (even bad TV) not to be influenced by its casual freedom from old boundaries.

It would have been a bad year for Republicans in any case, yes, but they have tied themselves repeatedly to moribund, fading, hateful issues: they were anti-Civil Rights (and blacks have not forgotten that - nor have racist whites), they are anti-women's rights, they are anti-gay rights, they are anti-immigrants. They have set themselves in opposition to teaching science in science classrooms. These casual choices for unworthy reasons (I can't believe most Republicans really believe in creationism) have produced an image, a "branding," that they are the backward, hateful party. Word was bound to get around. It hasn't helped that their president was also the master of failed diplomacy, failed war, ruined New Orleans, and ruined economy. They can and do blame Democrats for their every idiotic mistake, but what positive accomplishments has their 12 years' control of Congress and 8 of the presidency brought us? We're a whole lot closer to fascism, but that's not a platform easy to run on. (Whether the Democrats will undo the fascist tilt of the last seven years of "Homeland Security" government remains to be seen.)

In 1964, when I were but a kid, my father solemnly said, "I think the Republican Party may be dead," after LBJ's victory. He used the voice one might have for a worthy if incompetent tennis partner. I said, "Don't be ridiculous; they'll bounce back," and thanks to LBJ's misbegotten Vietnam policy they sure did. In 1974, the day after Nixon quit, I said, "Well, I've seen the last of the worst president I'll ever have to live with," and that was the dumbest thing (politically) that I've ever said. I expect to be disappointed by many things Obama does, as I was with Carter and Clinton, but there is a matter of degree - I won't be shuddering with disgust and horror every time I glance at the headlines, as under Bush. (Or so I hope.)

For the next few weeks - maybe months - I will remember the nervousness of the last two. I will have a magic word whenever I am in the dumps: "McCain!" It automatically brings a smile to my lips and relief to my heart.

We all know NOW that McCain didn't have a chance; for the last couple of months I have been on tenterhooks (left over from a pre-Industrial Revolution loom) that he did. Obama's victory is that of a young, brainy guy who is unafraid of the new things in the world; McCain's defeat is the defeat of the people who feared the new world, who resented it, who wanted it beaten down, with weapons if necessary. Obama will embrace the world, which is eager to return the hug.

I would like to believe the Bush years were an aberration - but I don't. This counterrevolution has been building for some time, since the social revolutions of my youth certainly. Can any government bridge that gap? The Right isn't even interested in any such thing. Can the Left do it? Is there a Left in U.S. politics?

Back from Vancouver

Without being unpatriotic, you understand, what I detest about America is the sheer loudness of the brand, the insistence that no other brand counts, that we are the only way to go. This has only got worse since the fall of communism. Americans are offended that anyone else has a national anthem praising the beauties or splendors or achievements of their native land - that they admire their own movies, music, food, mode of living more than they admire ours. They are offended when any other nation wins an Olympic gold medal, because that means some other country's anthem will be played. They want the whole world turned into Disneyland with only one brand of coffee and one sort of hamburger and one sort of cola. One temperature. One weather. They want the whole world to be Chevrolets which, gas-guzzling aside, offends me because I think it's boring. I think a world with Packards and Studebakers and Rolls-Royces and Volkswagens is more interesting. And if it were Fords, they could be any color as long as it was red, white and blue. And fast food is terrible and the nine-to-five work day is inhuman; it is not nap-friendly; it is corporate in the worst sense.

And we're terribly offended that the whole world does not wish to be American any more, indeed that much of it never did. The world would rather be Canadian. We are all poised to kick out the immigrants, and they'd rather go to Canada. Old Croatian proverb: Give a man a fish and he will eat for one day; teach a man a fish and he will move to Nova Scotia. There is nothing like being all dolled up to reject an importunate suitor only to find out he's really come to ask your "dull" sister to the dance. And she's accepted him, so he may be next door the rest of your life - how do you like that?

If McCain wins the election, I think we'll all have to move to Canada. I don't see what other choice we'll have. Not that it will save us from global disaster, but at this point nothing will.

The Wheel of Dates

It's a wheel in my head. It spins and you insert a date. The date should be four numbers, and the first one should be 1, though leaving it blank will also (usualy) work. It works best for CE, but there is a certain general sense in which it works for BCE.

I had no idea it was in place, though I put it in place myself over long years. It was much harder to install than a piece of software in my computer (installing software in my body ... well, that's a discussion for someone else's blog, isn't it?), but also a great deal more fun or I'd never have done it, would I?

Any year, and I will tell you roughly (stress that) who was alive and what was going on anyplace on earth, focus especially on Europe. Certain places remain dark to me, but I'm always eager to add more facts. I tend to remember things in their proper order, too. At my present age, I am having senior moments, but not so many about previous centuries as I do about this one. My specialty is political history, but I am pretty competent on military history and artistic-literary history as well. Musical history does not begin until the invention of musical notation (twelfth century, Italy? yes, Virginia, there are things dead white European males did do better than any other civilization, and notating music so that we can recover a lot of tunes from five or seven or nine hundred years ago is one of them), but I can give you a decent proximate timeline on that from 1600 to 1950. Don't ask me which year which band produced which top hit in the last thirty years because I probably never heard of the stuff (actually, I have, but did not pay attention to which group did which song). Am I into eighties music? someone asked me. I said: 1680s or 1780s?

This wheel gives me great pleasure and it was quite some time before I realized most people have nothing of the sort. (Too busy dancing to Top Forty or collecting football stats or making money or raising children or doing something else pointless.) When I look at a painting or a building or listen to a tune, I have a context to put it in - which does keep me a handsbreadth from just reacting to the thing as art (I yield - and deplore - the point), but does allow me to make connections that help me understand my reactions, or understand the artist. The point of art, I have always believed, is to communicate with others, and when I look at old art (or read it, or listen to it),, I am trying to open my satellite dish to the transmitter be s/he ever so anonymous or long dead. I want to share the joke, which is easy with jolly sorts like the anonymous sculptors of Romanesque cloisters, or composers like Rossini or Mozart, but can be tough with austere types like Mimar Sinan (the Ottoman architect) or George Eliot.

Go ahead, pick a year, pick a country. 1375, Sweden. The king was Albrecht of Mecklenburg (I think), to the great resentment of the Swedes, who ended up deposing him, besieging him and his German troops in Stockholm (a German city at the time) and offering their crown to Margarethe, the Danish regent of Denmark and Norway, in 1387. The greatest power in the Baltic was the Hanseatic League, a band of mostly German merchant cities (often in non-German places, like Bergen and Riga and Danzig and Tallinn, but based on Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck), grown rich on the furs and lumber and grain and nautical supplies of the sea, which they exported to the entire continent. The local nationalities were thus under outside control and resented it; this ended in 1397, when the three Nordic monarchies were united by Margarethe under the nominal rule of her grandnephew, Erik of Pomerania. (Not a Scand, but at least not a German either.) This lasted until 1523, sort of - then Sweden dropped out (taking Finland with her. The Union of Kalmar was a great success in its way, as it was strong enough to hold off the Germans in the Baltic and allowed the Danes and Swedes, at any rate, to have local cultural development properly - but it was a bumpy sort of deal, sometimes with separate monarchs who still subscribed to the "union." The lessons of its breakdown should probably be studied more carefully by the EU in Brussels than, I fear, they are.
The Hansa never recovered from the Reformation, which hit Germany hard after 1517 - suddenly there were reasons other than national or mercantile for groups to stick together.

Do you want to know WHY Albrecht of Mecklenburg was King of Sweden? I'm so glad you asked. His mother was Euphemia, sister of King Magnus Smek (the word means a slobbery sort of kiss and there's a great story there, as usual), whose sons were Erik XIII of Sweden (o.s.p.) and Haakon VI of Norway (married to Margarethe of Denmark, vide supra; their son was Olav IV of Norway and Denmark, who died at the age of 17. Women could not legally reign in any of these countries, but Margarethe just kept on ruling anyway until her death in 1412, and the present Danish sovereign is named Margarethe II in her honor).

Of the other kings who were about just then, my favorites are Gedyminas of Lithuania and Pedro the Ceremonious of Aragon-Catalunya, the latter simply because of his cool nickname. There's a story about it. Go ahead: ask. (Charles the Bad was king of Navarre - or had he been succeeded by his spoilsport son, Charles the Noble?. You don't get many kings called "the Bad," and he did deserve it. Go ahead: ask.) (The Holy Roman Emperor was Charles IV of Luxembourg, who is fondly remembered in Prague if nowhere else. Historians like him because he was an intellectual and wrote an autobiography. Very few medieval monarchs did.) (The king of France was Charles V the Wise, one of the two Valois kings with any political sense. The tyrants of Milan and Pavia were the brothers Bernabo and Galeazzo Visconti;. The tyrant of Ferrara was wicked Marquis Niccolo d'Este, famous for murdering his bastard son and his second wife who were making eyes at each other. The pope - I think - was Gregory XI, who returned from Avignon to Rome. Not at all sure about that.)

(When figuring out which pope reigned when, it is generally reliable rule that the numbers increase as time passes. I cling to that. So if you know Gregory IX was the bane of Emperor Frederick II, who reigned in the 13th century, you can be pretty sure any later Gregory had a larger number. I cling to that.)

I'm not making all this up, you know. And I did just pick a date out of thin air.

That was dry, wasn't it? It's livelier when I have you in person and you want to know (my friend Doug rings me up and says, "Yohopedia?") why the Iconoclasts in Constantinople upset the pope so much that he crowned Chalemagne emperor or something like that. I've got a million of 'em. Literally. It's especially good if I've been to the site of events (Istanbul, Ferrara, Prague) and can tie things in that way, with architecture and painting and why this building exists and that one doesn't.

I am always putting more reasons in for things that happened, from books, from research, from lectures, from deductions of my own. "Simple explanations are for simple minds - I've no use for either." - Joe Orton (True, he puts this line into the mouth of a maniac, but it still has relevance)

I'm in Vancouver now and it's raining so I can't ride my bike in Stanley Park and see how much is left, but I was sort of in the mood to work on my novel anyway. Back in New York on the tenth. Not looking forward to that. There are mice in my storage closet, yclept The Gulag. Any advice for getting rid of the smell will be appreciated. I can get rid of the mice okay, but the smell is problematic.

Weird Coffee

Constant fantasy, takes the place of travel, much cheaper, easier on back and feet: daydream I am in a strange city in a strange country when in fact I am only in New York. (Only!)

Today, awoke groggy (two margaritas and a vodka-and-tonic), no coffee, no computer, no conversation, nothing but instinct in gear, took manuscript and pencils - not to the Vandam Diner (as usual, if I'm up for breakfast) but to Starbucks on Hudson as it is next to my bank. Stood on line, but barely time to decide: do I want coffee, ice coffee, americano? Chose coffee and marble cake, but the woman at the counter, though smiling at me, was not speaking to me; she was speaking to the woman behind her, patiently, merrily, directing her on the next chore to handle, and doing this constantly as I tried to marshal thoughts, words, concepts to her, feeling as if distracted, rejected by her smile at me off purpose with her continual words not at me, the line behind me goading me not to wait longer, tongue refusing to sync with concept, desire - finally I blurted, "Coffee, medium size, with music." "With music?" she finally addressed me. "I mean, with room for milk." "Hot or ice?" Was she speaking to me? As I said, "Hot," she chattered again, still smiling into my eyes, but to the woman behind her. Threw me again. "And a marble cake." Somehow I escaped.

Had she been speaking Turkish? Croatian? Italian? Dutch? French? Quebec French?

Is this the new conversational manner - speak as if on ear phones (but she wasn't even wearing ear phones) with no connection between face, smile, and words? Would I get this, not be thrown by it, if I were 22 or had a cell phone or a bluetooth or were happily traveling in a foreign country?

Somewhat rattled, sat do my copy editing for a chapter or two.

The Passover story: Meanings of the Seder

Sometimes I get to a seder, sometimes I don't. Shrug. I go for the sense of community with a largely atheist, much intermarried family I don't know very well, and for the pleasure of communal ritual (which is a far older custom than any extant religion, but is an element in almost all of them), and because I love fresh horseradish and hardly ever get it the rest of the year. This year, my distant cousin Mina got me invited to the seder given each year - largely in Mina's honor, and to keep the children aware of their Jewish ancestry - by her Irish Catholic daughter-in-law, whom I had never met. I was proud to be invited, delighted to meet a slew of cousins I didn't know, and wrote of this to a pagan friend who wasn't sure what a seder was. So I analyzed it for him.

As you know, all Judaism – and all Jewishness – is based on the notion that there is an omnipotent God who has chosen the Jews, and that history is worthy of study because it constitutes evidence of the working of God’s will in the world. This is a break (how conscious before the fact is an interesting question) with traditional cosmologies in which whatever deity actually creates the world is well nigh spent by the effort (often literally, being dead, his body parts used to create this or that) and retires to some unreachable realm, no longer influential (or interested) in terrestrial (much less human) doings: Ouranos, Varuna, Osiris, Obatala or Nyambi.

But if there’s only one god (let’s call him El, the Genuine Article, as in a train high above the streets, or a box of exploding cigars), then he either rolls over and ignores us (the Red King a-dreaming) or he enters history, stirs the pot, tastes it now and then and adds spices to taste. (God-in-a-toque and the divine (Julia) child.) Jewishness is predicated on this interfering god, and interpreting reality through his interferences. (E.g.: Sodom means he’s anti-gay or something else that was done there.) That is rough on theology as it means God is responsible for all the pain and bad stuff as well as the good stuff, and if God is good that means we've all done something to deserve it, and if God isn't good then he's a demiurge created by the real God, or else (Job's god) he's got too much on his plate to care to explain it to us. But that is not the subject of today's sermon.

So the first Event really (aside from the legendary strand of personal mystical interactions recorded in Genesis), for Jews, the moment when El threw aside his anonymity and said These are my chosen people, is the Exodus, and the celebration of the Exodus is a celebration of Jewishness (and Jewish survival) as no other holiday is. The actual event being commemorated, of course, is the Passing Over, when the firstborn of Egypt died but the Jews, having anointed their lintels with lamb’s blood or something (colored flashing lights? Christmas trees?), were spared, whereupon Pharaoh said, “Beat it,” and beat it they did, so fast there wasn’t time for bread to rise.

The event is commemorated with a feast (and a season) from which leavened product is specifically excluded. (You can’t even keep it in the house; it’s a spring cleaning holiday.) Like all celebratory holidays in every religion, this one involves particular foods and a particular crowd: in point of fact, a theoretical communion of all Jews celebrating at once, and in a sense sharing that meal with all other Jews (and their well-wishers). No accident that Jesus’s Last Supper was, it is generally agreed, a seder. He was offering his unleavened self and cleaning house of old theologies – or so runs the tale - in some versions.

For the Orthodox Jews, this is a major deal. Orthodox Jews must have two sets of dishes, utensils, pots and pans (even washing machines) in order to observe the division of food into milk and meat categories, never mingling them. Too, everyday items may not be used during the Passover season because they have probably touched leavened bread (or other leavened product, such as beer) during their shelf lives, so either one has two more full sets of dishes in the house for Passover use, or one goes out and buys brand new ones at this time. (Producers of dishware, cookware, silverware love this holiday.) Bread and anything else with yeast in it has to be thrown out of the house before Pesach. (I don’t know anyone who goes this far – I don’t even know anyone who has two sets of dishes. It would never occur to my Catholic cousins – or to their Jewish mother-in-law, for that matter.)

In not-so-well-to-do families in stricter times, each year new dishes were purchased at Passover, and last year’s Passover dishes were promoted to year-round daily dishes – in any case, it’s a headache. My friend Barbara Murray has a set of Passover dishes in the basement because her husband has relatives who married Jews, and she loves to throw them a seder when the cycle has come round to her, and the Jewish cousins are charmed by her wish to be included. It’s a very inclusive holiday. My friend Edith, who comes from a not terribly observant family, found herself in London once, with Passover coming up. She went to a synagogue and was immediately overwhelmed with invitations, and had that experience so difficult for strangers to come by anywhere, feeling part of a family on a family sort of occasion. Because, as a Jew though a stranger, she was long-lost family, and inviting her in was a mitzvah (good deed, blessing).

Besides fresh dishes and unleavened bread, the seder includes a reading of the haggadah, which tells the story of Exodus and the Passover, with appropriate pauses for consumption of certain foods (bitter herbs for the wanderings in the desert, wine at certain moments, matzoh with assorted stuff on it – there’s also a game with matzoh broken, part of it hidden, kids sent to search for it, the matzoh restored and proven to be the other half of the broken one – I forget what that means, go invent something). When my cousin Amy’s partner, Ilene, who is fairly devout for my family (for a radical lesbian) – she converted Amy from Buddhism (the Jew in the lotus, as they say) – held seders for the Martinson connection (my mother’s family), which she did for two or three years before saying to hell with us – we all got haggadahs, borrowed from her mother, and the reading went around the table, each person getting a few paragraphs. This year, the Laskey haggadah assigns most of the reading to Father and Mother, and Jim read Father’s part, while the Mother’s was given to his mother, Mina, rather than to his wife and our hostess, Mary – since the house tradition was started (by Mary) when Mina sold her house and could no longer host the thing herself.

I’m rather fond of matzoh myself, though I like it salted with butter, which is not the way it is ever served at a seder. I also like fresh horseradish, which I think stands for bitter herbs. There is usually a fruit-and-nut spread symbolizing the land of promise, and every Jewish wife has her own recipe, there are whole traditions of them. (All this sort of holiday, in all religions, I call “communion” holidays, and sharing food is central.)

Four questions are asked during the Haggadah reading by the youngest (speaking) person present. There’s a nice moment in The Ten Commandments, and one that Jews enjoy, during dinner at Aaron’s house on the night of the Passover, when Aaron’s youngest kid starts asking the questions spontaneously. Ritual watchings of the movie are a recent addition to seder tradition. “Oh Moses, Moses, you wonderful, impossible man! What power can you find in these mud pits to keep you from these arms?” is not one of the four traditional questions, but Anne Baxter saying it to Charlton Heston is my favorite moment in the movie. Wherefore is this night unlike all other nights? is the first traditional question. Whether they are ever actually answered is debatable – the answer to Anne’s question, of course, is God.

I’ve also never been to a seder that served kosher wine. My father used to insist on French wine, and bring it himself, whoever was hosting the seder, and this is a tradition to which, thank God, all my cousins hold. But making wine kosher is easy enough – just get a rabbi to go zap over the bottle, and it’s kosher.

There are two dubious moments in the seder, by me: At some point, someone (usually the youngest ambulatory kid) is sent to the door to see if Elijah is there and invite him in if so. (In strict neighborhoods, poor Jews hoping for a free meal – or at least dessert – sometimes lingered by front doors awaiting this moment.) Elijah (Ilene said) stands for all the poor and deprived who might turn out to be God’s confidante, but I am opposed to inviting him in because the Prophet Elijah invented religious persecution (he slew 400 priests of Baal for no particular reason), and I think it would be better for Jews to remember that they have practiced this in the past, that some Jews would love to practice it now, and that all of us – Jews and non-Jews – have suffered horribly from it, and ought not to commemorate it. (I think this is where Ilene’s lack of interest in me changed to active dislike.)

The other dubious moment is the expression of hope that we will celebrate Passover “next year in Jerusalem.” That kind of got passed over chez Laskey – it doesn’t really mean anything to them (the kids are Catholic) – and when Ilene read the line to us Martinsons, she hurried through it as well – since the last thing anyone in my family would want is to be obliged to live in the Holy Land. How seriously, how fervently, did non-Zionist Jews say this in the years before the Holocaust and the founding of Israel? Did Jerusalem mean Jerusalem to them, or was it (as Ilene cleverly glossed it) an Ideal World where all would be at peace? How about Zionists, who were mostly not religious to begin with? Hard to say.

At the climax of Job, one of my favorites of Joseph Roth's wonderful novels, and almost the only one partly set in the new world (to which Roth never came – he died of alcoholism in Paris in 1939, a ticket to New York in his pocket), Mendel, a poor but devout Jew whose family has been more or less destroyed in its attempt to reach new world success, and who lives in the back room of a friend’s store over the grumbling of the friend’s shrewish wife, joins this family for Passover and is sent to open the door when Elijah is mentioned. To his surprise, there is a knock before he reaches it. Outside is a stranger from Russia, who apologizes for disturbing them – of course they invite him to join the meal. He turns out to be Mendel’s long-lost youngest son, an invalid baby left behind in Russia who has grown up to be a successful folk-band leader, now on tour in New York. He is searching for his father, to take him home to the Baltics. (Considering what lay ahead – of which Roth knew nothing as it had yet to happen – one may forebode about this.) As the tale unfolded I found my eyes wet; best of all, it was the shrewish hostess who leaped to her feet and cried it was a miracle, and a judgment on her, and that she would never question her husband’s charity again.

There has been some discussion in archaeological circles as to whether there ever was an Exodus. There is no contemporary sign or record of it. Israeli archaeologists perusing the Sinai have found no sign of a march of a great concourse of people meeting the Biblical numbers – but pre-modern estimates of crowd size should never be taken too seriously (never mind that our written account of the event dates from three or four centuries afterwards). What seems likely to me is that a sizable band of Semitic tribes of linked ethnicity (easily glossed in myth as ancestry from an eponymous Israel), let’s say four thousand not four hundred thousand, having quarreled with the Egyptian authorities (newly nationalist after the overthrow of the invading “sea peoples” of the 15th and 16th dynasties, who may well have included – or employed – aforesaid Israelites, as Genesis suggests), decamped by way of the Sea of Reeds (the Hebrew Bible does not mention the Red Sea, which would in any case be the wrong direction) and, avoiding the Negev and the Egyptian-controlled routes to its west, circled around through Nabataea, followed the caravan routes north to Petra and Amman, and then crossed the Jordan, where they found – surprise! – communities in the hills (of what is today, ironically, the West Bank) of peoples linguistically and ritualistically related to them. (Archaeologists have found they eschewed pork; they probably did not circumcise yet, as the Hebrews learned this rite from the Egyptians who had done it for millennia.) Their miraculous tale of wanderings and tribulations and a god who nurtured them and led them through it all was identified joyously with the god worshipped by the Yids in the hills, and the various peoples were then linked by inventing twelve sons for the eponymous ancestor. Since there was no monarchy, the myth could equitably be shared; it did not yet imply one tribe ruling the others but something more confederal than that.

But the seder is a link to relatives one has not seen in forever (which is to say, all Jews - but also Arabs) and to all well-wishers, and as it calls for no extremes of religious observance (no religion demands that you must eat leavened bread or lobster at every meal), it is an easy way to cross any boundaries that may in fact exist, and also (but this is a matter of modern times) to permit Jewish and non-Jewish womenfolk to join forces in the kitchen, the latter learning tradition in the guise of acquiring recipes from the former.

And liberty and brisket for all.

One of these days I hope to find myself at Pesach-tide in Pasadena, where my Episcopalian cousin Martha gives, I am told, a famously special seder. And we can sing the holiday songs of Irving Berlin (Russian Jewish immigrant, married to a Roman Catholic). Though I will insist on "It Only Happens When I Dance With You," "Isn't It A Lovely Day To Be Caught In The Rain" and "Puttin' On The Ritz."