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June 8, 2008
“Godparents,” my wife said, as if I had not heard. “Godparents?,” I repeated, “Why do you want those?”
Visions of me bending down to kiss an old man’s hand leapt into my head as the theme to “The Godfather” wafted through my thoughts. No, that didn’t seem right. Who had godparents? Are they good for the Jews? I would need to look into this, before I could commit.
My wife grew up in France, marginally Greek Orthodox, but educated in Catholic schools. When she moved to Toronto as a young teen, religion was not a priority. In fact, aside from the perfunctory Christmas tree, she probably did not think much about it at all – until she met me, a liberal Jew from Long Island, when we were both in our 20s. Now, finally settling down and with a baby on the way, we were having one, of what will surely be many, discussions about religious lifestyle choices.
“Godparents?,” I asked again. “Godparents,” she said from the next room.
I knew that my parents had not appointed godparents for me or my brothers, and would likely be appalled at the idea, but I wanted to know what other Jews thought. While I knew it was not the most prudent place, I headed straight for the convenience of the web. As usual, on the internet there were as many conflicting answers as there are Polowins in the Ottawa Jewish telephone directory.
Emohel.com stated, “The appointing of godparents is not a Jewish tradition,” but then added, “If a Jewish family wishes to appoint godparents, they may do so – it is simply an honorary title.” On Beliefnet.com, an uncle, who had been chosen as the sandek for his nephew’s bris wrote that he did not want the “religious responsibilities” that he thought came with the position. He was advised not to worry, because, unlike Christians, Jews do not have godparents and the religious upbringing of a child is reserved “exclusively for biological parents.”
Yahoo Answers offered a veritable seder feast of different responses to the question, “Do Jewish people have godparents?,” posed by someone “just curious” as neither he nor his Jewish friends knew the answer. The responses ranged from “I thought only Catholics have godparents” to “Yes, many Jewish people have godparents.” Another person wrote, “I don’t see why not. Jews can lose their parents as easily as anyone else.” The final Yahoo response on the page stated that the Sandek was indeed the equivalent of a godfather. I was beginning to get dismayed. Although I went into this project with the zest of a Yeshiva student, it appeared that I might have to use the pilpul method (a method of Talmudic interpretation) to get a straight answer.
Due to time constraints, I did not get to that level of examination, but I did do some research to confirm my understanding of the ceremonial roles at the Brit Milah. The sandek is the person in the Brit Milah ceremony who either holds the baby on his thighs during the circumcision or hands off the baby to the mohel. It is considered the highest honour a person can have at the ceremony and is usually given to a grandfather or other important male person. In more liberal circles, females are also given this honour. I also learned about the Kvatter or Kvatterin, who have the honour of handing the baby from the mother to the father of the baby at the ceremony to the sandek. They are often a couple who would like to have a child soon as superstition dictates that performing this ritual is a fertility rite.
Kvatter is derived from the German word “gevatter,” which means godfather. Their role is sometimes thought of as nurturing, educating and guiding the child through life. That sounded similar to the Christian notion of godparents to me. This was getting truly exhausting. If only I had the will of Rashi to go forward. I did attempt to contact a local rabbi, but, becoming impatient, I sought a response that would surely be contrary, likely halachically questionable and definitely animated. I called my parents.
My father answered the phone and was terse as usual. “Jews don’t have godparents,” he said, before passing this hot potato kugel to my mother, the animated one. First, I asked her to think back to my bris in 1974. I wanted to know who acted in the ceremonial roles. “You did not have a bris or a sandek. We had a Pidyon Haben instead. Your father’s friend Morty Shine acted as the rabbi. I was tired and working to the end.”
“I did not have a bris,?” I exclaimed in disbelief. “No, just the Pidyon Haben, at the hospital. We had it done at the hospital for your brothers too,” my mother explained.
A Pidyon Haben is a ceremony traditionally held thirty-one days after the birth of a first-born son, when certain conditions apply including that the parents are not Cohanim or Levites and that the child arrived via natural birth. I am not sure why this was done, because my father is fairly religious and the conditions for a Pidyon Haben were not satisfied, but that is for another day. I moved on.
“What do you think about godparents?,” I asked my mother. Her tone changed immediately. She became as crazed as George Bush at a pro-choice rally. “I’ve never heard of that in my life. I don’t think it’s Jewish,” she said.
“Not one person in my entire life; who would ever do that? I would never do that.”
That was about the response I expected. But what was it about godparents that turned Jews away? Weren’t the sandek and kvatter at least comparable to the Christian notion of godparents? Apparently not; at least for my mother. “No, I don’t think so. Jews don’t call them that.”
I intend to do further research on the subject of godparents. I am not convinced that they are bad for the Jews, but I am not going to completely dismiss my parents’s reaction either. With three months to go until the baby is due, and then, god willing, many years of parenting after that, there will be many decisions to make and, hopefully, many compromises. Still to come: Naming the baby: Is there a heimishe name that also sounds good in French?, and Baby Showers: Conflict between economics and tradition.
And no, whether or not to circumcise is not on the table. We dodged that one when we recently found out – it’s a girl.
6/15/08
Paris in the Spring – the Eiffel Tower, the Grands Boulevards, the shopping, of course, but a Yiddish Cultural Center and a kosher cooking school? Mais oui – if you know where to look. Paris has long been an important city of the Jewish diaspora, with successive waves of Jews, first Askenazi and later Sephardic, finding a home in the city. Though the home they found was not always a hospitable one, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Paris since at least the sixth century. A large Askenazi population still exists, but there is a palpable Sephardic flavour – it is a city where you can walk into a kosher North African restaurant and hear a melange of French and Arabic. I love Paris and for my second visit to the city, I wanted to experience the sights, sounds, and especially tastes of Jewish Paris, a world at once familiar to my New York Jewish palate, yet bursting with exotic flavours.
“The Sephardim made the city Jewish again,” said Susan Susskind, a transplant from Brooklyn who moved to Paris
in 1970 and never looked back. I met her and her husband when they sat next to us at Lotus De Nissan, a quaint, glatt kosher Chinese restaurant, with décor straight China.”
Madame Tao, adopter of traif recipes
Orthodox proprietor Madame Lafond opened Lotus 23 years ago after she “got tired of going to the same place in Montmartre
all the time after Torah classes” and because “J’adore Chinois.” Mme. Lafond assured me that a Chinese woman, Madame Tao, had adopted all the recipes from her authentic Chinese versions, even substituting faux shrimp for the real, but traif, kind. It was not long before my coFrance once again confronted its’ anti-semitic past, as it had in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair and the second World War. Instead of fragmenting the Jewish community, the Halimi incident brought a renewed awareness of Arab-Jewish tensions and racism in France generally. “A French woman in a supermarket started crying when she saw my boy with a kippa on his head after the Halimi incident. She said she was so sorry,” recounted Mme. Lafond.
My experience at Lotus de Nissan ended on a lighter note, not with a parve fortune cookie, but with schtick. “Did you hear who senator Mccain told Chelsea Clinton were the most hated people in the world?,” Mr. Susskind asked. “No, who?,” I answered.
“Osama, Obama and your mama,” he replied; fitting for a people who, in France as in New York, have usually managed to face adversity with humor.
The next day, we headed to the St. Germain area, home of posh shops, the famed Deux Magots Café and, nearby, the Alef-Bet Restaurant and kosher cooking school, a delightful and funky place owned by two vibrant young Jewish women, both 26, one Algerian-Moroccan and the other Moroccan-Romainian. Perhaps as a result of their mixed heritage, the menu is eclectic, with North African and Israeli dishe
s sharing the rotating menu with gefilte fish and kreplach. Our teacher, Sarah, had been trained at the Ecole Supérieur de Cuisine Française which, according to her, is where real French chefs train. “Cordon Bleu is for foreigners,” she explained. She taught us to prepare a simple, but satisfying, brunch of Israeli salad, zaatar (a mixture of thyme, sesame seeds and oregano) spiced scrambled eggs, mini pitas and French style rugelach (lighter and longer, like a croissant, instead of the dense little pieces you find in most Ashkenazi bakeries).
After polishing off most of the meal, with my wife pocketing the last rugelach for later, I spoke to Elya Trigano, one of owners. After a mid-career crisis at the ripe age of 25, Elya, who had been in advertising, explained that she had always loved cooking and wanted to open a stylish, fun, kosher place. She hired a Jewish architect, who designed the minimalist interior with a wall of cut out shelves meant to evoke Hebrew lettering. With such an overtly Jewish name and theme, I asked if she had encountered any problems with anti-semitism. ‘No,’ she said. “It’s a risk, but I feel safe.” We liked it so much we returned for lunch a few days later, for a salmon club sandwich and frites. Desiring a souvenir, I asked if I could buy one of their signature Alef-Bet logo aprons, a hip red design with cascading alefs and bets. They were out of my size. “We have the children’s size,” Elya explained. “It can be, you know, sexy on a woman.” Maybe so, but I do the cooking in our house so I left empty handed, though not without memories of the most stylish kosher café I have ever seen, as well as handy, laminated recipes.
- Sexy?
The next day, after walking through the much lamented, rapidly gentrifying Marais area, we went to the Mémorial de la Shoah, a museum that opened in 2005 as both an admission of the horrors of the Vichy regime during the holocaust and a celebration of French Jewish life. After entering the outdoor courtyard just beyond the front door, we were greeted by a large Star of David, meant to signify the six million Jews without a burial place and a wall, with the names of 76,000 Jews deported with the cooperation of the Vichy government during the holocaust. The museum also celebrates leading Jewish figures in French history, such as Andre Citroen who founded the eponymous car company and Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian immigrant whose Zionist vision led to Israeli statehood.
The siren call of “Shawarma, Falafel. Get it here” greeted us as we ambled up narrow cobblestone streets onto Rue des Rosiers in the Marais, well known as the ancestral center of Parisian Jewish life. Much like Orchard Street on the Lower East Side or Boulevard St. Laurent in Montreal, it is fast becoming a caricature of it’s former self, with a few Judaica stores, delis and synagogues dotting an area dominated by high end clothing boutiques with prices that would make your nana blush. True, many of these stores are still owned by Jews, but can 225 Euro jeans be called shmattes? A certain degree of haimishness remains though, between the boutiques and the scaffolding signifying more urban infill condos, especially on Rue Des Rosier and Rue Des Ecoffes. On two different nights, I devoured top-notch falafels, dripping with tahini sauce, spicy eggplant and cabbage at L’as du falafel, billed as Lenny Kravitz’ choice and their competitor, Mi-va-mi, just feet away. For around five euros, there may not be a more satisfying Jewish culinary experience in Paris. Even if we did have to run over, or, more accurately, get run over, by bugaboo strollers and dogs with pink outfits to find it, the Marais and its Jewish character cannot be counted out yet. As shabbos descended on the Marais, orthodox young men rushed home to change in gym shorts, tzit tzit blowing behind them, and the main Marais synagogue, on Rue Pavee, buzzed with acticity, just as it has for ninety five years.
Far removed from the hustle of the falafel barkers and physically fit Orthodox in the Marais, we sought tranquility, at the cemetery. Père Lachaise is the final home of many of France’s greatest figures. The painter Pissaro, the composer Chopin and the singer Edith Piaf are among the luminaries buried there. In Père Lachaise’s Jewish section, one can find simple graves of long forgotten French Jews as well as ornate mausoleums seemingly designed to rival their Christian brethren one section over. Among the Jews buried there are the painter Modigliani, the singer Sarah Bernhardt and the philosopher Gertrude Stein, but finding them will take some perseverance. We were chanceux enough to find a friendly guide, who, free of charge, showed us the way to Modigliani. On our way out of the cemetery, my wife insisted that we stop by to see its most famous denizen, James Douglas Morrison, late of the Doors. He was not Jewish, although I heard his agent was.
After exiting the cemetery, we headed to nearby Belleville, a fascinating multi-cultural neighbourhood with colourful multi-hued people clinging to the cultures of their homelands, mostly in Africa and Asia, which they or their families left behind. A sephardic counterpart to the Marais, Belleville is still home to a large Jewish Tunisian community, who are concentrated on a stretch of Boulvard de Belleville. That is where I found the Aux Délices de Kifolie restaurant. From his adjoining table, a Muslim man from Tunisia explained that Tunisian Jews and Tunisian Muslims had a mostly congenial relationship and that although most Jews have left, many keep vacation homes in Tunisia to which they return year after year. Yes, but what about the food? The speciality at Kifolie, the man explained, was fish couscous. When in Belleville, do as they do, so that is what I ordered. Next to us sat a large contingent of Jewish Tunisians, at a big table, speaking at once in Arabic and French, with Arabic tunes wafting through the air. Each time someone new came up to the outdoor patio, they were welcomed into the loud and boisterous big table, as if they all knew each other from the old country.
We were presented with a virtual feast of appetizers, including mini pizzas, mini tuna sandwiches, known as “Tunisian sandwiches”, olives (my wife, an avid olive eater pronounced them “great”) and a tomato dish described as “Mechoui.” If that sounds like a whole meal before the mains even arrived, it was. Still, when my fish couscous arrived, along with potatoes and other veggies in a separate bowl of broth, I was anxious to try it. “Use more of the juice,” the man next to me admonished. I did, and it was the best meal of the week. We left Belleville with an appreciation not just for the food, but for the coulurful and friendly Tunisian Jewish way of life and wondering what life was like for Jews in the old country. I tried to ask the owner, a middle aged Tunisian what it was like for him. “I don’t know. I was born here,” he replied.
Going from one transplanted culture to another, I found the Yiddish Cultural Center on Passage Amelot, in a barely marked alleyway across from a large Renault car dealership. It was there that I met a woman named Ruby Monet, a Yiddish teacher at the Center. Another transplanted New Yorker, from the Bronx, Ms. Monet had moved to Paris in the 1960s. Although she grew up speaking Yiddish with her grandparents, she had not spoken it in years, until she found out about the center in 1989 and decided to see how much Yiddish she could remember. She remembered enough to become a teacher and has been there ever since. “When I taught English, students had to learn it, but with Yiddish, what do you need it for but pure pleasure. It’s a pleasure to teach,” she said. The center contains the largest Yiddish library in Europe, which Ms. Monet called “one of the great unknown treasures in Europe” and a Yiddish language school with about 200 students. It also holds seminars, klezmer concerts and other events celebrating Yiddishkeit, and has a small café.
As my wife and I left Paris, our bellies full of falafel and couscous and our minds at ease, knowing that the largest Jewish community in Europe is flourishing, I was already plotting a return visit to the city of light. I ran out of time before I could sample what I hear is the best kosher Indian restaurant in the world (no joke – google “Darjeeling Paris”) I could work up another appetite for that.
If you go:
Alef-Bet Café and Cooking School, 25, rue Galande 75005 – whether for a cooking class or for a quick bite, it is fun, stylish and inviting.
Aux Délices de Kifolie, 112, blvd. de Belleville 75020 – a lively taste of a lost world, get the Tunisian sandwich or the couscous.
L’As du Falafel, 34, rue des Rosiers and Mi-Va-Mi, 27, rue des Ecoffes 75004 – dueling kosher falafel makers, watch for free samples.
Lotus De Nissan, 39, rue Amelot 75011 – old-school glatt kosher Chinese, for solid rice and noodle dishes minus the traif.
Mémorial de la Shoah, 17, rue Geoffroy l’Asnier Paris 75004 – not far from the shopping and falafel in the Marais, a well done review of France’s Jewish history, good and bad.
Pere Lachaise Cemetery, enter on Boulevard de Ménilmontant, 75020 – Yes there are Jews here and a “graveyard usher” will help you find them.
Yiddish Cultural Center18, Rue Passage Amelot, 75011 – Even if you don’t know your noz di from your tokhes der, it is worth a visit. Ask for Ruby.
Well, I am leaving unemployment behind for a few days of R and R (read shopping per my wife) in my former hometown, New York; former home of quirky, fascinating ethnic enclaves, current home of Starbucks and Hedge Funders and future home of Target:
(Picture courtesy of Gothamist.com)
Target, in NYC??? What next? How about just putting St. Louis inside NYC or Sacramento?
Well, it should be a good trip anyway even if NY is looking more like everyplace else and they are looking more like NY.
We are staying at the Millenium Hilton, by the World Trade Center Site, courtesy of priceline.com. I plan to go to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Coney Island, a place in peril:
http://grahambrunk.vox.com/library/post/astroland-to-close.html
If I have any room left after staging my own private hot dog eating contest, I also plan to sample Lombardi’s Pizza, the oldest Pizza parlor in NYC.
http://www.lombardipizza.com/zgrid/proc/site/sitep.jsp;jsessionid=aws9iqwOO499
Will write upon return…
Of all the blogs, in all the world, you walk into mine; the musings of an American, soon to be Canadian, over-educated, underemployed dreamer.
The inspiration for this blog is the Momousse, a yacht formerly docked in Brockville, Canada. While I don’t know who owns the Momousse, it seems as close to paradise as I can think of.
What is paradise? The thrall of new love, the ability to go anywhere, the contentedness that comes with success? The Momousse represents all this to me.
The past year has been one of dissapointment, fear and loathing. The Momousse represents the hope of the future. It may be just a boat, but, unlike many of us, myself included, it is going places.
Au revoir, Momousse. Tu est dans mes reves. Je n’oublierai jamais.
