Alan King - Matzo Balls for Breakfast and Other Memories of Growing Up Jewish

Jay Winik

Jay Winik is a historian and the author of the best-selling book , April 1865: The Month That Saved America.

O NE OF MY FIRST VIVID recollections of growing up Jewish has to do with my bar mitzvah. At the age often, I decided that I loved sports more than I cared about religion, let alone my Jewish education. Football, baseball, boxingthat was what I wanted to do. I skipped Hebrew school so often that I basically quit; it was a fait accompli that I imposed upon my parents. A few years later, however, I still wanted a bar mitzvahto have the ceremony, to become a man, to have the party. I got Hebrew tapes from which I learned what I was supposed to say and door so I thought.

It was a grueling chore, curled up in my bed, night after night for months, memorizing, chanting, over and over again. Eventually I learned my part, and just in the nick of time: about a day or so before my actual ceremony. (By the way, this wonderful work habit would repeat itself for years right up until I was an undergraduate at Yale, cramming for Shakespeare and history courses, invariably the night before the final. Only later, when I started writing books, did I finally become enormously disciplined.) With some trepidation and a healthy dose of excitement, I was finally ready.

On the anointed day, a heavy snowstorm blanketed New England, including my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, but that did not stop the ceremony. I passed, which is to say that I read my lines adequately and with no mistakes. But there was one thing that I neglected. Although I knew my text, I had forgotten other aspects of the ceremony. Actually, it was quite comedic. When the rabbi and everyone else on the biman turned around, I stood proudly, still facing the guests. Whoops. When the glass of wine was set before me, I instinctively heaven knows whypicked it up and slugged it down like I was chugging a Coke. Whoops again.

The other thing I tend to associate with growing up Jewish, and I admit this at the risk of sounding totally unenlightened or like a Philistine (or both), is the food. As a kid, Saturdays were the days wed go to the local deli in New Haven. It was called Chucks. A meal at Chucks was a fixed routine: Eat at the same table, usually with the same people (my family and boyhood friends), see the same crowd every week (Hey, how ya doin?), eat the same pickles (the best), and the same food, usually thickly piled corned beef and melted cheese on rye. Going to Chucks was a sort of comforting ritual, repeated so often that it became part and parcel of growing up. To be sure, there were the holidays, the family vacations, and the sports. There was the onset of adolescence, with all that entailed. But there was always Chucks.