What Do You Do On Sundays?

by Hugh Fox

What did we used to do on Sunday afternoons when I was a kid? We’d drive around in the Chicago suburbs and look at big-shot, beautiful houses. What do I do now a hundred years later? Drive around and look at big-shot, beautiful houses. Or maybe not just big-shot beautiful houses, but houses in old neighborhoods, the older the better. I’m looking for something I never had growing up – a house,  a sense of neighborhood.

Did it make any sense? My mother’s father, this skinny old streetcar conductor Irishman, had managed to buy a brick bungalow out in Cicero, west of Chicago. Great place. Dark red brick. Great attic. Great garden. Czech neighborhood. I remember my grandma talking over the back fence to her neighbors. In Czech. She was supposed to be Czech. Spoke Czech, said she was Czech.

But she wasn’t Czech, she was Jewish.

But what did I know?

I went to Mass every morning. The Body and Blood of Christ. Of course now I know that Christ’s Last Supper was a Passover dinner, but it wasn’t until I went to my first Passover dinner after I’d converted to Judaism myself that I realized that the whole symbolism of the Body and Blood of Christ came from Passover symbolism, that the host that was Christ’s body (transubstantiation, the real body of Christ, even though it just seemed to be an unleaved wafer) had symbolically begun as Passover matzahs, the unleavened bread that the Jews ate in the desert, you know the whole “passing-over” into the Promised Land, out of Egypt. And the Passover wine became the symbol for Christ’s blood. At age eight, nine, what did I know about such things? Nothing.

But came Easter, which is always around the time of Passover, and matzahs would appear on my grandmother’s table with little glasses of oversweet but delicious dark purple kosher wine.

I always associated matzahs and wine with Easter, and the association was there, right in the middle of the Mass, but never spilled over into Catholic Easter services themselves. The Mass was one big Passover supper all year long, but when my grandmother brought out her wine and matzahs I thought it must be something Czech. Czechs ate matzahs and drank wine at Easter.

When my grandmother would offer me a little glass of wine and some matzahs, my mother would object. My father had taken a Confirmation pledge to never touch a drop of alcohol, and he was so fanatic about it that he wouldn’t even eat food that had any alcohol in it.

“No wine for the boy. Hugh will be furious if he finds out.”

“What’s a little wine going to hurt? It’s good for you.”

And she’d pour it for me anyhow. I hadn’t made any pledges.

What a delicious combination, the dark, super-sweet purple kosher wine and the dark, crisp matzahs.
Czechs were lucky, I thought, they had all the tasty stuff.

Then when Christmas came around, my grandmother would make stacks of potato pancakes. Potato pancakes and tea. She always drank a lot of tea.

What did I know about Chanukah? Nothing. Chanukah in the Jewish calender always falls around Christmas. In fact that’s why it’s been turned from a super-minor feast in ancient times, to a super-big feast today. A little competition with Christmas now that the Jews are part and parcel of the Christian world.

It was only a few years ago that I discovered the connection between my grandmother’s Christmas potato pancakes and Chanukah. Just to show you how retarded I am.

I converted to Judaism ten years ago, and had to go to conversion classes, learn Hebrew, the whole schmear. My professor was a guy named Bruce Wetzler, a cantor from New York. Wonderful guy. Had been an enormous blimp of a guy when he’d been younger but when I met him he was “normal”-sized, on a constant diet. Great singer. When he sang services it was classy, serious, timeless Judaism. And we became special friends. For years he invited me every year for Passover, when his daughters got married I was invited to the weddings, we’d go out to dinner, he and his wife, me and mine, say once a month. A Chinese restaurant called Gourmet Village...and he’d get everything vegetarian. Kosher from the word GO.

So here I am dropping in on him a few years ago to bring him and his wife Miriam a
Chanukah present and there’s Miriam in the kitchen cooking stacks of potato pancakes.

“How about a potato pancake?” she asks me, “I bet you’ve never had a potato pancake in your life.”

“What are you talking about? My grandmother always used to make potato pancakes, stacks of them, just like you, right around Christmas.”

Miriam poured me a cup of cocoa.

“My grandmother used to always have cocoa with the pancakes too.”

Cantor Wetzler laughed.

“Oh, brother, you were surrounded by the whole thing, but how could you have known?”

How could I have known?

Or my uncle Jake. He was supposed to be James Mangan. His father was this bonafide Irishman, James Mangan Sr. But I never heard him called anything but Jake.

He worked at the First National Bank in Chicago as a General Man. Which meant that he could fill in on any job in the bank. Some teller got sick, there he was, some vice president was in Europe on vacation and here comes Jake to fill in for him.

And he ran his own business in the bank too. As wholesaler. Anything you wanted, he could get it for you wholesale. You wanted a diamond ring, OK, out came the suitcase with samples in it. You wanted tires, china, a fur coat, you name it, he had it.

Hardly your typical Irishman.

And there was a whole other world he was part of that I touched only peripherally once in a while.
He didn’t just wholesale in the bank, but on Sundays (never on Saturdays, Sabbath, Note Bene!) he was always down in the Jewish wholesale district, and afterwards he’d be talking to my mother about Sol said this and Mort said that and Herb said that, it was a whole other life that I was never brought into except....

There was one weird visit that I’ll never forget no matter how long I live.

I must have been about eight. My eighth birthday. And Jake took me down to Twelfth Street to this old toy store.

We walked in, it was darkish, super-crowded with toys. Everything you could imagine.
This old Jew came out of the back room.

“Hey, Jake!” Gave him a hug. “So you brought the boy.”

And he practically started examining me like I was the patient and he was the doctor.Walked around and looked at me, me wondering the whole time what the hell was going on. “So it’s you’re eight. What kind of toys do you like? Are you into sports?”

“Not really. I like toy soldiers and guns, that kind of stuff.”

“Ahhhhhh! Come on back here.”

He took me into the back of the store and took this big package down from a shelf, opened it up and pulled out a big khaki cannon.

“Let me tell you how this works. You put the powder in here in the top, put water in the cannon itself, then you press this little button, the powder falls into the water, produces this gas, then you press this other little button with a flint in it, it produces a spark, and BAM, it’s the biggest sound you ever heard in your life. It’s a little tricky, but it’s safe. The powder is calcium carbide, when it hits water it produces acetylene gas and that’s what blows up. But the cannon itself is cast iron. No problem. What do you think?”

I was overwhelmed. My own cannon. And all the fancy words, calcium carbide, acetylene, made it sound a thousand times better.

“I love it.”

“And you’ve gotta have some soldiers too,” he said, going over and getting two huge packages of lead soldiers and handing them to me, putting the cannon back in the box and handing it to Jake, still not just looking at me, but studying  me like I was a lemur in a cage in a zoo or something. No one had ever been so interested in me before in my life. But it wasn’t creepy, just filled with affection, tenderness.You could just feel that his hand wanted to come over and touch my hair. What was going on?

“So how much do I owe you?” Jake asked.

“Later, later,” said the old guy waving Jake away, half closing his eyes. It was just a normal “later,” but something I translated as “never, “ “forget it.”

We still didn’t leave and the good old Jew guy still kept studying  me.

I didn’t want to leave, really, felt some kind of strange, inexplicable bond between me and the old guy.
But finally we left, the old guy gave Jake and me both hugs and we were out into the Chicago cold again. My birthday is February 12th. It was always the North Pole.

I think it was the only time Jake had ever taken me anyplace with just the two of us.

Why?

What was going on?

Who was the old guy?

Years later, when my grandmother was on her deathbed out in Arizona (living with Jake), my cousin Judy, one of Jake’s daughters, was at her deathbed, and here’s what she told me later.

“Remember how Gram always said her family was Czech and that was it. All very vague. Well, she was dying and I was sitting there, no one else around, and she told me that when she was twelve her mother had died. She was deaf and the kids were sick and she’d gone out to get some food, and on the way back she didn’t hear this train coming and she got hit by it and killed, and then her father married her mother’s sister, which I thought sounded weird. But she didn’t get with her aunt, her new mother, so she left home and got jobs cleaning houses. That’s how she made her living, cleaning houses. Then she met the Seidels and they took her in and treated her like a daughter, and she used to work in the bar serving drinks and when she got older she met this guy in the bar and they went out on a date, someplace way in the western part of Chicago, and he tried to rape her and she ran away and got to this street where there was this streetcar coming and she flagged it down, got on all hysterical and crying and the streetcar conductor was James Mangan, who became our grandfather. Only in order to get married in the Catholic Church, she had to ‘convert,’ or at least go through the motions, so she did.....and.....that’s all she said, but the whole time I kept thinking there was a lot more she didn’t say.”

Which really rang a bell for me.

She’d left her family when she was twelve.

When I was eight she must have been about fifty-five.

Let’s say that her father was twenty-five years older than her. That would make him seventy.

How old was the old guy in the toy store? About seventy.

He couldn’t have been my grandfather, could he? Could Jake have maintained contact with him over the years and could the old man have asked him, “Come on, Jake, I just want to see the boy. He never has to know who I am....just to see him.....”

And Jake took me over to the toy store and....

It’s an encounter that I can never forget.

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