Thursday, October 06, 2022
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“Litvaks!” commented a friend on Facebook in response to a meme I’d posted making fun of people with no sense of humor.
“Watch it, Galitz,” I shot back, and then neither of us ever
said another word about it.
There was no need.
I knew he must have been mortified at his unintended gaffe,
and knew also, that it was not his intention to insult me. In fact, he meant it
as a compliment. A Litvak was one of the worst things he could imagine and he
never imagined, therefore, that I could be one.
I actually felt bad for him because who hasn’t made a
similar faux pas—really stepped in it—in a social context? Friends look the
other way when stuff like this happens, and that’s what we are, my Galicianer
friend and I, despite the Gefilte
Fish Line that divides our ancestors into those who liked their food sweet
(his), and those who decidedly, did not (mine)!
This was not the first time that someone had assumed I could
not possibly be one of those (gadzooks!) Litvaks. Once, during an important
negotiation, the man sitting across from me said, “Let’s not be like one of those
Litvaks who fight over the price of every leg of every chair and table,” words which
caused me to kick my negotiating partner under the table—in the shin—hard.
That’s okay. Because as I am sure you well know, these things
work both ways. For example, when I first became aware at the age of 13 or so
that there was something called a “Galicianer,” I went to the one who knew all regarding
these things—my mother—and asked her, “Mom? What’s a Galicianer?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “But Grandma said never to marry
one.”
Later, when I became consumed for a time with family
research, I learned a great deal about the communities and countries that
comprise the wanderings of the Ashkenazi Jew in Europe. I became so aware of
the distinctions between these regions and communities that I could often
surprise someone by guessing where their ancestors were from, just from the way
they pronounced “kugel.” I had a good laugh when one of my siblings married a lovely someone of Hungarian ancestry. My mother embraced this new family member
wholeheartedly, having absolutely no clue that Hungary was in that unimaginable
(to her) European region from whom spousal connections were proscribed by my
Grandma, may she rest in peace.
Many years ago, a driver we hired to take me to the hospital
to have yet another one of my babies got to talking about family roots. When he
mentioned the town in Poland from whence his grandparents came, I said, “Ah,
Galicianers!” to encourage him to tell me more—I love hearing about Jewish
roots.
“Yup,” he said, “In my family, the men went out in the
morning with a rope, and came back at night with a horse!”
My husband and I busted out laughing (which wasn’t so
great for my contractions). Our driver had touched on the very thing that
people not from Galicia (i.e. Litvaks—though never MY family) say about Galicianers, but NEVER to
their faces: “Galicianers are horse thieves.”
Bully for our driver. These distinctions: do they really
matter anymore? We have (both his family and ours) all come home to Israel—we can
laugh at the prejudices that once kept our communities distinct throughout our
long sojourn in the Diaspora. The poverty stricken Jews of Galicia had to be
canny to make a living in order to survive. They had to have something to keep their spirits up, which
they found in Chassidus. They lived in a land of sugar beets, so they put sugar
in their food.
The “kalte” (cold) Litvaks, on the other hand, survived Europe (but in most cases didn’t survive at all—94% of Lithuania's Jews were wiped out by the Holocaust) by remaining dryly unemotional, rejecting Chassidus, and burying their heads in their books. It’s difficult to pinpoint how these ancestral survival behaviors manifest in either community today, but I often catch myself doing something particularly “Litvish,” something my mother or grandma might have done, too.
My mother used to say that if my grandma entered a home and
there was something she didn’t like about the house—I dunno, maybe she saw a sock
on the floor in the hall—she wouldn’t let anything pass her lips, nary a drop of
water or bit of biscuit. Grandma’s lips stayed sealed shut, and she would not
said why.
Mom had her own way of expressing her inner Litvak. Growing
up, we were expected to pass things at the dinner table without being asked. My
beloved late mother would literally have starved before saying, “Could you please
pass the potatoes?”
She would sit, head held high, not looking at you, yet you
knew you were guilty of something. Eventually it would occur to you, “Oh, she
wants the potatoes.”
With me, it’s the stupid things like netiquette that make me revert to
ancestral traits perceived by some as common to the Lithuanian shtetl. If, for example, you
send a mass email and put every email address—including my own—in the CC line
instead of obscuring them in the BCC line, it burns me up. It literally makes
steam come out of my ears
When someone did this to me (note: did this to ME—exposed MY address to 15 strangers) only recently, I said to my husband, “I can just feel the Litvak coming off me when this stuff happens,” and he laughed.
Nu. Dov can laugh. He has no skin in the game.
After all, his family's Prussian.
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