A Treasury of American-Jewish Folklore Read online

  A

  TREASURY

  of

  AMERICAN-

  JEWISH

  FOLKLORE

  A

  TREASURY

  of

  AMERICAN-

  JEWISH

  FOLKLORE

  LION KOPPMAN

  STEVE KOPPMAN

  First Jason Aronson Inc. softcover edition—1998

  This book was set in 10 pt. Stempel Schneidler by Alabama Book Compositon

  Deatsville, AL.

  Copyright © 1996 by Lion and Steve Koppman

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Jason Aronson Inc. except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Koppman, Steve.

  A treasury of American-Jewish folklore / Steve Koppman, Lion Koppman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-7657-6024-1

  1. Jews—United States—Anecdotes. 2. Jews—United States—

  Folklore. 3. Jewish wit and humor. 4. United States—Ethnic

  relations. I. Koppman, Lionel. II. Title.

  E184.J5K774 1996

  305.892'4073—dc20

  96-941

  Manufactured in the United States of America. Jason Aronson Inc. offers books and cassettes. For information and catalog write to Jason Aronson Inc., 230 Livingston Street, Northvale, New Jersey 07647.

  To Mae,

  Hana,

  and

  Sharon

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Jews Among the Indians

  ‘Navajo Sam’ and Billy the Kid

  Immigrant to Indian Chief

  “Box-Ka-Re-Sha-Hash-Ta-Ka”

  Ute with a Yiddish Accent

  “Old Mordecai”

  The Magic Name of Franks

  Wild Man of the Frontier

  He Got the Grand Canyon in a Trade

  “Bosh-Bish-Gay-Bish-Gonsen”

  Powwow at Levy’s

  A.K.A. Señor Nogales

  2 Pioneers and Trailblazers

  Cohen and Isaacs and Daniel Boone

  Mr. Texas

  God-Fearing Guards

  Pioneer Advertiser

  Family Tragedy

  Miner Problem

  Dutch John’s

  Bulls and Bears

  Forty-niner

  Levi Strauss: Blue Gold

  The “Menken”

  Bank in the Back

  “Sadie” Earp—Adventure in the Blood

  “Get the Hell Off the Wire!”

  Baseball’s Forgotten Hero

  3 Fighters and Freelancers

  No Loyalty Oath

  Jewish Paul Revere

  Belle of Philadelphia

  The Truth about Haym Salomon

  Gracious Seixas

  At War with the Navy

  John Brown’s Bondi

  Chaplain without Leave

  No Furlough

  Lincoln’s Corn Doctor

  Order Number 11

  ‘Pass Over’ Story

  “A Regular Fronthall”

  Israelites with Egyptian Hearts?

  All He Could Fit on His Chest

  Slinger the Slugger

  Sensationalism Sells

  4 Rebels and Eccentrics

  “Rabbi” Monis

  Buried Standing Up

  Levi Solomon’s Women

  Noah’s Hark

  Difficult Conversion

  Emperor Norton

  The Stingiest Man in San Francisco

  Holy Moses

  Divine Sarah

  Bathing in Milk—Naughty Anna Held

  He Made the Stars

  Levy’s Gold

  5 Dwelling in Darkness:

  The Early American-Jewish Community

  Mordecai Moses Mordecai: The Tide of Intermarriage

  Jewish in New Orleans

  Holy Roley

  Rebecca Gratz’s Sunday School

  Finally, a Real Rabbi

  An Anti-Semitic Incident

  Pistol-Packing Rabbi

  Isaac Mayer Wise: Albany and Beyond

  The First Woman Rabbi?

  6 The Joys of Peddling

  The Pack

  Pretty Sally Solomons

  Hyman Lazarus and the Steamboat

  Lost Language

  Sorry

  Peddling in California

  Slave to Servant

  That’s Business

  7 Learning the Ropes:

  Greenhorns and Their Advisers

  America

  The Presser

  Abadiah ben Charlie

  No Sin

  Counting Streetcars

  Modern Wonders

  Escalators

  A Golden Land

  A Wonderful Place

  Coney Island

  Even Keel

  Don’t Fix the Country

  Fifth Avenue

  Learning English

  No Headway

  Give Me Your Tired

  Boobelah

  8 East Side Stories: Life in the New Ghetto

  Furnishings

  Hooking a Boarder

  Fear

  Advice from Your Banker

  Lincoln, Bakunin, and de Hirsch

  Jewish Asthma

  Yom Kippur Balls

  Blind Justice

  Romance at the Settlement

  Upstairs

  Advertising

  A Good Question

  Unto You, Peace

  The Schnorrer

  9 Greeting the Mishpacha: Uptown vs.

  Downtown, Reform vs. Orthodox

  Bridging the Gap

  Bad Dreams

  The Tzimmes Revolt

  No, Thanks

  Marshall Law

  “As Rich as Jacob Schiff”

  Richman and the Pushcart Peddlers

  How Many Synagogues

  The Treifa Jollification

  Chief Rabbis

  Emil Hirsch: Closed on Shabbes

  An Orthodox Joke

  Forced to Close

  S. S. Wise—Truth Bravely Uttered

  10 Milk and Money: Getting By in Business

  Promise You’ll be Rich

  Lately

  Imagine

  Salt

  Odds

  Joseph Jacobs

  It’s a Living

  A Good Question

  A Penny Fan

  Visit to Bloomingdale’s

  Bernard Baruch

  Last Wills

  Let Them Work for It

  11 Jews of the Underworld

  The Early Days

  Doing What Comes Naturally

  “Big” Jake and “Dopey” Benny

  Horses and Hoods

  Only in America

  Ma Crime

  Gyp “The Blood” Horowitz

  “Lepke” Buchalter

  “Kid Twist” Reles

  A. R.

  “Greasy Thumb” Guzik

  “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer

  Meyer Lansky

  12 Stage, Screen and Song:

  The Yiddish Theater and Its Children

  It Wouldn’t Hurt

  Sleep with a Baker

  The Yiddish King Lear

  An Actor’s Theater

  Jacob Gordin

  A Fighter’s Theater

  The Jewish Caruso

&n
bsp; Moishe Oysher

  The Great Houdini

  Include Me Out: The Legend of Sam Goldwyn

  The Dancing Cantor

  “Jolie”

  Toastmaster General

  Forgot to Remember

  Victor Borge

  “Uncle Miltie”

  Oh, God!

  13 Notes from the Interior:

  The Catskills, Galveston, and Beyond

  Southern Sabbath

  The Outcast of the Grand Union Hotel

  The Filth

  A True Story

  The Borscht Belt

  A Simple Question

  A Rabbi’s Market

  Galveston, Oh Galveston

  Another Jewish Holiday

  14 The Old World in the New:

  Yiddish in America

  Yiddish-Englishisms in American-Jewish Folklore

  New Yiddish in America

  How Yiddish Traveled

  Bilingual Jests, Puns, Sayings, and Graffiti

  Bilingual Vulgarisms

  Disappointed

  Zuhg Ah Yiddishe Vuhrt: Speak a Jewish Word

  Getting Mad in Yiddish

  Yiddish Sayings and Their Humorous Connotations

  Pocahontas, Yiddish Version

  All I Got Was Words

  Traditional Folk Beliefs and Superstitions

  15 Out in the World:

  Changing Names, Fitting In, Moving Out

  That Explains It

  Don’t Ask

  Name Changes

  Namesakes

  Bilingual Name Games

  How the Jews Became Fergusons

  Yankele

  No Christian Name

  “Nice American-Jewish Names”

  A Jew Named Kennedy

  Max Backward?

  No Good

  Joe Jew

  A Yew, Not a Yentile

  Conversion Benefit

  A Reason

  Religious Preferences

  Church Visit

  Hank Greenberg

  Mixed Children

  Ginsburg

  Horses at Shavous

  Greenhorns

  Onward, Hum-hum Soldiers

  Ikak, Rel Yid

  Return Home

  16 Giving It Away/Taking It Back:

  Fund-Raising and Philanthropy

  Peace Unto You

  A Satisfied Check

  “If Mr. Rosenwald Had Six Dozen Eggs . . .”

  Louis Pizitz of Birmingham

  Minnie’s Music

  Albert Greenfield of Philadelphia

  Religious Acts

  No Shame

  Ends & Means

  Fund-Raising Tips

  The 1967 War

  Pledging and Squeezing

  17 The Synagogue in Transition

  Not Today

  Stages

  “Without Grape Juice, There Is No Joy”

  “No Praying!”

  New Aesthetic

  Raffling Off the Torah

  Half a Loaf

  Crown of the Torah

  Handwriting on the Wall

  Our Little Secret

  You’d Never Believe

  Christmas Stories

  May He Rest

  Transformation of the Bar Mitzvah

  The American Shadchan

  New Matchmakers

  18 Classic American-Jewish Humor

  Second Chances

  Am I Thirsty

  Unsatisfied

  Special Order

  Wherever You Go

  Test

  Final Wishes

  Waiter Jokes

  Not So Good

  A to B

  A & Q

  Are You Jewish?

  Wrong Numbers

  Humor with the Yiddish Still In

  “Milchig” and “Flayshig” Jokes

  I Don’t Believe

  Another Jew

  Generations

  Just One Question

  He Meant Well

  Helping Hand

  Hitler’s Punishment

  Instructions

  Pictures

  The Venerable Young

  Mixed News

  That’s a Business?

  Baseball

  Einstein Jokes

  Reprieve

  Light Bulbs and J.A.P.s

  How the Jews Got the Commandments

  Questions

  Don’t Depend on Me

  Faith

  19 Jews as Seen by Others

  Impressions

  Reflections

  Body and Soul

  Who Is a Jew?

  The East Side and its Observers

  More Questions than Answers

  Money and Business: Jokes on Jews

  Old Sexual Folk Humor on Jews

  Told by Jews

  The Case of Leo Frank

  The Six-Day War

  Street Rhymes

  Camp Parodies and Cabin-Tent Songs

  Black and Jews in American Folklore

  Some Black Folklore Tales

  What Won’t They Do

  Jokes and Slurs on Blacks and Jews

  Sayings

  Peddler Pearlman and the Blacks

  Some Black-Jewish Jokes

  Color Cautious

  Topping the List

  “Freedom Cap”

  The Golden Plans

  The “Nineteen Messiahs”

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks for their aid in the preparation of this book are due to the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, for a research grant; the late Dr. Jacob R. Marcus, eminent historian and former director of the American Jewish Archives, for his generosity in allowing us to draw freely from his books, essays, monographs and other works; anthropologist and folklorist Nathan Hurvitz for his material on the street rhymes of Jewish children and the relationship between black and Jewish folklore; the late Samuel Asofsky for his collection of Yiddish folk expressions and to the YIVO Institute for Scientific Research; the Yeshiva University Museum; the San Francisco Jewish Community Library and Joey Liebman, formerly of that library; Dr. Ellen Frankel; the American Jewish Historical Society, Jewish Currents, Moses Rischin, Atheneum Publishers, Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly, and the Jewish Publication Society, for permissions to reprint; Mae Koppman for her valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript and for her encouragement; and Brenda Blau and Jean Cullen for typing portions of the manuscript.

  INTRODUCTION

  B. A. Botkin, one of America’s most eminent folklorists and author of A Treasury of American Folklore, said, “When one thinks of American folklore, one thinks not only of the folklore of American life—the traditions that have sprung up on American soil—but also of the literature of folklore—the migratory traditions that have found a home here.” The very same can be said about American-Jewish folklore. There are Jewish tales, anecdotes, jokes and customs that could have developed only in America. At the same time, there are traditions that have traveled here from other places and been transformed in their American environment.

  Folklore is made up of the stories, anecdotes, recollections, sayings, jokes, beliefs, superstitions, customs and songs of a people that have been handed down so long they have a life of their own. They travel from person to person and region to region and become “classic.” They are patterned by common experience, varied by individual repetition, and cherished because they are somehow characteristic or expressive. Folklore is not history and it is not biography, although some of it is about people who lived and what others remember or heard about them.

  In its purest form, folklore is associated with the “grapevine.” Virtually every story, every folk belief, every song has variations, since it has been passed orally from person to person and, in the retelling, inevitably changed and embellished.

  Folklore includes the archetypal and the atypical, the character who is strikingly different and therefore leg
endary, and the character so representative of his community at that time and place that he epitomizes it and becomes legendary.

  American-Jewish folklore is an expression of the land, the people, and their experiences. Since 1654—more than 340 years ago—when a handful of refugees found a grudging haven in New Amsterdam, American Jews as a community have undergone many profound changes. Since they started coming from Eastern Europe by the hundreds of thousands in the late nineteenth century, they have evolved from an immigrant, generally low-income and embattled group to an overwhelmingly native-born, educated, predominantly middle-class community, accepted as an inseparable part of the nation’s fabric.

  As Botkin says, we become estranged from the folklore of the past, which we cannot help feeling a little self-conscious about, without yet being able to fully appreciate folklore in the making. Yet each period has developed a literature about the folk, ranging from anecdotes, old-timers’ reminiscences and homespun humor to local color and sketches.

  In some respects, American-Jewish folklore is singular and unlike other peoples’ folklore. There are no folk tales about animals, witches, ghosts or devils. There are few tall yarns. There are no mythical folk heroes, although there are folk heroes who once lived. On the other hand, American-Jewish folklore has its share of boosters and knockers, trailblazers and eccentrics, rogues and fighters, wise men and fools, folk beliefs and superstitions, riddles and rhymes, customs and sayings, folk humor, anecdotes, ballads and folk songs reflecting the American-Jewish experience.

  Botkin noted too how folklore perpetuates ignorance as well as wisdom. For example, negative attitudes that some Christians held about Jews in earlier times were unwittingly repeated and spread by Jews themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in street rhymes making fun of Jews, chanted by Jewish children, who typically didn’t have the faintest notion of their original meaning.

  This book includes anecdotes, jokes, sketches of legendary figures—the bits and pieces of American-Jewish life that are “classic” in the folkloristic sense—that provide a characteristic glimpse, that capture something significant or memorable of the development and experience of the Jewish community in America over the past 340 years.

  Any work of this kind is inherently selective, both the boundaries and selection of folklore of necessity subjective. Our view is that folklore by its nature is not new or recent; folklore does not become folklore until long after the events referred to first occur. It has to become part of legend, tradition, collective memory beyond the individual memories of those who directly experience it, and to mutate into different versions over time, told not only from person to person but generation to generation. For this reason, relatively little material from recent decades has been included here.

  Much of the material will be familiar to readers old enough to have heard it from their parents or grandparents; for others, it will be quite new. In either case, it is an attempt to capture and preserve the wisdom, insights, laughter, tears and daily living of those who have gone before us.