WITH Purim on the horizon, it makes me think of Purims past. Especially primal Purim memories of my childhood in Jerusalem.
I grew up in an apartment building. We were the first post-Six Day War generation of Americans raised there. All of our respective parents were inspired by the miracle the war wrought and came from near and far, from all over the world as proud Jews to begin life anew in the holy land.
The Sochnut, The Jewish Agency, assigned apartment buildings to newcomers based on the county each person came from and apartment sizes based on the current amount of children in each family. There were buildings with French people, buildings with Russian people, buildings with Americans.
Then there was our building, the left over building housing representative families from each culture, all squashed together under one roof.
On the first floor was our family, the Americans (and not just any Americans, as many of the Americans in the neighborhood were New Yorkers, but Coloradans!), and next door were the Malouls, Sephardic French Moroccans.
On the second story were Eastern European chasidim and secular Russians, a doctor, his wife and two children.
On the third floor were the Georgians. Their surnames, regardless of what the first half of the name was, ended with the suffix of shveeley.
And on the fourth floor was another Georgian family, headed by the terrifying Adon Yisrael, as we called him (he was president of the building association, otherwise known as the Vaad Bayit, and had the supreme power to decide how much and when to allocate heat to all the apartments, or even to decide whether the heat would be on at all!) and an Israeli family.
Over the years, building residents came and went and replaced neighbors here and there. Pretty much the regulars who were there for years were the Malouls, Trabelskys, Petroshveeleys, Bashs, Mazels and us.
THERE in that little building, number 108, apt. 17, was me, the little daughter of a second-generation Coloradan and fourth-generation American (me being the fifth generation). I grew up exposed to so many different points on the Jewish continuum, culturally, linguistically, religiously and culinarily. It was a little globe, our motley crew.
Each day, within minutes, it was like a visit to Russia, France, Eastern Europe or Georgia depending on who I spoke to and interacted with. Most of us formed a kind of strange but loving and genuinely close alliance.
To this day, whenever I am around French speakers, and the one time I was in Paris, France (for but a day), French is a familiar language to me. Mind you, I dont speak a word of it (what a shame!) other than one phrase. Every evening, as the Maloul girls and I, together with my sister Mimi, were playing outside, we knew time was up when dusk was descending and Juliet Maloul would one by one call out each of the her girls names, Sondra! Kati! Bette! Come into the house, vayez à la maison.
You can imagine the wonderful chaos in our apartment building (our apartments already being in very unboundaried close proximity to each other) on the holiday of Purim when everyone let their guard down a few more notches than usual.
Musically, it was a mixture of Russian skomorokhs, operas or a Chechyan folk tune, Parisian musettes, garish and rocky Georgian beats, all laced with the slow, mellow and heartfelt melodies of a good, soul-arousing niggun.
One year, my father got a hold of a lifelike original gorilla costume and mask from the movie, Planet of the Apes. Decked out as The Gorilla, he knocked on the Maloul’s door. Juliet answered. In the first second she turned pale as a ghost. In the second she began shrieking in terror. She ran for her life, and thought a baboon had escaped the zoo.
I remember how my sister Shana was scared, too, and hid under the bed. After that year my father only wore the lifelike mask so as not to scare anyone off!
Purim was for dressing up and for that one day enjoying the fantasy of whoever you wanted to be, Queen Esther, Mary Poppins, cowgirls, a painter or a princess . . . but my default costume was always gypsy.
Whenever we had not thought up a costume in advance, my mother would say, Hey, how about dressing up as a gypsy?
I had no idea what a gypsy was. But I always smiled and nodded. Yeah, gypsy. Gypsy was always good. It meant wrapping yourself in a mishmash of grown up colorful scarves, sashes and crystal beaded necklaces.
It meant dabbing on some makeup on the lips and cheeks . . . good enough for my eight-year-old self.
It was just a good thing that no one asked me what a jeep-see (Israeli pronunciation) was.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
