JoelNothman.com

It began as Yom Kippur ended: the sudden realisation that my days in North America are numbered, and that the following Monday would be Canadian Thanksgiving. It would also be Sukkot, and a great opportunity to get out of town for the weekend, or at least to venture into another neighbourhood of Montreal. But I decided I would try to get to New York. My first attempts (Tuesday night) to call my New York friends didn’t work. “I’m going to visit a friend in Vermont,” said Allison, “you could come there.” David-Zvi suggested that I don’t join him going home to Toronto. Rachel would surprise her parents in Boston, also somewhere I wanted to visit. Jawina would be going with Yosef and co to Quebec City on Monday, maybe I could join them—a backup plan.

I stuck to New York and, after phonecalls seemed to fail, sent messages on Facebook to potential hosts or advisors. Most returned negative responses. I called Yogi again on Wednesday night and this time got through. He told me one of his roommates would be out for the weekend and I could be pretty sure of a bed if I came along.

So I was immediately pumped and ready for a weekend at Columbia. I packed on Thursday evening after class, and then went off with Naomi and Arié to a Cat Empire concert I’d now been looking forward to for some time. For some reason I’d been unable to convince anyone else to join us (although the tickets were quite cheap). Although it was at times hard to see them through the thick crowd, and there was little room to dance, I think the band lived up to their reputation of offering a fun and exciting and very different style of music. It creatively blends ska, reggae, various latin styles, maybe a little hip hop, jazz, even a touch of klezmer, and overall has a lot of energy and a lot of talent. Nice ideas and visions for the world in the lyrics are also good (although often the words are more arbitrary). It did bring me back home a little, and yet while there were many Australians littered through the crowd, there was also plenty of Quebecois French. Mixing much old and new, the band went out after a second encore on a river of red red wine…

Having missed the 11:45pm bus (I’d only considered it a little), I got up early to get to Berri-UQAM for the next Greyhound to NYC, scheduled to leave at 7:45am. Although the bus left fairly on-time, we were held up a little at the national border (an experience foreign to Australia), and so that the bus that had been scheduled to arrive at Manhattan’s 42nd St at 4:15pm was now due in two hours later. Shabbat was due in at 6:12. I was approached on the bus by a French brother and sister who were in the same predicament “Will we arrive in time to get to our hosts for shabbat?” “No, probably not. Hopefully we’ll arrive early enough to get onto the subway before the sun is set.” While the sun didn’t stand still for us, we did alight from the bus early: at 5:50pm, giving me the time to get to Columbia by 20 past the hour.

I had put my US SIM card back into my phone, but all credit had expired, so I again couldn’t call or be called. Finding somewhere to sell me credit that close to sundown would have been problematic, and besides, Yogi wouldn’t answer this late on a Friday anyway. I had spoken to him earlier in the day: somehow there was wireless internet access at the border crossing, and I made use of it and later the phone of the French Jewish girl on my bus to check some details and tell him I’d be late. He gave me the impression that he’d be on the lookout for me near his apartment for which he’d given me an address of 70 Morningside, at W 118th St.

Thankfully I knew there was an eruv in the area, so I could at least carry my posessions around once Shabbat was in. So I walked along Morningside Drive, looking for 70 and looking for 118th. 70-74 were some offices underneath the East Campus Residence building. Either way, I didn’t see anything that looked like apartments (and at least in Montreal few stay in residence after freshman year). So I wandered around in hope that he was actually looking for me at the arranged time of 6:30. With my luck in decline, I was offered help by a few passersby, one of whom suggested that Morningside Drv was different to Morningside Ave, on the other side of Morningside Park. So I crossed the park (which I later discovered meant I left the Eruv—whoops) and looked there. I realised a few things: (a) 118th was nowhere near #70; (b) I was in Harlem and no longer Columbia student territory. These realisations signalled my return to the first side of the park.

One door of the 70-74 Morningside Drv offices looked appealing: nice blue walls, big lettering “COLUMBIA BARTENDING”, two friendly looking people inside, and piles of alcohol in boxes in the doorway. I knocked and entered, and with a worried face explained my predicament. “So you have a phone with the phone number, but you won’t use it, he won’t answer and it won’t call?” was the jist of the initial response. One took the phone and found the other number, the other started researching (with Yogi’s real name) on Facebook. They found his residence online and so were able to look up his room number. At the same time, the war was waged on another front and we discovered a message cleverly left on Yogi’s voicemail system for me! The guy played it back a second time on speaker: “A message for Joel: we’re at Mac (of Barnard) on the corner of Broadway and 118th. There’s a big sukkah there.”

When I then found my way back to Broadway (the subway had arrived there), I thankfully didn’t need to find the sukkah by myself. There was a group of very Jewish looking people on the street whose conversation I interrupted to explain my confusing predicament, and who turned out to be heading the same direction. Yogi seemed quite shocked to see me, that I had actually succeeded in finding him.

Columbia is a campus that has enough Jewish students to offer kosher meal plans alongside the usual (for a couple of dollars more), so the festival meals at Mac were arranged by the residence meal system. It was quite good food, and fantastic honey-dew melon, but I of course missed the flavours of home. I was still getting over mum’s temptation of Rosh Hashana’s overcooked tongue and turkey.

The first night and day were a little cool, so people escaped soon after overfilling themselves with matzah balls, carrots, kugels, shnitzel, salad, cookies… We went to one of the Barnard (women’s college associated with Columbia) residences to visit Ilana (my host in Los Angeles), and hung around there for a while with her friends, including Nira who I had met at a Sunset Blvd bar for Ilana’s friend’s birthday party in LA. As the night grew old upon us, I was finally able to unload at Yogi’s place and climb into Walter’s bed for a nice night’s sleep.

When I had gone walking through this same neighbourhood many weeks before with my Olympiyeda friend Simi, she had actually shown me to the East Campus Residence where I was now residing. “This is where lots of the Jewish students stay,” she informed me. And despite 24-hours of security guards and sign-ins at its entrance, it is quite easy to get in if your head is covered with a kippah. Due to the problems of being signed in on shabbat, all one needs to enter is to say “sabbath observer”. Technically, to my knowledge, you’re meant to flash your ID as well (but realistically one could have been outside of carryable areas so this would need to be excused as well). As far as I hear this works on most days of the week, too (which is sensible a few days a year for festivals, but usually would just be amusing). Me being a good boy, though, when the work-free days were over on Sunday night and Monday, I decided I wouldn’t excuse myself in this manner. But Yogi only came in with me once during this period. And yet, while the security guard was liable to lose their job if I wasn’t signed in by a resident, they recommended simply asking a passerby to do that task. Passersby were more than happy to stop for a second, copy my name from my ID and presumably affirm my good character (in a residence where many doors are left unlocked). Basically, the security is very superficial. Anyway, I think I was in the middle of sleeping, so I’ll get back to that…

I was very impressed by the view as I woke up. Yogi doesn’t understand why, and supoosedly the look of the urban slums of Harlem stretching out from behind the trees of Morningside Park doesn’t appeal to him. At least it was a nice sunny day, and yet this also meant we’d woken up a bit late. We attended the Ramat Orah synagogue, which Simi had actually shown me on our tour of Columbia and its surrounds. It was the first synagogue that I’d attended with both a mechitza (a gender-separation barrier that is a usual sign of orthodoxy) and a pipe-organ. They didn’t use the organ (a pity, maybe), and most suggested it was a relic of former incarnations of the building. I didn’t particularly like the accoustics there, either, but otherwise it had a very friendly, knowledgeable and charismatic rabbi, and was generally a pleasant place to be.

Lunch, as dinner that night, were again with Yogi and Ilana and friends in that same students’ sukkah. But after every meal, it was back to the apartment to do readings. It seems I had arrived at Columbia for the frantic mid-term exam period, and everyone was to be spending their spare minutes with nose-to-book. Yogi worked his way through a novel by Abraham Cahan, a Jewish American socialist of the early 20th Century, who would be the subject of a thesis. One of his roommates, Amitai, read up on drugs and psychology, while I tried to start my way through Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath for my Judaism and Poverty class.

I had been warned by Trudi that I had to visit the Carlebach shul before leaving North America. Once the official seat of famous chasidic musician Shlomo Carlebach, the synagogue on 79th Street continues to be led by his great nephew through song and spirit. Styled as “the singing rabbi”, Carlebach was not known so much for his voice, but for the hundreds of tunes he composed that have become part of weekly synagogue services and thousands of weddings across the world, while leading a hippy generation to a warm and spiritual Judaism. The services for the second day of sukkot (and this year the first day of shaking the lulav) were certainly very musical and spiritual. The congregation substitutes Carlebach’s nigunim for many more regular parts of the holiday tunes, which adds to the unique character of this congregation and allows all to sing along. But it also (IMO unnecessarily) extends the service and its difference can be frustrating. Although done with a lot of extraordinary spirit and beautiful song, the hallel service lasted over forty minutes. By the end of the morning’s proceedings (after 2pm) I was quite tired and hungry. I approached the rabbi to tell him that I was now a little late for a 12:30 lunch at the Columbia Hillel building on 115th St, and could I join them for a meal in the sukkah? I was thankfully taken in to eat with them, and had a very nice meal (alongside another three Australians, although my parents’ generaton). Although I did enjoy my time at the Carlebach congregation, I think I would have done better with a smaller familiar event like a usual Friday night, or the enormous event of simchat torah the following week where this shul is the self-proclaimed sea to which all the rivers of Upper West-Side Manhattan flow, leaving lines stretching for blocks outside its entrance.

I wandered back north in the afternoon through a beautiful day at Riverside Park where all varieties of New York families bring their children for walks through the warm air and ball games on a Sunday afternoon. I finally got back to Columbia at about 5:30, where I found one acquaintance, Yavni, on Columbia’s student-littered steps where many come to read, eat, chat, chill. Yavni stopped his reading and we chatted for a few minutes until it was time to head back to synagogue to take the festive day out.

That night, finally returning to Yogi’s apartment, I called up a friend from Montreal, Becca, who I knew was at home in NYC for the weekend. Surprised to hear from me in her home city, Becca apologised for not being able to take me around town: she was returning to Canada on a midnight bus. Yogi, Amitai, Ilana, were all still reading, readying for exams. I was no longer sure if I would find something to do for another day in New York. Ilana suggested a certain club with music, but after I picked up some dinner from Cafe Viva (which I had already disliked many weeks before but didn’t recall until I got there) and got to the club, I would have to spend $20 on drinks for myself just to stay and listen to latin jazz. Having moved from Walter’s room to Yogi’s (Walter would be returning), I slept on a surprisingly-comfortable blow-up mattress.

Still unsure what I would do for the day, I woke up in time for the second shift of morning prayers at Columbia. Yogi had set his radio alarm clock, which proceeded to tell me which roads in New York would be more congested than usual, and that 5th Avenue would be closed off from 44th to 82nd St for a Columbus Day parade. Columbus Day is a minor holiday in the American calendar celebrating Chris’s arrival in the New World, maintained as Thanksgiving in Canada and other names in various South American countries. While many institutions are closed, Columbia University ironically persists in calling their students in on this day. Many also see the day as representing the first Italian-American immigration and hence it has become a day for Italian-American celebration and pride.

And although it was a little unusual, and Americans seems to have a parade for anything they can, this is what I found when I finally got to 5th Avenue late on the beautiful, sunny Monday morning. Families were squeezing at the barrier looking out onto 5th Avenue on the east side of Central Park, being handed small Italian flags for them and their toddlers to wave, some shouting “Viva Italia” or responding to calls from those passing in the parade. There were many groups of policemen from New York and New Jersey, in cars, motorcades of light-flashing motorbikes, to the march beat of captains. Some were particularly Italian-American groups, and others seemed a more arbitrary way to get the day off. Small civillian groups marched representing numerous localities in Italy, while vehicles owned by the sanitation or correctional services carried red-white-green flag-bearing children or dancing women. The usual sousaphone-armed school groups, disciplined drumming GIs, bagpipe-bearing kilt-wearing groups and another band with a folky klezmer sound. Troops passed and repeated calls after their unit leader. Floats came by bearing small visual acts from ballroom dancing to fire-throwing and labels dedicating them to different communities across the map of the Mediterranean boot. Lambourghini owners slickly rolled by. A few small operas, and another singer stopped by a grand stand of VIPs to sing “New York, New York”, before proceding along their way to sing for us “That’s Amore”. It was a fun and different morning to be out there, and was a wonderful day for the event and for a walk in Central Park.

I was heading back across the part towards West 72nd, since I’d been told that if I was to complain about North American kosher Chinese food, I had to try the real thing at Eden Wok. On the way I got caught up watching people at the Bethesda fountain and on the lake, and then for a good half-hour at a suprising gathering of people, near the western exit of the park, but I’ll tell you about that below, because I returned there after lunch. So I arrived at Eden Wok, a little late for the usual lunchtime, and I was surprised that they actually gave me a reasonable price for a large lunch meal including a wonton soup, chicken-cashew stir-fry, rice and a packet of chow-mein noodles (read sippets / soup mandel) which I would save for the bus-ride north. I walked down to 69th and Amsterdam to eat in the beautifully-decorated Lincoln Square Synagogue public sukkah. The soup was nice but fairly plain. And maybe I should have maybe selected a meal that was less pop-Chinese if I wanted to taste the real thing, but the stir fry had a good flavour and for once not too much of it (flavour that is), or of oil. And yet its main vegetable ingredients were celery and cucumber, which I don’t consider so traditional (but may be wrong). At least they were left with great texture, aided by cashews and water chestnuts. It was a good meal anyway, and I spent it talking to another patron of the public sukkah who had come with his baby and a pizza. Still, it’s nothing quite like the delicacy of the real Asian cuisine I know.

So I proceeded to spend the rest of the evening at Central Park where I had been held up before lunch. It turns out that the 9th of October is John Lennon’s birthday, and so his Strawberry Fields Memorial near the W 72nd exit of the park was the focus of many aging hippies, younger and older fans with flowers and messages to deposit on the mosaic floor design, and many passersby who were caught up in a frenzy of music, nostalgia and free-flowing messages of love and peace. There a keyboard and drum-kit were set up; electric guitars and basses were plugged to their own small amps, and many others attended with their guitar, clarinet, or maraca. The rest stood and sang, or merely gawked, or shed a tear. It was all John music. I think they may have even avoided non-John Beatles tunes. I certainly was reminded of my ignorance of a large corpus of Beatles music, though, while at other times was able to sing along and hit the higher harmonies. Looking around it was easy to be reminded how music and dreams could unite such a variety of personalities and backgrounds for so many years. I also met a guy named Adi from Melbourne who has just arrived in New York where he is considering moving, influenced in his choice by the strength of the Bund (prominent in few places out of his home city). For now living in a hostel, he is a jazz singer that was too surprised by the amassing of people and music at this site and simply failed to leave at his first attempt. Expecting to catch a 9:30 bus from Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd, I was going to leave at 5 to get my bags from Columbia. Then at 5:30. Then at 6. 6:15. 6:30. I finally went.

Collecting my things from the apartment, I expected Yogi to return and farewell me, but I waited, and couldn’t wait forever as I still needed to eat (at J2 Pizza on Broadway of course) before catching the bus. On my way to the station I stopped a random person to ask him if he knew which way I would have to go when I got to Times Square: west or east. He had the brilliant idea of looking at the subway map along the way, but I was more intrigued by how similar his story was to mine. His first response to me was to ask where I was from: James too was from Sydney (although living in Tasmania of late), and was currently on exchange at a university in Ithica, but had come down to New York for the weekend. A curious coincidence.

I arrived in Times Square somewhat later than anticipated, where trumpet-wielding buskers boosted an already musical weekend, and then was given the wrong directions to J2 pizza which sent me heading north instead of south. I did get there eventually, bought a slice of pizza, squeezed into a mobile sukkah with my big bags, ate, arose and ran towards the bus station. There I had to wait in a long line of people returning after the long weekend, but did get a place on the bus, next to Alex who studies at Concordia and lives a drunk stumble from Rue St Laurent in the Plateau. Sunrise came, the bus found its terminus, I farewelled Alex saying I might see her on a drunk stumble down St Laurent, and headed to the Ghetto Shul for a 7:30 start to the day.