JoelNothman.com

I landed in New York’s Laguardia airport on Wednesday the 9th of August with the knowledge that (a) I was staying somewhere in Brooklyn with Hadar’s dad (another friend who went on exchange to Sydney- Hadar, not her dad); (b) She would be in Baltimore, Maryland; (c) I would be leaving for Washington sometime the next week. And I also knew stuff like New York is a Big City, with a Big Subway, and that Brooklyn and Manhattan were different parts (”boroughs”) of the city. More than that, I’d need to work out.

Finding out where exactly it was I was meant to be, I eventually made it down to Flatbush (not a short haul from Laguardia) and unlocked the door after many attempts at a code I’d been given. (On the way I got my first experience of a New Yorker when she started shouting at various people on the bus from the airport in her thick NYC accent about some great injustice that had been done her. She left fuming.)

The homeowners would be home soon. Reuven had been married to his second wife Goldla for five years. By accent, you can tell that Reuven isn’t a local while Golda, his wife, very much is. The two together enjoy together a very apportioned life when it comes to food (favourite: frozen fruit) and Jewish study (slowly making their way through many classics a paragraph at a time). And above all they’re very welcoming hosts. This is made easier by the door-lock being accessible by code instead of key.

My first morning in NYC I took care of business. I got a haircut (sorry to those of you who like my hair long- it was just getting out of control). And I ate some pizza. Then I caught a train up to see Times Square. While I was a little overwhelmed by the lights and moving pictures in Vegas, Times Square consolidated all these together in its ads, while adding tickertaping news and share prices, and current sports games.

Now, other than lights, the Square is known for its broadway, and for the enormous commercial stores that line 5th Ave all the way up to Central Park. So I visited the enormous Toys “R” Us, which features a big Ferris wheel of toys spinning around a big Cyrillic “ya” (backwards R) in scare quotes. The shop itself includes some impressive Lego models, a moving plastic dinosaur, crazy inflatable missiles, a magic demonstration, and a lot of Israelis between the shelves. Of the big stores I went into that Thursday, Toys “R” Us was by far the funnest (maybe also the biggest), but I also visited southern Central Park and an enormous Apple Store with people checking out iPods, iBooks and iDon’tKnowWhatElse.

Friday was designated to Lower Manhattan, where I saw the World Trade Center site, which, being a construction site, wasn’t really that interesting, and probably held a lot more emotion for those who had at least seen the NYC skyline with its two giants. It was interesting how they tried to turn the location into a pseudo-sacred site… I made my way from there through the financial district: to Wall St, which to the outsider is merely a series of large and ornate buildings.

Going south (after going a little north to find lunch), I found the National Museum of the American Indian, seemingly a subsidiary of the same-named Smithsonian on Washington DC’s Mall (which I didn’t visit). Situated in a former US Customs House, the museum collected many artifacts (artefacts for Americans) of Native American culture from various regions, as well as contemporary reflections on that culture. Among the collection was a large collection of piggy-banks and armadillo-banks. A sign explained that European Medieval saving jars were made of pygg clay, later moulded into pig. Maybe by the added virtue of the pig’s luckiness in Peru, these animalia banks became part of a collection of South American ceramics.

The afternoon brought me out on a ferry to Staten Island. The only reason most people take the free ferry is to see a tall blue French woman with her arm raised along the way. The boat unloaded all its passengers on the island anyway, so I decided I’d catch a bus (I had a weekly pass) to see a little more of it. Lonely Planet’s first suggestion was Snug Harbour Cultural Center, and when I arrived there, it seemed like an interesting and large site of various cultural things, but it was highly unenticing to someone who had other things he wanted to do in Lower Manhattan, and a home to get to in Brooklyn before shabbat. Back in Manhattan, I visited battery park, which included some impressive street-performance and some interesting memorials, including a sculpture from the WTC site that had been damaged in the September 11 attacks. After all this, I tried to get to the Brooklyn Bridge to cross it, but found my time had run short.

So Shabbat came, as it always does, to bring change to the week. I had been given a smorgasbord of synagogues to choose from, so I went to a Young Israel congregation, which was nearly my sort of crowd, only with a lot less singing. After a pleasant dinner with Reuven and Golda, I had a pleasant sleep, and then decided to try out a more singy congregation, usually led by Rabbi Mordechai Twersky. But Rabbi Twersky was away and the place was noisy with conversation and laughter, and the singing was loud and rowdy and in unfamiliar tunes. So I considered returning to Young Israel when someone came in saying they needed a few congregants down the road (four to be precise, which is a high ask). It turned out later that the rabbi inviting (at 10am) extras to his small congregation had also promised to finish by 11:15am. Yikes! So all the rite and process happened, just very quickly.

I ended up at the place of this rabbi, Joseph Rosenbluh, for lunch. He lived just down the road from where I was staying, and although his apartment was by no means tidied, he was more than happy to have a guest. So at the table with him and his mother, we discovered a number of common interests, mostly centred around Hebrew language. As for his congregation, he was amid relocating, explaining (at least a little) the strangeness of his invitation. And when he found out my surname, he commented that he had a cousin whose name was Northman, although an uncle had said that this was an Anglicisation of the name without the ‘r’. A few hours later I would look up the appropriate trees and find that this Northmann was a great great great grandchild of my great great great great great grandfather, Jesaya Nothmann, which makes us third cousins twice-removed. Certainly one of the more obscure games of “Jewish Geography” that I’d ever played.

Finally, my lunch host invited me to experience a nearby synagogue run by the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn for the sabbath’s exit. Usually they use a much larger, grander synagogue, he told me, but during the summer it’s reduced to a smaller place across the road. Like everything here, the synagogues run minimally-to-nearly-shutting-down during the summer vacation season. The normal site, although I could only view it from the outside, was indeed grand. The summer site was still very nice. The tunes, the accents and the food were very interesting. Mmmm pita and humus and zatta and olive oil for seuda shelishit… Also interesting is their use of long traditional tunes in the prayer service for after Shabbat. While in European communities it is often rushed through, here they would mournfully extend the holy day’s exit with a kaddish that would take a few minutes (including oscillating between a note and a half-semitone step below, something I’d love to be able to do). It was an intriguing and different cultural experience, while still being very familiar in so many ways.

While I’m talking about eating, I think I should mention something: Hadar (whose father I was staying with) tells me she had competed with Trudi (for those of you who know her) about whose father was more careful and crazy about what went into his mouth. Trudi’s father, a nutritionist, has been preparing Trudi for a healthy diet for many years and counts each steps he walks daily, while Reuven and Golda have recently begun on “the plan”. Both have very selective kitchen cupboard contents. I still haven’t seen Trudi’s dad’s kitchen in action, I have only seen Trudi’s reaction when tempting food with high GI appears on the table, things usually out of the question at home. “The plan” on the other hand, requires carefully measuring out quantities of different foods each day (x ounces of fruit, y ounces of yoghurt, z of chicken…), and having to declare the menu to a friend each day. It was interesting that Golda pointed out that most people see it as very restrictive and constraining, but explained that with something like this, there is no temptation. She paralleled it with keeping shabbat (for those of you with that experience), which many on the outside see as constraining, while those that do it feel so freed by not having any compulsion to do work, or check email, or drive, or purchase, or think business. Desire is out of the question. So I guess she sees her diet as a little divine…

Anyway. Narrative continues.

Sunday was set to be spent with Anthony (from Sydney) and Nomi (from Philadelphia) who I sang with in USyd’s Madrigal Society. But I’d failed to contact Nomi although I tried numerous times the number in my phone. Finally, exasperated, on Sunday morning I looked at my contact lists and found that she had a home number listed. By calling it, I found out that the number I had been calling was of the apartment she’d be returning to in Boston. So, finally armed with her correct cell phone number, I managed to work out where Anthony and Nomi had got to. But on the way, I went to pick up a discounted ticket to Avenue Q, which the two of them had long arranged to see on Broadway. So the day proceeded to consist of: wandering around mid-lower Manhattan (not sure what it’s called), cooling off at a fountain in Washington Square, eating knishes in the lower east-side, catching a train north, going to the Jewish Museum, getting drinks, seeing Avenue Q, and eating Pizza at Jerusalem II.

Avenue Q is basically an adult take-off of Sesame St, about a guy named Princeton, newly with a BA and in New York City, who is trying to find his purpose in life. It is enacted with puppet characters and human characters, all of whom performed very well. Some of the puppeteering was quite impressive, with basically four puppeteers acting out eight characters. Still, my favourite may have been the human character Christmas Eve, a highly exaggerasted and aggressive Chinese-American woman. Many times the musical managed to shock the audience through its sheer bluntness and use of tabboo: there was no shortage of “sexual references” (or for that matter, puppet nudity) in this production.

The knishes and pizza were pretty good too.

Until that day, I had thought I would be going up to Washington DC or maybe Baltimore on Monday morning (earlier it had been Wednesday, but that changed after pushing off a Tuesday arrangement for a week- does that make sense?). But Nomi and Anthony had decided to see the Museum of Modern Art in New York before Anthony left town (they would have seen the Met, but it’s closed on Mondays), and I thought this would be a good time for me to go too. So I went. For a number of reasons I had to get there somewhat later than the others, and between an SMS not reaching me and Nomi switching her phone off in what I see as over-curteousy to fellow museum visitors, we didn’t meet up except by accident Anthony appearing behind me at 2pm. At that stage, A & N had seen floors 5, 4, and half of 3, while I’d seen 1, 2, and the other half of 3. Whoops. So we went out to near Central Park for a lunch of (my classic) fresh bagels and avocado, and returned to the museum to go our separate ways.

And by that Monday evening I needed to find the bus station to head up to Baltimore. Although I had one other challenge: I had a weekly pass for the transit system that would only expire on Thursday, so I found someone homeless on the street, and only hope he put it to good use, himself, or in bartering for food or cash…