Tampering with a delicacy
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Jerusalem Post, September 4, 1992
A true story: Marshall Honaker was the sheriff of Bristol, Virginia, a mountain town near the Tennessee border, until the day earlier this year, January 22 to be exact, when he walked into his office and shot himself dead. Apparently, a grand jury was investigating charges that Honaker, formerly the head of the National Sheriffs Association, embezzled more than $350,000 from the local government till Robert O’Harrow Jr., a staff writer of The Washington Post, reported that Honaker was considered a political boss in Bristol, which is located nearly 300 miles southwest of Richmond in the Appalachian hill country.
“His death, which came one day after a federal grand jury convened in Roanoke to investigate embezzlement allegations against him, shocked his home town,” O’Harrow wrote.
” ‘Lots of people are saying: Well, how could this happen in a place like Bristol? A basic small town with basic small-town people,’ said Cheryl Holdway, a clerk in a bagel shop. ‘When you have a hometown person in political office, you don’t expect them to turn on you.’ “
A bagel shop?
This is truly the end of the bagel as we know it.
THERE WAS a time in the not-too distant past when people with names like Cheryl Holdway (and people with names like Robert O’Harrow, for that matter) didn’t eat bagels; didn’t, as my great-grandmother would have put it had she spoken English, “even know from bagels.” And now, the Cheryl Holdways of the world are working in bagel shops, and the Robert O’Harrows of the world are reporting that the Cheryl Holdways of the world are working in bagel shops in places like Bristol, Virginia without comment, as if bagel shops were as natural a feature of the rugged mountain towns of southwest Virginia as coal mines and Ku Klux Klan rallies.
What next? Bristol Bialys? Herring and grits? Lox and ham sandwiches? Yikes. Isn’t anything Jewish anymore?
It’s all Murray Lender’s fault. He’s the mad genius who invented the frozen bagel, the discovery of which helped to place bagels in the frozen-foods section of Cheryl Holdway’s local supermarket, and led, eventually, to the opening of a bagel shop in rural Bristol, Virginia.
Rumor has it that Mr. Lender also invented what has come to be called the raisin-cinnamon bagel, which, as we all know, is an oxymoron, Judaically speaking. The raisin-cinnamon bagel, which is to bagels what Israelis are to manners, is a clever attempt to dejudaize one of the few contributions the tribe has made to the culinary arts. Dejudaize, you ask? Surely he’s gone too far this time. But wait—listen to the sound of this passage from a steamy romance novel I hope to sell for big bucks to a major New York publishing house:
“Oh, Muffy, my honeypot of love, I burn like a thousand oil slicks when your flaming red hair gets caught up my nose,” Winthrop whispered tenderly. “Winthrop, calm yourself, your passions overwhelm me. Let us go to the yacht club where we shall sup on a platter of raisin-cinnamon bagels,” Muffy said. “Yes, my dear, yes,” Winthrop replied. “I shall spread a butter-substitute on my raisin-cinnamon bagel, and if there is any left over, I shall spread it all over … DELETED BY THE ISRAELI ARMY CENSOR.”
It sounds natural, doesn’t it? Muffy, Winthrop, butter-substitute, raisin-cinnamon bagels? Now listen to the sound of the same passage, with different names:
“Oh, Gittel, my honeypot of love, I burn like a menora on the eighth night of Hanukka when your flaming red hair tumbles into the tsimmes,” Irving whispered tenderly into Gittel’s hearing aid. “Irving, stop with the sex talk already. I’m hungry; maybe you want to split a raisin-cinnamon bagel with me?”
Nah, I don’t think so.
I SUPPOSE it’s difficult to indict Mr. Lender for crimes against the bagel; after all, this is a man who gives about eight quadrillion dollars a minute to the United Jewish Appeal, and he probably didn’t mean to invent mutant bagels when he started out in the iced-bagel business.
And I suppose he has a lot of grass-roots support—after all, there are some in the Jewish community who believe that we should share our culinary wealth, such as it is, with the rest of humankind. I am not one of those people, for two reasons: one, I don’t think we have so much to offer, at least compared to what the Chinese, Italians, Vikings, Aleuts, Uruguayans, Laplanders, Yankees, Mets and Dodgers have given to the world of food. It’s highly unlikely that the world would thank us if we popularized and universalized, say, brisket, which is the Yiddish word for “tough strips of meat-like substance dried out for maximum chewing discomfort.”
Just to inoculate myself against the inevitable letters accusing me of denigrating the Jewish people’s role in world history, here is a list of fields in which I believe Jews have made immeasurable contributions: classical music, chemistry, physics, tank warfare, guilt, Talmudic scholarship, bad driving, mergers and acquisitions, literature, judo, drip irrigation, popular entertainment, weasel-like PLO-sympathizing comics who sleep with their girlfriends’ adopted daughters and bring shame upon their families’ heads, medicine, printing and publishing and humor-column writing, to name just a few.
The second reason is more complex. Though I don’t buy into the notion that we Jews are the chosen people, since I believe quite logically that God would have donated a nice piece of land such as Martha’s Vineyard or France to his true chosen people and not given them a Mediterranean sandbar where humous is considered a delicacy and the women shave their armpits once a year if you’re lucky, I still believe we’re a pretty neat people.
Jews—A Really Neat People. It sounds better as an advertising slogan than “Chosen People,” don’t you think? Less threatening. It’s even there in the Bible, in the little-known section recently discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls that has come to be known as the Book of Psalms and Practical Jokes: “And God spake unto the people Israel real loud so the people Israel covered up their ears but God said unto them, ‘Remove thine hands from thine ears, because I’m trying to talk to you and it’s rude, and it’s not good to be rude to God,’ so the people of Israel did removest theirest hands from theirest ears and God did sayest unto them, ‘People of Israel, I hate to tell you this, but I’ve already given away the south of France, but since I think you’re such a neat people, I’m giving you Bat Yam and Afula.’ “
Since we’re such a neat people, I think it’s imperative that we protect our cultural legacy from charlatans and barbarians who would add antisemitic substances such as cinnamon to bagels. Imagine the outcry if someone was to market Ketchup-Flavored Kung Po Chicken Ding, or frozen-veal parmigiana with a creamy nutmeg sauce.
Come to think of it, these aren’t such bad ideas. I’ve got to talk to Murray Lender about this.