I prepared for an unexpected and deep conversation about his role in the struggle for freedom, complete with tears, lessons, and morality, just like all those stories Grandma and Grandpa had told me over the years. I started firing off questions. “Bapaji, I can’t believe I didn’t know this about you. What would you say your biggest motivation was? Why did you decide you had to stand up and make your voice heard? Why did you ultimately march with Gandhi?” Bapaji shrugged his shoulders and, as was typical of his in-the-moment personality, matter-of-factly said, “I just felt like it.”
Many of my Jewish friends’ grandparents taught a similar pride—having been through hell, surviving the Holocaust, showing us the permanent markings of concentration camp tattoos. Some were quite vocal and emotional. Others more understated and quiet. Together, our grandparents were so brave and resilient. They were so strong. And despite their hardships, still so warm and kind. Their presence in our lives was a constant reminder of the need to fight the evil that is inherent in too much of humanity. I revered my grandparents. I loved that they lived with us for long stretches of time. I also loved getting to know other people’s grandparents. And there was no better place to do that than Bar Mitzvah Saturdays.
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Bar Mitzvah Saturdays would begin by mingling with friends’ bubbes before a service at a synagogue. You’d hear from a friendly rabbi, who would make eye contact with every member of the congregation while delivering a usually funny, uplifting sermon. This was different from the impersonal Sanskrit, Hindi, or Gujarati prayers shouted by pious men at our local Jain or Hindu temples. Don’t get me wrong, I liked that our pujas were so casual (literally you could walk around and talk in the middle of it and nobody would think twice), but I loved bar mitzvah ceremonies for the stories.
One of my favorites was about (you guessed it) someone’s bubbe. A rabbi said that once upon a time there was a sweet, old bubbe who used a baking pan that her bubbe had given her (passed down from the bubbe before that, and so on) to make challah. This prized family heirloom had been moved around the world, through strife and triumph.
Sadly, a scatterbrained granddaughter lost the pan one afternoon, and the family went manic. Nobody wanted to tell Bubbe—she’d be absolutely inconsolable. The family began to mourn. Their ancient challah tradition was lost forever. Everyone kept the sad secret from their family matriarch for weeks, until the day Bubbe set about the entire house, trying to find the pan for her baking. When they finally confessed to her that the heirloom was gone for good, she intensely looked them in the eye, burst out in an elated laugh, and said, “I hated that pan! Finally, we are free of it!” Confusion reigned. “The family challah tradition,” she clarified, “had nothing to do with that terrible pan! I know the recipe by heart, I just didn’t have the guts to throw away what my grandmother gave me. Let’s go buy a nice, new challah pan!”
The moral of the story is that traditions are deeper than a material thing, that it’s okay for them to evolve, that we shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. Everyone could relate to this because most religion is rarely questioned.6 Like my friends’ experiences in Jewish households, our Hindu and Jain traditions were also both religious and cultural. Every Saturday morning was a chance to hear a new story from a Jewish perspective.
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After synagogue came the party. Bar mitzvah parties were generally fancy affairs like a sweet sixteen or a wedding, even, with a theme chosen by the thirteen-year-old host. (In the early ’90s, baseball, cupcakes, and hockey were especially popular.) You’d enter the venue to find a small card with your table number, make a pit stop at the bar for a Shirley Temple, and squint to find your chair under the colored mood lighting. The food was always delicious and always “kosher-style,” with meals accordingly topped off with an endless supply of chocolate soy ice cream served tableside (seconds were available for those who made the trek to the dessert station on the far side of the room, where brown-paper-wrapped tubs sat over dry ice).7 You’d dance your face off, hoist your friend up on a chair, and go home at the end of the night with either a bag full of top-shelf candy or a bar mitzvah T-shirt on which a pun connected to the theme of the party was written (“Peter’s Bar Mitzvah Was Out-of-this-World” under a cartoon rocket, or “I had a sweet time at Amy’s Bat Mitzvah!” scrawled inside a giant pink lollipop).
Every once in a while a party was so excessive that it blew everyone’s minds. Deah Fishman had one such bat mitzvah. The faux-gem-studded addendum card accompanying the pink, glitter-infused invitation said it all:
Buses depart synagogue ~ 4:45 p.m.
Boat leaves dock promptly ~ 5:30 p.m.
A BOAT?!
For an entire evening, Dr. and Mrs. Fishman had rented a party boat that cruised up and down the Hudson River. The excess made me feel like I was in an MC Hammer video. On the water between Manhattan and New Jersey, eighty-five thirteen-year-olds had a DJ booth, a large dance floor under a double-height ceiling, and an endless supply of nonalcoholic cocktails, all to ourselves. The signature drink? A Deah Daiquiri. (This was actually a virgin pi?a colada. Deah hated strawberries but loved alliteration.)
My parents would never host a glamorous party like this. They and most of their friends are hardworking, middle-class Indian immigrants who save their pennies. They were not showy, and I just couldn’t fathom a scenario in which hiring a party boat on the Hudson was in the realm of possibility for them. The Indian version of getting out on the water would be bringing a picnic lunch to a nearby state park and renting paddle boats.8
(There was the occasional outlier. My dad’s friend Tapu Uncle once bought a brand-new emerald-green four-door Mercedes. He drove it to our house forty minutes down the Garden State Parkway just to proudly show off the gigantic built-in car phone. “As a cardiologist,” he opined, making sure we understood there was something practical behind his extravagance, “my patients rely on me to stay in constant communication and arrive very fast.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “Very fast.”)
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