when my family first arrived to chicago in 1980, we were met and housed by some distant american relatives, but our true friendships were forged with other like-minded immigrants like ourselves. this is not unique to my family, or soviet jews -- people in strange places seek comfort where they can : the mother tongue, strange dishes from their native lands (gelatinized chicken comes to mind), and traditional costume parties, like the one where my father dressed up as a giant box of aspirin. when you embark on such a daunting journey, a brave new cultural web is woven, acting as both a safety net in case things go terribly awry and as a familiar vantage point to remark on the peculiarities of a terra nova. above all, however, immigrant communities provide an impossibly fertile ground for the verbal compadre to streets paved with gold: good clean american gossip.
while i once stayed far away from such talk, dismissing it roundly as idle old-lady banter, i have recently embraced it, and now live for it. every time i visit chicago, i try to get as many chatty women together as possible, preferably at a round table and representing all available age groups. they require very little from me to get started.
'so whats new these days?'
'oh my god, misha lomkin dumped his wife and kids and is going with the polish whore from the office.'
'misha? the one who makes teeth for a living?'
'what kind of job is this? to make teeth for a living? and this putz walked around with his front tooth gone for two months anyway.'
this goes on and on. usually there are men watching baseball somewhere nearby, but i get enough of that on the west coast. on the other hand, stepping aboard the gossip train stamps your ticket for the one way journey to the promised land of sex and money. mainly sex. this amount of genitalia talk and intergenerational bonding is priceless, comparable only to the bittersweet hob-nobbing of a well attended bris. plus, there's coffeecake.
the day before i arrived in chicago on friday, my mother sent me this link:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/450874,CST-NWS-sexlaw01.article
the news rocketed through the community, primarily because it was on CNN and FOX and everybody knows these people, or at least knows someone who knows them. let's just call this game three degrees of pickled herring: mom knows sveta who works with alex who is in the same office of the lawyer who sued the guy. or alternately, my sister is friend with inna who used to date sasha, the general manager of prestige leasing, where that son of a bitch arthur was a big shot. either way, there are so many connections that even my grandmother knew half of the people involved.
you try explaining swinging to an 84 year old holocaust survivor.
'donny, how do you say ? schwigging? schvooging?'
once she mastered the terms, my grandmother, whose fluency in 6 languages never ceases to amaze me, was off running.
'ah donny, at the schvinging party, what kind of dish do they use for the keys? and efsher they catch something? do they have protection against some diseases you can catch? maybe the aids? be a gutinker and answer me in yiddish. mach meer a teva, dannalleh.'
i looked my grandmother in the eye and told her in the most broken yiddish imaginable that im sure the mythical key bowl was something they wouldnt mind scratching and that many 'schvanz socks' where distributed because people were afraid of 'receiving the aids and other choleras.'
we laughed it off, my mother and i losing our lox and my grandmother, still the funniest woman i know, proclaiming them all 'curvah-blyads', her own famous polish/russian amalgam, literally translated as 'whore-whores'.
when the dust settled, and everyone at the table was brought up to speed, we had a weekend's worth of inside jokes at our disposal. the elderly, probably due to their lack of mobility, became easy targets. for example, my brother-in-law's grandmother, was accused of running a swingers club at her retirement community in east rogers park.
'asya, its time to come clean! i know youre walking funny for a reason.'
he is merciless.
similarly, my grandmother gladly pronounced she had a new hobby. 'danalleh, may you can take me to the night club tonight so i can make some friends?'
and between the chuckles, the lobbying of sexual harassments towards our ancient relatives, and the grape soda squirting out of my nose, comes the inevitable judgement, where those in the room hotly debate the proper allocation of shame amongst the fuckers and fuckees. in the end of the day, it was decided that while $4800 wasnt a sizeable sum, it should at least help arthur get away for a while. and who knows, maybe during his vacation in the caribbean he'll get drunk, piss on a local constable, and insult the prime minister of albania. i just hope it doesnt happen while im too far from home.
