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men
In the Five Books of Moses
The first, first constipated man
Was Cain, he wasn’t Abel...”

3
    M Y MOTHER’S MOTHER , G USSIE B ARUCH, DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL AT the end of sixth grade and went to work in a factory. There, her older, worldlier co-workers introduced her to Chinese food—the official nosh of the assimilated Jew—and it was the beginning of the end of keeping kosher. Within a few years, Gussie met my grandfather, Max Leventhal. Max’s mother did not approve of the under-educated factory girl; she attempted to break them up by first moving the Leventhals from Brooklyn to The Bronx, then drinking a bottle of iodine in protest. The iodine did not kill her, nor did it deter young romance. Max and Gussie were married in 1924.
    Gussie promised her new mother-in-law that she would keep a kosher home and she did. But on Sundays, while my grandfather read the paper, she told him that she was taking their two daughters (my mother and my aunt) “downtown to see the relatives.” This was code for “I am taking them out of the house to eat non-kosher Chinese food.” My grandfather would smile, “Send the family my regards,” and turn the page.
    Gussie had it easy. After my own parents married in 1957, there would be no more visits to the relatives downtown. My father was the son of Eastern European immigrants, a man who would have fit right in at a 17th century
shtetl
, adamant about sticking to theOld World dietary laws. This meant we kept two separate sets of dishes in the house, one for dairy foods and one for meat. We did not eat meat and milk together. We did not eat pork or shellfish. Ever.
    These rules were difficult to explain to my friends, particularly the matter of vegetable shortening versus lard. I couldn’t eat Hostess cupcakes, but Drake’s were okay. I couldn’t have Oreos, but I could gorge on Hydrox. Pepperoni pizza at birthday parties posed multiple layers of nightmares, as did sampling the food we made in Home Ec class. To this day, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to eat Jell-O.
    So Camp Kin-A-Hurra was on the list of acceptable summer camps because, in our kitchen that winter evening, Saul Rattner smiled widely and assured my father, “We are strictly kosher!”
    If only my father had known the truth.
    While the camp did own two separate sets of dishes, the Girls’ Side kitchen staff found the bone china dishes designated for meat too hard to clean. They decided to go with the plastic dairy set full-time and I decided not to tell my father.
    Of course, I felt bad about the deception. Jewish guilt is a very real thing. I grew up with a lot of pride in my heritage, wanting to embrace it, to celebrate its history. But the way my father insisted we observe every minor holiday we couldn’t even pronounce and stick to every obscure rule (“No ripping toilet paper on Saturdays!”) made it tedious and time-consuming and I came to resent it. Which made me feel guilty. It was with this familiar feeling of trepidation that I approached the first Friday night at camp. Sundown marks the beginning of
Shabbos,
the Sabbath.
    Up until the 1960s, summer camps operated like little private countries with official camp uniforms in official colors. Most of thiswent out the window by the end of the Cultural Revolution and by the mid-70s Kin-A-Hurra had developed its own unofficial daily uniform. If you were cool, you wore a t-shirt (really cool if it featured the Coca-Cola logo in Hebrew) and denim painter’s pants or overalls. To complete the outfit, you wore a red or blue bandana tied to the hammer loop on the thigh. Luckily, I had plenty of painter’s pants. They were not a big seller in Springfield, New Jersey and had been on sale in every color at Rynette’s. On Friday nights, when we were expected to wear white to welcome the Sabbath, I pulled on and zipped up my white discount painter’s pants.
    Boys’ Side and