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least they were colorful. And authentic.
    A year before my bar mitzvah our synagogue, in concert with other Conservative congregations across the country, changed from Ashkenazic to Sephardic Hebrew. The ostensible reason was to bring liturgical Hebrew in line with the spoken language of the young State of Israel. Never mind that 99 percent of the congregants were Ashkenazic Jews with roots in central and eastern Europe. And never mind that the reason Zionist leaders insisted on the harsher, more “masculine”-sounding Sephardic pronunciation in the first place had more to do with ideology than linguistics: They wanted to purge the ancient Jewish language of its “Yiddish accent,” of the slightest whiff of the European diaspora. To me, Sephardic Hebrew sounded more like a tonsil exam—
“ BAAAH -rukh AHHHH -tah”
—than like the soulful prayers I had known, and the characters in our new Israeli textbooks— Y u-ri, YA -el—sounded as though they’d be more at home in a Superman comic book. To this day I have a hard time substituting
mah- ZAHL TOVE
for
mazl tov, nah-khat
for
nakhes,
or
rahk-mah- NOOT
for
rakhmones.
It’s as though the most intimate Jewish expressions of our parents and grandparents, the felicitations, endearments, and consolations used by Jews for countless generations, were somehow wrong, illegitimate, and in need of reinvention.
    Pronunciation was hardly the only sphere where the past was recast. That same year, 1967, we returned from summer vacation to find that every one of our European teachers had been dismissed, replaced by young Israeli women, the wives of local doctors and lawyers, who spoke fluent Hebrew but had little or no knowledge of Jewish tradition. The course they taught in Jewish history began with Abraham and Moses and continued—if we were lucky—until the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE . Then, in a single dizzying leap, they skipped over the next eighteen hundred years until—
whoosh!
—suddenly it was 1948 and we were all back in Israel. What happened during those intervening centuries—how Jews ended up in Europe; where my own grandparents came from; why they spoke with Yiddish accents; even what happened during the Holocaust—these were stories never told.
    Like most of my classmates, I didn’t take well to the new regime. One by one the noisy,
shnaps
-drinking old men disappeared from the back of the shul. What remained up front was stiff, formal, and boring. I celebrated my bar mitzvah in May of 1968—a year when it seemed the whole country was coming of age. Seven months later I aimed a snowball at a friend, missed, and hit my Israeli Hebrew school teacher instead, unseating her beehive hairdo. She sent me to the principal’s office and I was summarily expelled. While my classmates looked on with silent envy, I gleefully scooped up my books and left Hebrew school for the last time, certain that my Jewish education had come to an end at last.
    It was, appropriately enough, a book that finally brought me back,and that led me to study Yiddish literature in Montreal: a slim volume by Ruth R. Wisse called
The Schlemiel as Modern Hero
. I read it during the summer of 1976, when I was running a fruit juice cart in Copley Square, across the street from the Boston Public Library. Business was bad that summer but reading was good, which was lucky, because once I started the book I couldn’t put it down.
    Ruth’s thesis was this: The schlemiel, the familiar protagonist of much of Yiddish and, later, American-Jewish fiction, appears foolish only insofar as he is out of place—a Jew who ventures into the mainstream world and asks “the wholly spontaneous questions of a different culture.”
    Outrageous and absurd as his innocence may be by the normal guidelines of political reality, the Jew is simply rational within the context of ideal humanism. He is a fool, seriously—maybe even fatally—out of step with the actual march of events. Yet the