Saturday, December 8, 2012

Happy Ha-noo-kah! Happy Eas-tah!


Jack's Happy Hanukkah story. It's a yearly tradition.




San Leandro is a small suburb of about 70,00 people, outside of San Francisco, right next to Oakland in Northern California. It lays claim to a few distinctions. It is the Sausage Capitol of California. It is the home of Rice-A-Roni – even though Rice-A-Roni is advertised as "The San Francisco Treat.”

It was also profiled by a piece on CBS in the late 60's as being one of America's most racist cities. It may have been but we never really knew..well, sort of...

And San Leandro is my home town.

Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, being a minority was problematic for most minorities in San Leandro; that's because there really weren't many minorities in San Leandro. There was one instance of an African American family who had a cross burned on their lawn. And there were stories floating around that when a family that was not Caucasian was planning to move into another part of town, neighbors would conspire to buy the home themselves.  


Though San Leandro was “The Cherry City” and prided itself on being friendly and welcoming, it was oddly conflicted when it came to its residents who were different.

As for our family, we were definitely different - but not like any of the other minorities in town. Our parents were deaf. We didn't "speak" another language so people could identify us by the sounds of Chinese or Portuguese. When we walked into stores, we “spoke” in American Sign Language. Sometimes our parents, in an attempt to be like hearing people, tried to speak, but most times, we all conversed quietly, with only the small grunts that my parents occasionally made and swish of the hands in the air to break the silence. It was all very fast and stealthy. And it was great when you wanted to talk about someone who was standing right there who didn’t understand sign. In any case, there were definitely not very many people like The Jasons in San Leandro; people didn't quite know what to make of us.

We were also Jews. Because San Leandro was primarily Catholic and Protestant, being Jewish meant that once in a while you got your share of weird remarks. My PE teacher, Mr. Barry, often called out to me with this greeting, "Here comes the roly- poly Matzah Ball." And who kows what my lunch mates were thinking as they stared when I took out Matzah for lunch when it was Passover time (Maybe it was because it was TUNA on Matzah; not a good combination). 


But there was sanctuary (pun intended) from the stares. It was in Temple Beth Sholom. It was San Leandro's only Jewish synagogue. It stood right in the center of town and was rather modest and respectable, as conservative congregations went. It was where every Jewish kid in San Leandro and Hayward went to get Bar Mitzvahed or to attend Sunday school from the 1950's up until today. And though Jews were definitely a minority in San Leandro, Temple Beth Shalom allowed them to feel as if they belonged someplace. That worked for most members of Temple Beth Sholom, but again, we just had to be different from everyone else.


That's because were Sephardic Jews - Jews who hailed from Southern Europe. Our grandparents who lived close by didn't speak Yiddish like everyone at Temple; they spoke Ladino, a form of ancient Spanish. Jews who spoke Spanish? Suddenly my friends assumed we were Mexican. And we didn't eat brisket, bagels or Kugel like everyone at temple did either. We ate baklava and fassoulia, borekas and boyos.  

And we weren’t fair skinned like temple members that came from Eastern Europe. We were dark and swarthy. If you looked at my baby pictures, you’d actually think I born a black child - Jew-fro right there for all to see. Well, at least I didn't burn quickly in the summertime.

We were just very different. And being different, we attracted other temple members who were really different.

One Jewish couple in particular lived on "Oakie Hill." Oakie Hill was the unincorporated part of San Leandro just above our house and the name probably got its name from the people who moved there from Oklahoma during the Depression; thus the name, "Oakies." More than likely the name came from the fact that most people who lived on Oakie Hill were just poorer than everyone else in San Leandro. In any case, we never really saw any other members of the temple hanging out with them but we continued to say hello to them when we saw them at the grocery store. We didn’t even mind sitting next to them in the back of the temple when no one else would.

The most distinctive thing about the couple was that they drove the biggest, oldest Lincoln Continental - black. People probably thought they were undertakers. Many years later when I moved to New York, I realized they reminded me of a couple I might have seen living on Chrystie Street or Hester Street on the Lower East Side in Manhattan; older, probably in their seventies and always wearing black clothes. The husband was portly and was never without his hat. The wife was usually nicely coiffed but wore clothes that were definitely from another era. She also also wore the thickest glasses I had ever seen. They were tinted blue - not like sunglasses - but as somehow prescription glasses because she might have had a problem with sunlight. And they both spoke with heavy accents. It sounded as if they were Eastern European but their speech was delivered in a cheery, high pitched fashion. Different. But we liked them.

One day around Passover, we were riding with our parents in our 1960 Sky Blue Chevrolet Biscayne. My brother was probably playing on the dashboard beneath the back window waving to people behind us and I was more than likely playing with the strange little hole in the floor behind the driver's seat that allowed me to see the pavement whizzing past below. I remembered we pulled up to a light and waited for it to change when suddenly, my brother and I heard a horn honk. Of course since we were Mom and Dad's ears, we looked around excitiedly. (Every ride for us meant that we were practically the drivers. We had to pay attention to sounds, look for ambulances. It was grownup for sure). 


When we looked around for the honking sound, right next to us at the light was the black Lincoln Continental, idling noisily. And inside were our friends in black from temple. They were excitedly waving hello. My brother and I got our parents’ attention and we all excitedly waved back.

Then our friends in the Continental motioned for our parents to roll down the window so they could talk to them. (They never seemed to get it that our parents were deaf). Instead, I rolled down the back window and shouted "Hello!" With a cheery smile as she pushed up her dark glasses closer to her eyes as if she wanted to see us more clearly, the wife leaned around her portly husband and shouted out in her loudest Eastern European accented voice, "Happy Happy Han-oo-kah! Happy Eas-tah!" He husband nodded in agreement.

It was neither holiday.

Hanukkah was months away and Easter wasn’t a Jewish holiday. But we didn't really mind. They were being friendly to us swarthy deaf Ladino types.  A
nd we were happy to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to us. Birds of a feather, you know.

They remained there smiling and waving, even when the light changed to green and we drove away. That was the last time I remember seeing them, but from that point on, no matter what holiday it was - Jewish, Christian or secular – my brother and I would intone "Happy Han-oo-kah! Hapy Eas-tah!" We’d do it on Yom Kippur. We’d do it on Passover. We even do it on Christmas. And we definitely did it on Easter and Hanukkah.

And we do it to this day. I'd like to think that we do it because it was part of our interesting childhood, of growing up Jewish and Sephardic with deaf parents in San Leandro. If kids made faces or adults stared at us in the market because our parents talked differently or laughed because we ate Matzahs or that our friends were different, our parents taught us that it didn't matter; though we were minority, within a minority, within a minority, we were definitely not minor - by any means. At least that's what they implied with their cheery smiles when we wondered out loud that the gas station attendant ignored my brother and me when we would interpret for our parents. "They're just hearing people," my mom would say. And with that carefree attitude, it was if they wanted us to understand that we were unique. It's an attitude my brother and I carry around to this day and one which for which I am forever thankful. How else could we have dealt with living in such a strange land of white skies and rock gardens that was San Leandro?

So if you see me on the street this holiday season, you could say "Happy Holidays" or "Peace" or "Happy New Year." But it would be really fun to say "Happy Han-oo-kah! Happy Eas-tah!" instead. Just to be unique. Just to be different.

Happy Hanukkah, or however you'd like to spell it.

655Jack