What's Cantonese for Mazel Tov?

            In the spring of 2014, the third-year students at U of Virginia Law School looked forward to graduation. It was a busy time as they finished their academics and sought permanent jobs. The social highlight was Prom, law school edition.

            Tina Z, a third year, born in Shanghai but raised in Baltimore, volunteered, “Prom’s when I got pregnant.”

            The father was my nephew Yakov, who grew up in the ultra-religious (haredi) Jewish community of Lakewood, New Jersey, where they don’t let unmarried people spend time unchaperoned together, much less make babies.

            Yakov attended Yeshivas in Lakewood, and an Orthodox college in Israel. From there he transferred to his father’s alma mater, University of Virginia. As an undergraduate, he kept his head in the Torah, and skipped the school’s rich social life. “With a yarmulke always on my head and fringes hanging from my pants, I was a campus oddball.”

            On this big partying, big NCAA sports campus, you could see that.

            Things changed when he entered UVA law school. First-year law students like Tina and Yakov join sections of about thirty students that follow each other through graduation.

            Tina said, “I saw how smart Yakov was when he first spoke in class.”

            My three Lakewood nephews were brilliant, but Yakov was the best looking. Tina must have noticed, regardless of what sat on Yakov’s head or hung from his pants.      

            Tina described her high school as full of competitive students, loners, and bookworms like herself, focused on grades, college admissions, and scholarships. She never even got that ticket to youthful freedom, a driver’s license. Still doesn’t have one. She earned a scholarship to U of Maryland-Baltimore and continued her introversion right into UVA law.

            So, the two connected at law school but their lack of experience got the relationship nowhere. In the second year, they spent more time together. Both got involved in The Libel Show, a satiric play UVA law students put on to make fun of faculty and future lawyers, directed by Yakov’s best friend, who said, “You two would be great together.” This convinced Yakov to approach Tina, a new skill.

            “He gave me a rose when he asked me out,” Tina said.

            A quick study, that Yakov. They don’t teach that in Lakewood. Did the ex-yeshiva boy figure that out himself, or did some campus hotshot suggest it?

            By the middle of their second year, the two recall overnight stays, cooking meals together, and talk of making the relationship permanent. They were a topic of campus discussion, the cute little Chinese girl and that Jewish guy with his fringes and his beanie, holding hands.

            Everyone in our not-half-as-religious side of the family knew about this WAY before Yakov’s parents did because he posted pictures of himself and his Chinese girlfriend on Facebook, a planet forbidden in the Lakewood universe.

            Forehead slapping dumb, oh brilliant Talmudic student and erstwhile legal scholar.

            My wife, acting as a dutiful aunt and the only one in the family with the balls to do it, called him. “Dump the damn pictures or your mother will find out.”

            The documentary evidence soon left the world of Zuckerberg.

            That summer, Yakov got an internship at one of New York’s oldest law firms, and Tina got one in Baltimore. “We were so busy,” Tina said, “and far apart. We didn’t see each other and rarely spoke until we got back to school.” She didn’t know Yakov considered a breakup because he wouldn’t marry a non-Jew. Those considerations disappeared upon returning to Charlottesville.

            And then there was Prom.

Adapted from What’s Cantonese for Mazel Tov? a new memoir by Henry Astor Levenstein. Learn more at www.henrylevenstein.com.