Author: Henry Astor Levenstein

This beautiful baby, son of my nephew Yakov, gets his first name from the Old Testament’s Isaac, and his middle name from an ancient Chinese dynasty and his mother’s family.

            Biblical Isaac was the confused son of Abraham, the original Jew. God convinced Abraham to sacrifice the teenager, as a loyalty demonstration.

            Abraham: “Let’s take a walk, young man.”

            Isaac: “Where to?”

            Abraham: “I gotta see a guy about a thing.”

            Isaac: “You’re bringing a shiv?”

            Abraham: “Yeah, he’s um, got some packages to open, you know? Amazon.”       

            Four thousand years ago, teenagers obeyed their parents, and Isaac went along with his dad.

            As to the middle name, Zhou (pronounced ZOW) was a Dynasty in China that lasted almost eight-hundred years, longer than any other, ending around 250 BC. Thus, the Zhou period in China and the rise of Judaism in the Levant overlapped. Confucianism also arose during this time. Did Confucius and Abraham consult with each other as their belief systems developed?

            Confucius: “How’s it going, Abe?”

            Abraham: “Oy, Connie, this crowd doesn’t make it easy, and there’s only twelve of us…”

            Confucius: “Twelve followers? I opened my shop a month ago and I’ve got a million coming out for meditation and tea. Bring that monotheism over here and you’ll clean up.”

            Abraham: “A million? I could run a hell of a fundraiser. But from here to there is such a schlep. And Sarah hates the packing.”

            So, Abraham stayed in his tiny country on the Mediterranean, which gave him enough aggravation, anyway.

            The Qin Dynasty replaced the Zhou. Enough already, Zhou, Let someone else be the dynasty. Zhou remains as a popular Chinese family name, including that of little Isaac’s mother. That group came to the US from Shanghai in the mid-twentieth century.

            When you read this, the new Isaac of 2022 will have had his Jewish ritual circumcision, the bris, his first and hopefully only contact with a shiv. His father is an orthodox Jew from Lakewood, New Jersey, one of the largest orthodox communities in America. Isaac looks like him in this photo, taken at age six hours.

            During the bris ceremony (but before the deed is done), the father gives the baby his name by reading a prayer. We couldn’t say “Isaac” until he did that. I don’t understand enough Hebrew to follow the prayer, but I recognized the naming moment as my nephew announced: “Yitzchak Zion ben Yakov Shmuel,” (Isaac Zion, son of Jacob Samuel).

            “Did you say Zion?” I asked him after, “Why not Zhou?”

            “There’s no Hebrew equivalent for it, so I used the Z for Zion, to go with what ‘Isaac’ means.”

            “Oh?” was my last syllable before his short dissertation on what “Zion” means (an ideal place, where God has his office) and what “Isaac” means (one who rejoices).

            “See,” I said, “I was listening, and listening in Hebrew yet. Aren’t you impressed?”

            My nephew told me he was impressed.

            And that’s how we got to Isaac Zion M________. You’ll agree that an Orthodox Jewish father and a Chinese mother is an uncommon combination among the general US population.  It’s a pairing of two groups that often face hatred.

            And if you’ve read my memoir “What’s Cantonese for Mazel Tov?” you know the back story to this family.

            Many Jews love Chinese food and don’t keep kosher. Offer them “Kosher Chinese Food” and they think, “Death Row Cuisine in a Poorly Funded Prison”. I didn’t grow up in a kosher home, and while my wife’s family kept kosher, they also kept the workarounds. Cover the table with newspaper, use disposable plates and utensils, and you can get spareribs into the house without a transgression noted on your permanent record.

            So, neither of us ever had the pleasure of General Tso’s Talmud-approved Chow Fun.

            It’s an issue now because Grandson Benjamin is allergic to shellfish. He pukes at a hint of crustacean. He can’t even eat food prepared where there’s shrimp or lobster-both not kosher-in the kitchen. So, standard restaurant Chinese food is out for him and any grandparent who takes him to dinner.

            “I’ve been craving Chinese food all this time. I found a kosher Chinese place near you. Can we…?” He was getting ready for three months away on a post-high school gap year educational program. How could we say no?

            A kosher restaurant would stick with beef, chicken, noodles, and vegetables. There’s even plant-based “shrimp” on offer. Just nothing that might creep around at the bottom of the ocean, or have a cousin named Porky. So, this miraculous Chinese food would be a safe treat for the departing teen.

            We pulled up to “Kosher Chinese Experience”. With Covid running wild, no dining in. You encountered the front man through a wooden flap improvised into the glass door. The front man, who looked age eighty, wore a skullcap (yarmulke), a full hoary beard, and a rumpled white shirt with fringes (tzitzit) hanging out of black pants. Behind him was the kitchen with three young Chinese guys (no yarmulkes) cooking and packing the food orders.

            We sent Ben for the takeout menu and called in the order, even though we’d parked at the door. We watched several Orthodox Jewish women make pickups. You can tell they’re Orthodox: long sleeves, ankle-length skirts, and wigs (sheitels), in eighty-degree weather. Also, some young men with contemporary clothes and nothing on their heads bought bags of the Shawshank / Alcatraz fare. Business looked decent for a summer Tuesday evening.

            After the expected twenty minutes, I sent Ben to the door. The old man rounded the tab down to the nearest dollar, tossed my fifty into a cardboard box on the floor, and gave him four bucks change. Ben’s grown-up watching teenagers punch pictures of dishes on a computer screen while an adult paid Mickey D

’s with a credit card. He was fascinated by how paper money got collected.

            I explained why a restaurant or other shop MIGHT require cash payment and have no register. (My parents and grandparents were small business owners). It’s a POSSIBLE tax avoidance strategy for a small business, whereas a major corporation would bribe Congress to change the tax law, case closed.

            I figure Ben grasped none of this, but he asked an insightful question: “Who owns this place?”

            Who indeed?

            The old Jew at the door flap was the safe bet. He keeps the dietary laws. All he had to do was hire a Chinese kitchen crew, teach them the rules, amend the recipes, and collect pictures of dead gentile men for the box on the floor.

            Wouldn’t it be similar for Chinese owners? Between strip mall takeout shops, popular Cantonese restaurants, and upscale “fusion” places, there are Asian food businesses everywhere.       And in this Jersey town, more than the usual proportion of Jews. Maybe an Asian entrepreneur saw those Hebrews and figured some wanted their Chinese food kosher and didn’t want to shlep to Lakewood, Highland Park, or Teaneck for it.

            The strategy: Let’s get our own Kosher kitchen supervisor (mashgiach) and make him a partner. He’ll be the face of the franchise everyone sees when they show up. We’ll prepare the food following his rules. And since the place MUST close on the Jewish Sabbath-Friday night and Saturday-we can work at our regular restaurants when they’re busiest.

            It’s a brilliant plan. I don’t know if it’s the truth, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
            As for the food, I ordered the sesame chicken, figuring the recipe and taste would be the same, kosher or not. Lesson: no. But Benjamin loved whatever he ate, and that made the Kosher Chinese Experience wonderful.

            It’s Christmas Eve, 2016. Two masked men enter a Chinese family gathering of about fifty people at a home in northern Jersey. Their masks are not ski, stocking, or Halloween. They’re blue surgical. No one else is wearing one or is concerned about the two men who are.

            One man is Frederick Lee, my Chinese machuten (ma+phlegm+OO+ten). That’s Yiddish for my daughter’s father-in-law. (Our Sara married his son Geoff in 2014 and became Sara Lee.) He’s arrived with his own son-in-law, Ken. They’ve donned masks to protect the extended family from their common colds.

            In my sixty-plus years, it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone wear a mask to a social gathering. This is years before the Coronavirus pandemic made masking a social need and a political issue. And it’s damn considerate of them.

            Masking has long been a common practice among Asians. For them, it’s a logical and simple response to the spread of airborne illnesses like colds, flu, and occasional past epidemics like SARS. It’s an easy contribution to the public health of civilized people. Fred and Ken are not imposing on anyone’s freedoms, and they’re not taking away anyone’s guns.

            “Not much else you can do.” Fred says, “I take some extra vitamins. Cold will go away on its own.”

            He’s the patriarch of the Chinese family my daughter Sara married into. They gather every Christmas Eve, though they’re not Christian. They’re either Buddhist or follow no religion. It’s just a convenient date to get together; people have time off. And Christmas Eve 2016 was also the first night of Chanukah that year. So, for the first time, we Jews got invited to this otherwise all-Asian event. After all, we’re family.

            In 2022, Omicron, vaccinations and boosters are here. The decline of the pandemic was somewhere in sight until it wasn’t. I’m back to wearing my mask in stores and indoors among strangers. About half of Jersey does the same.

            After two years of isolation and caution, I’ve been lucky and haven’t caught a cold, the flu, or a Greek letter variant. Getting vaccinated and boosted was the gold standard of safety until it wasn’t.

            Someday, in a pandemic-less future, a bug will find me. I’ll attend a Thanksgiving dinner or New Year’s party or Bar Mitzvah reception and have a case of the sniffles. Should I follow Fred’s lead and blow the dust off my box of trusty N95 masks?

            Logic tells me yes; don’t sicken friends and relatives and avoid their cooties. But I never covered up in non-plague times, nor did my family as a kid. (Videotaped Passover movies show us exhaling who-knows-what as we climb onto each other to spear plattered potato latkes. A super spreader if there ever was one.) Any Chinese person present would understand if I masked, for sure. I hope most of my loved ones, having lived through the Covid pandemic, wouldn’t object, either.

            What about a Broadway theater full of general population strangers who paid big bucks to see the show? What to do if I’m sneezing in my expensive (and never refundable) orchestra seat? Should I leave, as a courtesy to the guy who shares the armrest? Say screw him, it’s my freedom as an American? Or will ushers pick me up and throw me out into the lap of a Times Square’s Naked Cowboy? Should they?

            Share your opinion at henrylevenstein.com.  And for more fun with Asians and Jews as they merge their families, read my new memoir, What’s Cantonese for Mazel Tov?

            Okay, kids, let’s line up and celebrate America’s diversity, if only to piss off the nativists.

            After Ethnic Day, the preschool sent pictures of the costumed kids, all with faces pixilated. here’s a sari on some girls, a turban on a Sikh (I guess) boy. An Italian family opted to dress a son like a Chico Marx style paesano. (Chico was a 20th century Jewish comedian born in NY as Leonard Marx. What about the Pope, Michelangelo, or da Vinci?) We saw a sombrero on a head of pixels, a Dominican Day tee shirt on a toddler boy (or girl), and just one Rutgers tee. Nobody dressed like a Pilgrim, a Colonial, or a Delaware, the Indigenous tribe of Jersey.

            My granddaughter, above, wore a traditional Chinese design outfit and topped it with a yarmulke.

            Discussion question: The Chinese are people who “come from” China. Are the Jews a nation, “coming from” a specific place, Israel? Or are Jews a religious group existing in minds, hearts, and books, coming from anywhere?

            Some folks in my Chinese family asked when we came over from Israel. My bloodline left the Levant a thousand years ago, having migrated, with or without duress, from somewhere in the “Holy Land”. They spent a millennium isolated in the farming villages, shtetls, of greater Russia, or in urban ghettoes. The deepest roots I know of are in eastern Europe-Lithuania and The Pale of Settlement. My children’s roots are in the Bronx and Queens. Dress them like the cast of Fiddler, or Hassidim, but that ain’t us.

            For now, I’ll opine that Israel is not the place I “came from”.

            The Chinese in my family could say medieval Cathay is where they “came from.” Most, like my son-in-law and his parents (my machatunim) don’t follow a religion. Some, like Tina’s parents, adopted Christianity before they left northern China. Others follow Buddhism, but that’s more about lifestyle and good personhood. Judaism, with its old man on a throne in the sky, writing commandments with lightning and deciding who’s gonna make it to next Yom Kippur, that’s a religion.

            Today, there are about a thousand Chinese of Jewish ancestry living today in Kaifeng, Henan province, China. Every spring, you can find pictures of their Passover seders on the Internet. Same for the Jewish Taiwan Cultural Association in Taipei. Ask them to dress like where they think they “came from.” Don’t get involved in the whole China / Taiwan issue.

            Thousands of Jews fled the Nazis to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they got along okay. But they left after the war, saying, Thanks for your hospitality, China, but the road (to Ellis Island, or Palestine, or Galveston) is my middle name. Will be in touch. BTW, love the food.

            While Ethnic Day was a fun exercise for Julianna and her daycare pals, and sent a positive message for diversity in central Jersey and America, it failed to address an inevitable question my granddaughter’s cohort will ask: If where we “came from” so memorable, why are we here?

            The preschool’s announcement: “Wednesday is Ethnic Day! Come dressed to show the place you came from.”

            “Came from?” Okay, Julianna’s grandparents, father’s side, arrived in New York from China and Vietnam in the 1960s, encouraged by communism’s rise in Asia. Her great-great-grandparents, mother’s side, landed in the city around 1900, from what is now Lithuania, encouraged by the Czar’s pogroms.

            Hence, the kid’s got a Chinese side and a Jewish side.

            But both her parents “came from” Jersey, and she already used her toddler-size Rutgers football tee for “Sports Day”. Her maternal grandfather (me) and grandmother provide no international flavor, born New Yorkers, with a little more than half our lives in Jersey. Three of her mother’s four grandparents were born in the Big Apple, too. Julianna could dress like the Statue of Liberty, which is in Jersey’s territorial waters. Pickup a Nerf version of the Statue’s pointy headdress at Newark Airport, crumple orange crepe paper on a toilet plunger for the torch. Add sandals and an oversized shmata for a robe, and she can stand astride the mouth of the Hudson, all three feet of her.

            It falls to her paternal grandparents to provide the exotic background. Fred, her Yeh Yeh (you’ll pronounce it wrong; I always do) grew up in Canton province (now called Guangdong), which is suburban Hong Kong, in the southern part of China. Ma Ma Betsy was also Cantonese but grew up in Vietnam. The dress Julianna wears above has traditional Chinese embroidery; dragons, birds, and flowers, in lucky-Chinese-color red (for happiness) silk with maybe-luckier-color gold (for wealth) designs. You’ve seen this motif if you’ve ever been to a Chinese restaurant.

            I guess there are other outfit choices. A conical bamboo peasant hat with simple pajamas suggests an Asian background. That’s inappropriate, since most of the Asians in my extended family are professionals or businesspeople. And don’t call it a coolie hat, either. These folks never were coolies. Call it a Vietnamese non-la, or use the Chinese term, du-li. My granddaughter dressed like the up-to-date suburban youngster she is, paying tribute to faraway Asia where half of her ancestors “came from”.

            The other half, her maternal Jewish great-great-grandparents out of Lithuania, called themselves “Litvaks”. There was antagonism and mistrust between them and the Jews of Poland, ‘“Golitzianers.” For why, ask my grandfather Sol, a Litvak who warned me about the crafty Golitzianers before he died in 1962. I was twelve then and more concerned about winning touch football games against the crafty Irish and Italian kids on Bronx streets.

            The blue thing on my Julianna’s head is a yarmulke (YA-mul-kah). It’s a traditional head covering for Jews to wear in the presence of God. Orthodox Jews define that as everywhere and all the time. For men only, though. Orthodox women mustn’t wear one. Reform Jews like me can wear a yarmulke whenever the mood strikes them, no matter where the wearer is on the gender spectrum.

            The color coordinators among you might say that the light blue head covering doesn’t coordinate with the red / gold outfit. So what? The gene pools that “come from” different parts of planet Earth have merged well in the beautiful young person pictured here, getting ready to learn about where her preschool chums “came from.”

            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 What’s Cantonese for Mazel Tov?