2 August 1999
Sorry I haven’t written much. The problem was that, until recently, nothing interesting was happening to me. But then I went to Alabama to attend a
F A M I L Y
R E U N I O N
Would it sound egotistical to say that now I know where my intelligence does NOT come from? Well, let’s not spoil the fun yet….
It was officially called the Israel Family Reunion, in honor of the Israel family who, more than a hundred years ago, performed the invaluable service of importing one-sixteenth of my genes from Russia to the United States in the form of my great-great-grandmother. Of course, a few other Israel family members also came over, one thing led to another, and now we have approximately a jillion relatives all across the South. In celebration of our hegemony, every two years the family gets together in order to – well, get together. And so I spent last weekend in broiling Birmingham, Alabama with my sister, father, uncle, and about 145 cousins, most of them so far removed, in genetic terms, as to be completely valueless as potential kidney donors.
Strangely, though, I wasn’t terribly excited about going. Most of this stemmed from the fact that I had never met most of these cousins, and those I had met had been blotted from my mind using my own special brand of aggressive amnesia therapy. Thus I would constantly be shifting between the Tenth-Anniversary-High-School-Class-Reunion Syndrome, in which you desperately want to demonstrate to people that you have actually succeeded despite everyone’s expectations, and Who-Gives-A-Damn-They’re-Just-A-Bunch-Of-Hick-Relatives Apathy. The fact that I hadn’t succeeded (that is, I was jobless) didn’t help either. And most of all, I had just spent a lovely week meeting friends and seeing museums in Washington DC, and now I would be descending into the slow and potentially Faulknerian miasma of my deep Southern family. In summary, the challenge would be to see if I could make it through the weekend without decapitating any of my relatives.
So we all met Friday night in the hospitality room, which, as at all our gatherings, featured plastic platters of candy, cake, and Doritos, as well as the ever-popular bottomless bowl of random chocolates. We each got a t-shirt and a nametag that said “Hi Cuz!” and “Shalom Y’all!” The tag also contained the serial number designating our line of descent from Zovel Israel, the great patriarch – mine was 1.2.7.1b.2.1a.1. (You too can be a Patriarch: simply make sure your descendants never know who your parents are. That was what qualified Zovel.) Our first disappointment, after seeing the clone-like Kennedys all over television with their big old identical choppers and sad hooded eyes, was that none of us looked like each other. On the other hand, after seeing each other, we probably all thought that it was for the best. We weren’t the most charismatic bunch, I must say, and I wasn’t feeling so great-looking myself – especially after initiating the all-chocolate diet I would maintain for most of the weekend.
Not that looking good should have mattered. In some ways a family reunion is like a vicious Greek-hell version of a singles’ bar. It is incredibly easy to introduce yourself to the more attractive attendees, engage in witty conversation with them, and even get them astonishingly drunk for free. But, since they are all your RELATIVES, at the slightest tinge of naughtiness you will immediately feel the ice-cold hand of societal and familial shame on your shoulder, and perhaps on other bits of your anatomy as well.
This wasn’t such a big problem in the past, however. The family tree helpfully provided to us has three dotted lines connecting the boxes in ways rarely anticipated by most genealogy software. One line is entitled “this marriage is between first cousins” and the other two are entitled “these marriages are between second cousins.” Yow! It doesn’t meet the legal definition of incest, but it sure does quack like a cross-eyed, inbred duck. It appears that back around my great-grandparents’ and great-great-grandparents’ age, insularity and lack of creativity were such that it just seemed best if you occasionally married in the family. The results spoke for themselves. Sample reunion dialogue:
Cuz: Did you have the cheese grits?
Me: (Matter-of-factly) No.
Cuz: (Warily) Do you like cheese grits?
Me: (Quietly sorry to disappoint) No.
Cuz: (Joyfully) But they’re so good! I love cheese grits!
Me: (Tentatively) Mmmm.
Cuz: (To another cuz) Did YOU get the cheese grits? Etc, etc.
Since my generation wasn’t very strongly represented, there wasn’t really an opportunity to see whether the incest impulse still stirred strong in our veins. Well, I lie – my sister (1.2.7.1b.2.1a.2) was apparently hit on by one of our number, but she turned him down. (Her conclusion, announced loudly in the hospitality room: “Woulda been the best five minutes of his life!”) One can only imagine that if any more cousins marry, the family will soon lose all social inhibitions and collapse in on itself like a neutron star. Certainly some of the relatives were just as dense. More dialogue:
Cuz: So what do you do?
Me: Well, I am unemployed right now. I finished my MBA last year and am now looking for the Next Big Thing (light irony in my voice capitalized those words).
Cuz: An MBA! I was thinking about doing an MBA. Did you like it?
Me: Yes, well, it’s a useful degree.
Cuz: I think it would be fascinating. I always wanted to know – I really don’t know about all that money, you know, how it moves (hands swish around).
Me: Like what, in the economy?
Cuz: Yeah, you know, the money moves here and there. I don’t really understand it.
Me: Mmmm. (Looking around for more chocolate.)
Now it may occur to you to ask: is it nature (inbreeding) or nurture (being Southern)? Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. There was a lot of this:
Cuz: So who are you exactly? (Recall, of course, that this is with a Southern accent, so all the vowels become super diphthongs in a manner not unlike Minnesotans doing Tennessee Williams, but since I detest writing dialect, your imagination will have to do until you start begging me to attach sounds into my letters.)
Me: Daniel, (note the tiny eighth-note pause to let it sink in) Silver.
Cuz: Oh, SIL-vah. So, how do you FEE-uht into the FAMuh-lih? (OK, I couldn’t resist.)
Me: Well, my Dad is Dennis Silver.
Cuz: (Total blankness) Uhhhhhhhh. (Sound is not unlike opening note of a Tibetan monk’s chant.)
Me: My grandfather is Judge Sam Silver.
Cuz: (Tiny bell rings in back of head) Uhh. Yes. SAY-uhm Silver?
Me: The judge.
Cuz: Ah yes! The judge. How is, he, doin’? (Commas added for extra slowness.)
Well, he was doin’ fine, but was not attending. He stayed in Miami for medical reasons. My sister, however, was in great shape, having fully recovered from her recent elective surgery:
Sis: How do you like them? They’re new! (Hands on side)
Cuz: What? Your new shirt?
Sis: No, my new tiddies! They’re firmmmmm. (Cupping the tiddies.)
Cuz: Uhh (not sure where to look).
Sis: I got ‘em sewed in the back so they stand up even if I take the bra off.
Cuz: Uhh.
Sis: I went up three whole cup sizes!
Cuz: Uhh (still unsure where to look).
Sis: And next month I’ll do this too. (Pats sides)
Cuz: Yore PAY-uhnts?
Sis: No, I’m gonna have liposuction!
You have to realize that my sister naturally sounds like a Cartmanesque Tourette’s patient on amphetamine- and LSD-laced pecan log rolls, so the sonic effect is slightly stronger than I can convey in print. She was also sporting Ginger Spice hair (blonde in front, red everywhere else) with her own special touch (dark roots), so maybe the visual assault shorted out some cousin’s already attenuated brainwaves.
Now while the hotel was located in Birmingham (in a mall no less), the real objective was West Blocton, Alabama, an old coal mining town an hour away. My grandfather (the judge SAY-uhm) was born in West Blocton and lived there until the age of 10 or so, at which time my great-grandfather had enough sense to realize Florida was the land of the future and move his family out to the then malarial and poorly air conditioned Miami.
West Blocton is now only a shadow of its former glory – why, in the great mining days, there had been some 15,000 people in the vicinity, a real metropolis dwarfed only by Blocton itself (now extinct). But as we noted when we went out there that Saturday, there were now only four stores left open on the main drag: a flower shop, an curiosity shop/salvage yard, Callahan’s Taxidermy (perhaps also on the way out: Call Before Comming, said its OPEN sign), and the poorly air conditioned Cahaba Lily Community Center, where we all met to see a presentation on the history of West Blocton. The rest of the street was boarded up, shot, closed down: here a pharmacy, there a convenience store, a pizza parlor, a tae kwan do studio, a barber shop. All dead as the CBS fall lineup.
The Center (named for the local Cahaba Lily – you could even buy a book about these precious flowers) had special significance: it was formerly called the I & N Quality Store, and was formerly owned by family keystone Wolf Israel himself. Wolf was the reason all my family ended up in Alabama and not in dirty, smelly old Manhattan, where by now we would probably all be living in the creepy Upper West Side eating strange, round pieces of bread called bagels. (Bagels were unknown in Alabama until late in my grandfather’s youth.) Wolf found his calling by selling Quality goods to the locals, and of course, importing siblings – the genesis of all our glory.
After some historical blah-blah and a Southern-style buffet (a mayonnaise extravaganza) we went off to see the house where Wolf Israel himself once lived. (Yes, we warned the occupants first.) As we all got out of the buses, the full awfulness of the summer heat hit us, and we soon felt like our hotel’s food: either boiled to death or roasted to a hard crust. This caused us to collectively storm the house. Shock: the seemingly well-off Southern family (equipped with a tall blonde squinty Miss Cahaba Lily daughter) had completely redone our little house into a Holly-Hobby floral print organzasm, complete with a penetrating, industrial supply of apple potpourri that made you feel as if you had died and been reincarnated as a garden gnome buried in the Scented Candle section at Cracker Barrel.
(For those who don’t know, Cracker Barrel is a family-style interstate-exit Southern restaurant that has a nightmarish gift shop up front by the cash register. In addition to the candles, corncob pipes, “Bless This Mess” needlepoint samplers, and novelty gifts in the shape of outhouses, they also sell those striped, translucent fruity candy sticks you can make incredibly sharp with your own saliva and perforate your friends with. By the way, “family-style” means all the food is fried and served with corn boiled into mush.)
Now the family had been warned a few of us might come in, but it would seem that after the owners saw 80 or 90 Jews tromping through their house wearing identical t-shirts, I could only imagine that their first order of business after our departure would be a thorough exorcism. (They would be duly advised to count the silverware as well.) And it got weirder later, when our large-haired Cousin Ethel (or was she Aunt Ethel? Who knows? She was just 1.2.7.2.4 to me) noted that she had lived just across the street when she was a young child. I am not totally sure what happened, but I think she walked up to the front door, knocked, and gained entry from a kindly but obviously bewildered couple I’ll call Ma and Pa Kettle. Once the door was open, their hallway quickly became the modern-day equivalent of the Red Sea, as one after another of us walked in, sniffed at the furnishings, and traipsed out, commenting on how things had changed after a mere sixty years. The Kettles looked overwhelmed and probably figured it was only a matter of time before they would have a big Star of David burning on their front lawn.
And that was it. With temperatures over 100 degrees, we practically never left the hotel after that – OK, we went to the mall, but that doesn’t count because it was actually connected to our hotel. (And this was the nicest hotel in Birmingham, make no mistake.) Sure, we had a few more meals, and then we all went home. And, to continue my special diet, I stole two bags of chocolates from the hospitality room.
I have a new laptop, so I can write even longer letters now! Take that. I also put some stuff on my website.
Regards to all,
Daniel