In writ­ing my new nov­el, Cheese­cake, I reflect­ed on the enor­mous change that have tak­en place in Jew­ish life in recent decades. The book is not sole­ly focused on Jew­ish life. It is real­ly about how the lust for real estate is destroy­ing neigh­bor­hoods and lives. Jew­ish lives are only a part of this. Char­ac­ters in the book mourn the dis­ap­pear­ance of the land­sleit, while oth­ers are fran­ti­cal­ly Googling to find out what the word means. 

The char­ac­ters in the nov­el do not use land­sleit in the tra­di­tion­al sense, mean­ing fel­low Jews. There are still Jews. What they mean is the dis­ap­pear­ance of the old-time neigh­bors, some many of whom are Jew­ish and some of whom are not, includ­ing Haitians . 

It is a way of life that is dis­ap­pear­ing and the cause is large­ly the price of real estate. The old bak­eries have all been dri­ven out and so have most of their Yid­dish speak­ing cus­tomers. Even if you didn’t speak Yid­dish you could sit at the Éclair, eat a dessert, and lis­ten to the singsong argu­ments in Yid­dish of the old­er patrons. Found­ed in 1939 by a Vien­nese sug­ar bro­ker, it filed bank­rupt­cy in 1996 and was replaced by a Krispy Kreme Donut shop. Most of the oth­er Upper West Side bak­eries have met the same fate which is why I can no longer get my strudel on the corner. 

Isaac Bashe­vis Singer was one of the reg­u­lars at the Éclair. He was the only Nobel Prize win­ner whose entire body of work was writ­ten in Yid­dish. I hap­pened to know Bashe­vis Singer because we lived in the same neigh­bor­hood both in New York and Mia­mi. Today the block next to mine on the Upper West Side has been named after him but I won­der how many young peo­ple know his name, much less read his books about a world to which they feel lit­tle connection. 

In Mia­mi, in the 1980s I lived on Ocean Dri­ve in what is now called South Beach. I liked the neigh­bor­hood with its long porch­es where Jew­ish immi­grants, many of them Holo­caust sur­vivors, sat in alu­minum chairs enjoy­ing the sea view, while they chat­ted. The slick devel­op­ers that were buy­ing up the neigh­bor­hood at bar­gain prices want­ed to dri­ve them out. They spoke to them with an air of friend­ly con­de­scen­sion and didn’t seem to under­stand that these tough and extra­or­di­nary peo­ple had incred­i­ble sto­ries. They have all been replaced with gaudy restau­rants strug­gling to look trendy.

Shift­ing com­mu­ni­ties and com­mu­ni­ty insti­tu­tions is at the heart of my nov­el, Cheese­cake. I often reflect on how my expe­ri­ence of being a Jew is so com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from that of my daugh­ter, born in 2000, and liv­ing on the Upper West side where she was born. For me being a Jew meant being in a world of immi­grants. It often strikes me that my daugh­ter has nev­er met an immi­grant rel­a­tive. She doesn’t know Yid­dish-speak­ing peo­ple either even though it was the first lan­guage of my father and my moth­er-in law, nei­ther of whom my daugh­ter knew. I don’t think she even knows many Yid­dish expres­sions oth­er than the ones that have become part of New York vernacular. 

Yes, she went to a syn­a­gogue and a Hebrew school around the cor­ner and that gave her a strong sense of being Jew­ish. But it is a dif­fer­ent sense than mine. On Sat­ur­days every­one says Shab­bat shalom. Grow­ing up, I nev­er heard this phrase. We always said Gut shabbes.

At cer­e­monies — wed­ding, bats mitz­vah, etc —I am always asked for my Hebrew name and that of my father. We didn’t have them. We had Yid­dish names instead. 

And speak­ing of bar and bat mitz­vahs, what has hap­pened since Jew­ish neigh­bor­hoods have moved from mid­dle class aca­d­e­mics, social work­ers, lawyers with small prac­tice lawyers, to large firm lawyers, and busi­ness­peo­ple with incom­pre­hen­si­ble occu­pa­tions with names like hedge fund? That is what has hap­pened in my neigh­bor­hood because that is who can afford the rent.

The cer­e­monies are still the same though while they were sup­posed to ini­ti­ate their entrance into Jew­ish life they more often mark the con­clu­sion of their Jew­ish edu­ca­tion, which is cel­e­brat­ed with a lav­ish event. You are almost oblig­at­ed to invite your class­mates whether they are Jew­ish or not. They com­pete for the best recep­tion as in the one in my book, which serves a choco­late coat­ed Roman cheese­cake (which makes no sense).

Fine, I don’t live a reli­gious life either. Many of the land­sleit were left­ists who didn’t believe in reli­gion. But it is a dif­fer­ent world. The cul­ture has changed. I just miss chat­ting in the ele­va­tor with peo­ple with whom I have some­thing in com­mon. But there is a Yid­dish proverb: No one knows whose tomor­row it will be. Though I have my suspicions.