The Romantics
Zeeva Bukai
I’ve always been a romantic, a dreamer, a believer in the impossible. I blame this affliction on my parents’ “mixed” Ashkenazi-Mizrahi marriage — and on Hollywood, movies and television shows like The Sheikh, West Side Story, and I Love Lucy, which depicted love stories between Europeans and Latin Americans and Middle Easterners. My Polish Jewish mother was an impressionable seventeen-year-old when she married my father, an older, handsome Syrian Jew from Damascus. They met in Israel in 1956, when sand dunes still stretched across parts of Tel Aviv. My mother had E. M. Hull’s The Sheikh on her bookshelf. The cover showed Rudolph Valentino in desert robes. In my father, she saw her own desert sheikh. On that same bookshelf was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. My parents’ record collection included a recording of the Broadway production of West Side Story, and they were fans of I Love Lucy. It was uncanny how much my father looked like Desi Arnaz.
When things became difficult and uncertain, my mother turned to Harlequin Romances and novels by Barbara Cartland, queen of the intimate clinch — escapist literature that kept her mind off rearing four children, her husband’s patriarchal views, financial instability, and being an immigrant in the United States. We were outsiders. Ashkenazi families looked askance at my father’s dark complexion, and Mizrahi families looked warily at my mother. So, it was no wonder we identified with West Side Story, a modern-day, immigration-steeped Romeo and Juliet tale.
The movie opened in theaters in 1961, the same year we immigrated from Israel to New York City, where our life of riches was to begin. We moved in with my grandmother in Brooklyn. My uncle’s family, also from Israel, resided there. Nine of us lived in her two-bedroom, one-bath apartment where Yiddish was the main language, one in which my father, whose first language was Arabic, was also fluent. Summers, my mom and I went to the movies to cool off while my dad worked. We felt like royalty sitting on plush velvet chairs in the balcony of the Beverly Theater. This luxury epitomized America, and the movies were our window into American culture, language, and society.
Though he’d never admit it, my father was a romantic, a believer in the impossible. Why else would he come to America, love outside his culture, leave his home, and plant roots somewhere he’d never been? Working two jobs, he didn’t have time for movies, but he was there for West Side Story. I sat between my parents in the balcony, the closest point to heaven I knew. The opening scene was a panoramic view of New York City’s muscular grandeur. Then the camera zoomed in on the schoolyard. The Jets looked quietly ferocious snapping their fingers to the beat of the music. As the story unfolded, my parents must have been struck by the similarities to their own lives — intercultural love, bigotry, violence.
As the story unfolded, my parents must have been struck by the similarities to their own lives — intercultural love, bigotry, violence.
I was too young to see all the ways Bernardo was like my dad. It wasn’t only because he was often mistaken for Puerto Rican; like Bernardo, he was also an immigrant struggling to make it in America for the sake of his family. Decades and a remake later, the movie was more than a musical drama, more than an immigrant story. It was a real Jewish success story. The film was directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with the music by Leonard Bernstein, the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the book by Arthur Laurentis, and the script adaptation by Ernest Lehman — all Jewish men who knew what it was to be outsiders. West Side Story was the result of what could happen in America in one generation if you worked hard. My Mizrahi father was enough of a romantic, a believer in the impossible, to think he could make it, too.
In my novel, The Anatomy of Exile, I wanted to tell a story of an Israeli family coming to the US, hoping yet struggling to gain a foothold in American society. I wrote an intercultural love story between an Ashkenazi woman and a Mizrahi man, along with two other love stories between Israelis and Palestinians — a kind of West Side Story of the East. It was only after I finished the novel that I realized how much I had mined from my parents’ lives, and how the story illuminated the romantic notion that anything was possible and that sometimes the best love stories end in tragedy. My father once told me that if you can imagine it, you can do it. The Anatomy of Exile is the book I imagined into being.
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The Last Laugh
Esther Chehebar
In the tight-knit Sephardic neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up, I quickly learned how to ruffle the feathers of my elders with rebellious denunciations of our community’s way. My parents, my three siblings, and I lived with my maternal grandparents until I was fifteen. Our family occupied the first floor of the house; Grandma Rosalind lived on the second floor, and Grandpa Nissim — a Syrian refugee who served in the Golani Brigade of the IDF and kept all of his money rolled up in his right sock — lived on the third. Every Friday, he would uncrumple a five-dollar bill and hand it to me, payment for having cleaned up the pages of the past week’s Yediot Ahronot that littered his apartment floor. “Take.”
The money smelled like orange peels and dirt. I took it.
My paternal grandparents frequently joined us for Shabbat dinners, where the stark divide between the older generation (immigrants, traditional, antiquated with a hint of bigotry) and us (Americanized, educated, evolved offspring of their offspring) was obvious. My father’s father, Grandpa Maurice, had survived anti-Jewish riots in Egypt, his birthplace. He fled Cairo for Paris before settling in Brooklyn. I argued with him a lot — usually in good fun, but occasionally things would get heated. Grandpa Maurice was the type of man who would spit out food that he didn’t like back onto his plate. In front of the person who’d cooked it.
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When it came to our futures, my two sisters and I understood that, at a reasonable age (under twenty-four), we were to marry nice (Jewish, Syrian) men. I understood the assignment. But that doesn’t mean I always did my homework.
When I was seven, my mother took me to our community ophthalmologist to get fitted for glasses.
“When you’re older you’ll get contacts and braces,” Dr. Cohen told me. “You’ll look beautiful and one day you’ll get married — ”
“Oh, no,” I interrupted, “I’m never getting married. I watch Divorce Court with my Grandma Ros and I’m not interested.”
I still remember the doctor looking like he had just swallowed glass, and my mother, who did not know whether to laugh or cry.
By the time I was nineteen, I’d already marched down the aisle as a bridesmaid in two of my friends’ weddings. I was a freshman at NYU and high on my proverbial intellectual horse. I still lived at home, but every day, as the Manhattan-bound F train lumbered out of the Avenue U station, I allowed my mind to wander. While most girls I knew fantasized about finding their nassib—promised one — and putting a ring on it, my daydreams involved getting in trouble. I wanted to make questionable decisions. Wear the same clothes two days in a row. Fall in love with a complete stranger.
I wanted to make questionable decisions. Wear the same clothes two days in a row. Fall in love with a complete stranger.
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Reality had other plans for me. At a wedding, my friends introduced my future husband to me as another “artistic” kid in the community. We’d grown up mere blocks from each other but had never spoken much.
Our first date was at a Think Coffee next door to his Greenwich Village apartment building. We spoke about G‑d and music and movies over americanos and then red wine, until the shop was closing and the check came. I suggested we split it.
“Sure.” He smiled, much to my surprise. How egalitarian of us. We were bucking the system that had borne us already!
After nine months of secretly dating, I finally pulled my mother aside. “I have a boyfriend, but I’m not ready to tell you who. I just don’t want you to hear it from anybody else.” A flash of pain, then relief crossed her face. My middle sister seemed dead set on having European flings and my youngest was still in high school; my admission, however vague, was a win.
A year into my marriage, my husband, who is half Egyptian like me, asked if I knew how to cook ful medemmes, a fragrant stew made with fava beans and garlic. I knew the dish well. Grandpa Maurice ate it every morning with pita bread, tahini, and a drizzle of olive oil. His house always smelled like cumin and passed gas. I called him up for the recipe. As he recounted it step by step, with as much patience as he’d ever shown me, I could picture the smile on his lips. A few months later, I wrote an essay about ful and my grandfather. It was the first piece of writing I published about my community as well as the beginning of my career and the inspiration for my novel, Sisters of Fortune. Although my grandfathers aren’t around to read it, I can hear them chuckling. They have the last laugh, and I’m glad they do.
Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in NYC. Her honors include fellowships at the Center for Fiction, Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliffe AIR. Her stories have appeared in multiple journals. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire. She’s an amateur potter and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Esther Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community, and a member of Sephardic Bikur Holim, a non-profit supporting the growing Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the New School and has had her work featured in Glamour and Man Repeller. Chehebar’s first book, I Share My Name, was an illustrated children’s book explaining the Sephardic tradition of naming children for their grandparents. She lives in New York with her husband, their kids, their Ori-Pei named Jude, and a couple of fish. This is her debut novel.