A Boiled Chicken Jew

We walk down the boardwalk, the bay waters choppy and grey and we walk into the wind, as fast as old dogs can go, all the way down to the new pier which is still a partial building site after all these years.

We are old dogs in late summer on this windy chilly morning, and there is a moment, as we stand there waiting for the lights to change so that we can cross to the boardwalk, when I wonder – not for the first time this morning―whether this brainwave I had of taking the same walk that we had taken, Rocky and I, 16 years ago—in January 2008—is a sign that I am a writer in desperate search of a trigger.

In my defence, that morning walk we took 16 years ago, when the boardwalk was newly built and was like a highway that had obliterated the sandy path along which I had walked on summer Sundays when I was a child, hand in hand with my older sister, that morning walk 16 years ago, was the start of Rocky and Gawenda, a daily blog that eventually became a book, Rocky and Gawenda, The Story of a Man and his Mutt. And thus did Rocky, no matter the merits of my writing, gain entry to the admittedly crowded pantheon of literary dogs.

On that morning 16 years ago, in that first blog, this is what I wrote about Rocky and about me:

I have had dogs all my life and dogs are markers, in a way, of the stages of any life, from childhood to old age. Rocky…. well Rocky, with some luck, will grow old with me. We will grow old together, though I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me, and Rocky is still a puppy. But at some stage, we will be old together.

Rocky - 16 years ago

We cross the road when the lights turn green and as is his wont nowadays, Rocky walks behind me, mostly unaware of the people and the dogs with whom we share the crossing and when we reach the boardwalk, he has no interest in the water of the bay, choppy and white capped and almost feverish, and I recall how he once was, a ball of muscle hurtling into the water in search of the great almost mystical tennis ball of his dreams.

I am ambushed by memories. The boardwalk is covered in them, waiting there in the widening cracks of the aging and weathering boards. Hidden in the waves splashing on the sand, angry little bay waves, and nestled into the grass where my parents had sat on those summer Sunday afternoons long ago, on faded woollen blankets, neither of them able to make sense of what had happened to them, what had transpired that had brought them to this place of strangers who, in the main, could not understand a word of Yiddish.

This morning, before we set out on our anniversary walk, two old dogs in search of a narrative, I read the foreword to Rocky and Gawenda―available still on Amazon and on eBay ― written by my friend Rod Usher. This paragraph set my heart racing:

What I like about the Jewishness Gawenda indirectly reveals is that it’s not caricature as in much of Portnoy’s Complaint, stunningly funny though that book is. It’s more quotidian, more cucumber-and-boiled chicken real. There seems to be a unity and resilience in these families, an enviable one-of-usness. Threaded through it, the bond of Yiddish songs and poems.

As we walk towards the pier, the wind has picked up and Rocky is walking behind me, determined to find shelter behind my legs and I am thinking about this, the idea that my Jewishness is quotidian, full of boiled chicken and cucumbers—pickled ones I think he meant to say—and I wonder at that and I wonder how it was that in those many months of daily blogs, before Rocky and Gawenda was a book and was a blog published by Crikey to which I no-longer subscribe because it is, in my view, hysterical in its coverage of Israel and Gaza and the Palestinians, in all those blog posts that became a sort of memoir, full of stories about my father and mother and my sisters and my children, I do not think, in all the things I wrote about being a Jew and about my Jewish memories, I ever wrote a word about Israel.

Boiled chicken yes and pickled cucumbers yes, the way they tasted, the way they were pickled, the way my mother would take one from beneath the blanket of dill that covered the top of the earthenware jar and hand me a cucumber and if I was lucky, a piece of kosher cabana to go with it, all that sort of stuff I wrote about, all those quotidian Jewish memories, but there was nothing in this memoir about Israel. Nothing.

When I started Gawenda Unleashed three months before the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of 1200 Israelis and Hamas taking 250 hostages—men women and children― I wrote that Gawenda Unleashed would be a sequel to Rocky and Gawenda but I knew that in many ways, it would be nothing like it.

The Jew I had been, the Jew my friend had seen and experienced and appreciated was gone. The Jew I was still loved pickled cucumbers, but pickled cucumbers are no-longer any sort of metaphor for the Jew I have become. I have not counted, but I imagine I have written the word Israel and the word Israelis hundreds of times in my Gawenda Unleashed posts.

And in all those Rocky and Gawenda posts, in the book, I do not think a single blog or chapter was about antisemitism, Jew hatred, my experience of it, how it is there in my quotidian Jewish life, even this morning as we retrace our steps, Rocky and I, of that walk 16 years ago when Rocky was a puppy and I was a boiled chicken Jew.