It would take four Russian novels to explain why Pinsky’s mother missed his bar mitzvah.
Topic: Growing Up Jewish
Robert Pinsky: I grew up very aware that they are infinite number of degrees and ways of being Jewish. It has occurred to me that just about every Jewish person thinks that there are Jews who are too Jewish and others who are not Jewish enough and it goes right from the people who have four refrigerators who think the people with eight refrigerators are excessive down to the people who never go on the holy holidays, but they like telling Jewish jokes and I had quite a lot of the range in my family, my dad’s father Dave Pinsky when I was a kid, he had a bar called the Broadway tavern and he had been a bootlegger in the --- when liquor was illegal, he was in the liquor business and when I knew him he was married to a Methodist woman and had a wife three and he had a Christmas tree that wihtout exaggerating its probably seven or eight hundred feet tall and my other grandfather ----- the house was Kosher though my parents were kind of secular people in a nominal way we are affiliated with the orthodox synagogue and we did have to set the dishes and we didn’t have bacon in the house. If my dad and I want to order a pizza with pepperoni on it, we had to eat it off the piano bench, couldn’t put it on the table, that degree of being Jewish.I think people often make the mistake of inventing a kind of nice ethnic mom and dad for everybody if you are Italian or Jewish or you are Wasp or you are Irish until you actually know a person I think we make the mistake of filling any kind of cliche [phonetic] from some sitcom or movie and I didn’t have a nice old Jewish mom and dad. Like most people they were weird. I have a problem which I observe that for reasons that are hard to explain my mom missed my bar mitzvah and 10 years later she missed my brothers. Just didn’t take in of the ceremony and that sounds if the family was divorced or they lived all over the place. No. Just at the crucial moment you realize you don’t have the right hat, you stay home something or other and you don’t just explain things like that. You have to write four Russian novels to explain them.
Recorded On: 3/25/08
