<\/p>\n
When I was growing up, saying “Jewish music” <\/strong><\/span>was like\u00a0 “Jewish cars.”\u00a0\u00a0 Didn’t mean a thing.<\/p>\n On second thought, “Jewish cars” did<\/em> mean something.\u00a0 It meant, for example, the Boat — an Olds 98 owned by my friend Mark’s father.\u00a0 The Boat had electric windows and was oceanic.\u00a0 (Mark was richer than the rest of us, I think.\u00a0 He lived by Cedar and Green roads, and his doorbell lit up.)<\/p>\n Years later, a West Side gentile called those humongous Detroit rides “Jew boats.” \u00a0 So maybe there were Jewish cars.<\/p>\n Re: Jewish music . . .<\/p>\n I learned about that at the house<\/strong><\/span> of another high school friend, Shelly Gordon.\u00a0 His parents knew Israeli and Yiddish music, cold.\u00a0\u00a0 Shelly was rarely home.\u00a0 I was an adult when I got interested in Jewish music, and Shelly had already moved to Israel.\u00a0 (His parents were such impassioned Zionists most of the family wound up in Israel.)<\/p>\n Shelly’s parents were Labor Zionists (Poale Zion).\u00a0 They seemed to know every classic Israeli tune and how to dance and\/or sing it.\u00a0 And the\u00a0 Gordon family\u00a0 attended a Yiddish camp in Michigan.\u00a0 (Farband\/Jewish National Workers Alliance.)<\/p>\n The parents didn’t know sports, which was odd because Shelly turned into a star athlete.\u00a0 He played tennis for Ohio State and became a tennis pro in Israel.\u00a0 Shelly did that for more than 30 years.\u00a0 (Still at it.)\u00a0 He never took a private tennis lesson.<\/p>\n Shelly didn’t care about Jewish music;<\/strong><\/span> he cared about the Browns, Buckeyes and Indians.\u00a0 In Israel he logs on — to this day — at about 3 a.m. to catch Cleveland sports scores on the Internet.\u00a0 He has a yarmulke that reads “Cleveland Cavaliers.”<\/p>\n When I went to Jerusalem in 2006, I played<\/em> The Wall.\u00a0 Shelly.\u00a0 At the Israel Tennis Center, Shelly was like Moshiach<\/em> (Messiah); he had the highest seniority and everybody deferred to him.\u00a0 He had even beaten Andy Ram, a Wimbledon doubles champion.\u00a0 “Andy was 12 at the time,” Shelly pointed out.<\/p>\n Shelly’s dad, Sanford (the man who knew all the Hebrew tunes),\u00a0 never played tennis.\u00a0 In fact Mr. Gordon was so oblivious to sports he didn’t even sign Shelly up for Little League.\u00a0 Mr. Gordon was not an immigrant or DP (Displaced Person); he was a NASA scientist and full-time Zionist.\u00a0 Baseball meant nothing to Israelis, thus, it meant nothing to Mr. Gordon.<\/p>\n Shelly went to a Zionist camp in Michigan.\u00a0 (Habonim Camp\/The Builders.)<\/p>\n On the flipside: My parents played <\/em>tennis;<\/strong><\/span> didn’t collect Jewish song books;\u00a0 didn’t send me to any kind of\u00a0 camp; and my dad managed a Little League team.\u00a0 So I wound up playing klezmer music.<\/p>\n When Mrs. Gordon died last month, her body was flown from Israel to Cleveland, to Mt. Olive Cemetery.\u00a0 A twist on shipping an American Jewish corpse to Mt. Olive, Jerusalem.\u00a0 Mrs. Gordon wanted to be buried next to her late husband.<\/p>\n At Mrs. Gordon’s funeral, I had time to kill because the mourners, following Orthodox tradition, shoveled mounds and mounds of dirt into the grave.\u00a0 Took a half hour.\u00a0\u00a0 I noticed Mr. Gordon’s tombstone said on the back side: “A kind and gentle man loved by all.”\u00a0 In his case, true.<\/p>\n Mr. Gordon was eydl <\/em>(polite\/refined).\u00a0 Also, a rocket scientist and excellent balloon twister.\u00a0 His wife, Beatrice, had gone to college and social work school after raising children.\u00a0 She wasn’t idle.<\/p>\n When my kids were little, I took them to the Gordons often.\u00a0 (The Gordon grandchildren were in Israel.\u00a0 That worked out well for my family.)\u00a0 I called Mr. and Mrs. Gordon “Beasan” behind their backs.\u00a0 It was a contraction of Beatrice and Sanford, as in: “Let’s go to Beasan’s for pizza and some magic tricks.”<\/p>\n What a pair. When I was growing up, saying “Jewish music” was like\u00a0 “Jewish cars.”\u00a0\u00a0 Didn’t mean a thing. On second thought, “Jewish cars” did mean something.\u00a0 It meant, for example, the Boat — an Olds 98 owned by my friend Mark’s father.\u00a0 The Boat had electric windows and was oceanic.\u00a0 (Mark was richer than the rest of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cleveland-full","category-coming-of-age","category-sports-pages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1023,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n—-<\/span>
\n1 of 2 posts for 11\/11\/09.\u00a0 Please see the post below too.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"