beat-up old car and in less than two minutes we arrived at our bungalow. The whole way there, I sat in the backseat and kept asking, âAre we there yet?â I think I might have even thrown up, but thatâs just me and long car trips. To this day, if you pick me up in your car and offer me a ride around the block, youâll do well to put down some newspapers on the backseat, just to be safe. Actually, itâs probably better for both of us if you donât offer me a ride at all, because the last thing you need is a motion-sick Jew and my cardiologist tells me I could probably use the exercise so I might as well walk.
We pulled up in front of our rented bungalow and spilled out of the car and my father said, âOkay, everyone. Letâs have a fun vacation.â
That vacation turned out to be a fiasco. The weather was lousy, so we packed up and went home.
Another summer, my parents sent me off to a Jewish camp in upstate New York. I donât remember the name, but it rhymed with Auschwitz. (Also, mostly true.) I think we were served three meals a week, which was plenty, believe me. I still have my old camp T-shirt somewhere. Itâs faded with the years, but you can still make out the camp colorsâsmoke and ash. And you can still read the message beneath the campâs spirited hammer-and-sickle-and-swastika logo. It says, âI survived the camp.â Only in my case I barely made it through a single session. My father made it through World War II, and I couldnât handle one week of sing-alongs. (This might be another instance of delicious irony, but it still leaves a bad taste.) That should tell you something, and what it tells you is this: I hated camp. With a passion. Which worked out well, because the other kids in my cabin also hated me. Also, with a passion. I donât think there has ever been so much passion passed around among a group of eight-year-old boys.
The camp was run by a couple of Jews who thought it would be worthwhile to devote an entire day of activities to honoring those who died during the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never understood why this was more meaningful to our camp directors than honoring the victims of Pearl Harbor, say, or the victims of the German concentration camps that seemed to bear a passing resemblance to our own little hellhole, but I was eight and I didnât have it in me to question authority. And so we honored the fallen Japs. It was a politically incorrect time, so we ran through the woods with our eyelids taped down. This was our way of showing respect. Then we made lanyards. Then we hiked into the woods so the mountainfolk could rape us.
It was like Deliverance, only with bug spray.
(Yeah, yeah ⦠I know. That makes two Deliverance jokes, and weâre not even halfway through this thing, but that should pretty much cover us, here on in.)
Which reminds me ⦠why is it that Jews play into all these offensive stereotypes when we have something to celebrate or commemorate? Itâs innate to our species, I guess. On Hanukkah, we give each other chocolate coins. Whose idea was that? Jews running hither and yon with sacks of money, chocolate or not, doesnât exactly do much to dispel the notion that weâre a money-grubbing lot. (And when was the last time you ran hither and yon, anyway?) You donât see Asians taping down their eyelids on their holidays, unless itâs at Camp Auschwitz in the Catskills, on Hiroshima Day. You donât see African-Americans walking around in blackface, eating watermelon and singing minstrel tunes. And on Irish holidays, the Irish donât go running around, drinking themselves shit-faced and getting into fights in the street for no apparent reason and then puking their guts out in between parked cars ⦠oh, wait a minute. Forget I said that.
It wasnât exactly a formative experience, my brief time at camp, but it was an experience. I never had to swim
We pulled up in front of our rented bungalow and spilled out of the car and my father said, âOkay, everyone. Letâs have a fun vacation.â
That vacation turned out to be a fiasco. The weather was lousy, so we packed up and went home.
Another summer, my parents sent me off to a Jewish camp in upstate New York. I donât remember the name, but it rhymed with Auschwitz. (Also, mostly true.) I think we were served three meals a week, which was plenty, believe me. I still have my old camp T-shirt somewhere. Itâs faded with the years, but you can still make out the camp colorsâsmoke and ash. And you can still read the message beneath the campâs spirited hammer-and-sickle-and-swastika logo. It says, âI survived the camp.â Only in my case I barely made it through a single session. My father made it through World War II, and I couldnât handle one week of sing-alongs. (This might be another instance of delicious irony, but it still leaves a bad taste.) That should tell you something, and what it tells you is this: I hated camp. With a passion. Which worked out well, because the other kids in my cabin also hated me. Also, with a passion. I donât think there has ever been so much passion passed around among a group of eight-year-old boys.
The camp was run by a couple of Jews who thought it would be worthwhile to devote an entire day of activities to honoring those who died during the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never understood why this was more meaningful to our camp directors than honoring the victims of Pearl Harbor, say, or the victims of the German concentration camps that seemed to bear a passing resemblance to our own little hellhole, but I was eight and I didnât have it in me to question authority. And so we honored the fallen Japs. It was a politically incorrect time, so we ran through the woods with our eyelids taped down. This was our way of showing respect. Then we made lanyards. Then we hiked into the woods so the mountainfolk could rape us.
It was like Deliverance, only with bug spray.
(Yeah, yeah ⦠I know. That makes two Deliverance jokes, and weâre not even halfway through this thing, but that should pretty much cover us, here on in.)
Which reminds me ⦠why is it that Jews play into all these offensive stereotypes when we have something to celebrate or commemorate? Itâs innate to our species, I guess. On Hanukkah, we give each other chocolate coins. Whose idea was that? Jews running hither and yon with sacks of money, chocolate or not, doesnât exactly do much to dispel the notion that weâre a money-grubbing lot. (And when was the last time you ran hither and yon, anyway?) You donât see Asians taping down their eyelids on their holidays, unless itâs at Camp Auschwitz in the Catskills, on Hiroshima Day. You donât see African-Americans walking around in blackface, eating watermelon and singing minstrel tunes. And on Irish holidays, the Irish donât go running around, drinking themselves shit-faced and getting into fights in the street for no apparent reason and then puking their guts out in between parked cars ⦠oh, wait a minute. Forget I said that.
It wasnât exactly a formative experience, my brief time at camp, but it was an experience. I never had to swim
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