Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (32 page)

I would tell him to take me to the Pasteur Institute, which recently horrified even the president of France by changing the names of its scientific journals from French to English. Once I got there, I would say, in the manner of a British headmaster congratulating the winning rugby team, “Good on you, Pasteur Institute! Good on you!” Then I would tell them, in American, “Atta way to chuck, Pasteur Institute, baby. You’re the kid, Pasteur Institute.” Then I would give everyone at the Pasteur Institute a high five—what used to be called an
haute cinq
over there before the French language started losing out to English.

Then I would get back in my cab and go to the nearest bar, where I would say, in my best English, “Gimme a beer, mac, and step on it.” When the bartender answered, in English, I would refrain from criticizing his accent, despite all the times that French taxi drivers pretended not to understand my directions in the days when the French still spoke French. I’m above that sort of thing, although just barely.

Understand my directions? Yes, I’ll admit it: I use a little French whenever I’m over there. Not verbs. I don’t do verbs. I used to do a few. In fact, I knew some pretty complicated verbs—what I believe the French intellectuals call Sunday-go-to-meeting verbs. For instance, if I wanted to know where the beach was, which I often did, I
could say
“Ou se trouve la plage?”
—which, literally translated, is “Where does it find itself the beach?” But that seemed silly to me. A beach knows where it is.

The head of the Pasteur Institute said that the institute simply had to face up to the fact that the international language of science is now English. He said that in 1988 the institute received 249 manuscripts, half of them from French-speaking countries, and only 6 percent were written in French. Good. I think if we really work on it, we might be able to get that down to about 2 percent.

I suppose you could argue even then that an absence of French content is no argument for changing the name of a scholarly journal. Think of all the restaurants in the United States that have French names even though the only thing French about them is the Kraft’s French dressing they use at the salad bar. I suppose you could argue that, but I’m not about to, because I’m all for this decision. In fact, I feel like dropping into the Pasteur Institute right now and saying, in English, “Stick to your guns, Pasteur Institute.”

That phrase itself, by the way, is an example of how much better everything is going to be when the French language finally loses out completely to English. In the French translation, it would mean people literally sticking to their guns—a bunch of people standing there with no one left to shoot but still unable to remove their hands from their guns. Getting rid of that sort of awkward and embarrassing image is going to be a big relief to the French, once they get used to it.

1989

BAGELS, YIDDISH, AND OTHER JEWISH CONTRIBUTIONS TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION

“In Kansas City, where I grew up, Calvin Trillin is a very common Jewish name. My full name is Calvin Marshall Trillin. Marshall is an old family name. Not our family, but an old family name.”

For us, the saddest news of the spring holiday season was that our old friends the Levines decided to get a divorce, citing irreconcilable differences over what kind of Passover seder to attend. It seems only yesterday that we were all together at the Levines’ for a Freedom Seder—asking that all people oppressed by antidemocratic dictators be freed as the Jews were freed from Pharaoh’s grasp, debating the issue of whether the Pharaoh’s daughter was trying to co-opt Moses
by hauling him out of the bulrushes, and tucking away some of Linda Levine’s superb gefilte fish done with a simple béchamel sauce. But when Richie Levine and I had a drink together to talk about the split-up, he reminded me that the Freedom Seder was almost twenty years ago. Since then, he told me, the Levines have observed Passover at dinners that included an Environmental Seder that emphasized the effect the parting of the Red Sea might have had on marine life and a seder done entirely in Reformation dress. It shows you how time flies.

When we had our drink, Richie was in a reflective mood, talking about the seders he used to go to as a kid in Detroit at the home of his Uncle Mo the Gonif. Richie happened to have two uncles named Mo—one of them a failed actor who lived off his relatives, the other a prosperous businessman who had once been accused of embezzlement by his partner—and to keep them straight, the family called them Uncle Mo the Schnorrer and Uncle Mo the Gonif.

“Those were the days,” Richie said. “My sisters and I would get a little tipsy on the Passover wine and kid Aunt Sarah about the matzo balls being kind of rubbery: ‘I’ll just save this one, thanks, Aunt Sarah; we’re going to play jacks a little later, and it’ll make a good ball.’ ”

“Simpler times, Richie,” I said. “Those were simpler times.”

It was an acquaintance of ours we call Harold the Committed who organized the Freedom Seder at the Levines, but Richie didn’t seem to blame him for anything that followed. “Hal the C’s okay,” Richie said. “Sure, I got a little bored when he went into that long spiel comparing Moses’ brother Aaron to Ché Guevara, but I figured it wasn’t much different from when I got restless waiting for Uncle Mo the Gonif to stumble through all that Hebrew so that I could have another go at the Manischewitz burgundy. Times change.”

I nodded, and looked into my drink for a while. “So what went wrong, then?” I finally said.

“Well, nothing right away,” Richie said. “Harold the Committed wasn’t in town for Passover for a few years there; that’s when he was going to Sweden every spring to do that ecumenical Unilateral Disarmament Seder with the schismatic Lutheran peaceniks. Josh and Jenny weren’t old enough then to know what was going on, so I guess we just skipped Passover for quite a while, except for that Interfaith Seder at the Mohlers’ where we saw you—the one where the
priest got blotto and the Methodist minister fainted into the chopped liver.”

I remembered the occasion well. The priest polished off the Passover wine supply so quickly that the last two blessings had to be said over apple juice. The Methodist minister started in on the chopped liver with considerable gusto—having had up to that moment no way at all of knowing that he carried in his bloodstream antibodies that would set off a violent chemical reaction to schmaltz.

Apparently, when the kids got old enough to understand what Passover was—Josh was about six and Jenny four—Richie assumed there would simply be a regular family seder every year, but Linda, who had always been intense about causes, was convinced that a seder had to be a statement. After she lost interest in national liberation and gourmet cooking, the Levines went to the Environmental Seder, which Richie remembered as having been “mostly about microorganisms.” That flowed into a Natural Foods Seder, whose symbolism irritated Richie. “I mean, let’s face it,” he told me. “The mortar that the Jews made in Egypt didn’t look anything like mung beans, and it’s silly to pretend it did.”

“So that’s what did it?” I asked. “The mung beans for mortar?”

“Oh, no,” Richie said. “That was years ago. After that—let me see—we had a seder at a radical feminist collective, where they refused to recognize the killing of the Egyptians’ firstborn sons as a curse, which made Josh feel a little uncomfortable, of course.”

“So you said you wouldn’t go back there the next year?”

“No, no. The next year we went to a seder where the guest of honor was an Indian holy man Linda’s pals were very big on at the time. He went on and on about whether plain matzo had inner peace. Finally, I told him I’d promise to stay away from his ashram if he’d stay away from my seders—sort of a reverse interfaith arrangement.”

“So that did it?”

“No. What did it is when Linda got involved in finding her roots, and we started going to seders every year in Brooklyn with Hasidim who pray in Hebrew for six or eight hours before you can have a bite of gefilte fish. I have a lot of respect for those people, but they’re not the sort of crowd that goes for matzo-ball jokes. So this year, I told Linda that if we’re searching so hard for roots, my roots are in Detroit:
I was going to seder at Uncle Mo the Gonif’s. So she said go. It was great. Uncle Mo the Gonif and Aunt Sarah are getting on, but one of my sisters helped with the cooking, and she even knows how to make those bouncy matzo balls. Uncle Mo the Gonif’s Hebrew hasn’t improved. He’s really a very sweet man, my Uncle Mo the Gonif—as long as you don’t leave him alone with the books.”

“I hope there’s no acrimony between you and Linda,” I said.

“It’s a very amicable separation,” Richie said. “The only problem we’re having is who gets custody of the kids on Passover.”

1983

I was surprised to read that bagels have become the most dangerous food in the country. I’ve lived in New York—which is to bagels what Paris is to croissants—for a number of years, and I’ve never been injured by a bagel. When I go back to Kansas City, where I grew up, old friends never say, “Isn’t it scary living in New York, what with the bagels and all?” My answer to that question would be that New Yorkers who were asked to name foods they think of as particularly benign would mention bagels as often as chicken soup.

They might talk about that morning in the park when nothing seemed to soothe their crying baby until a grandmotherly woman sitting on a nearby bench, nattering with another senior citizen about Social Security payments or angel-food-cake recipes or Trotskyism, said that the only thing for a teething infant was a day-old bagel. They might talk about the joy of returning to New York from a long sojourn in a place that was completely without bagels—Bangladesh, or a tiny town in Montana, or some other outpost in the vast patches of the world that New Yorkers tend to think of as the Bagel Barrens. They might talk about the days when people used to sit on their stoops and watch the neighborhood kids play roller-skate hockey in
the street with a stale bagel as the puck—days spent listening contentedly to the comforting slap of hockey stick against bagel and the inevitable cries, when the action got too close to a drain opening, “Lost bagel! Lost bagel!” They might talk about picking up freshly baked bagels late at night and being reassured, as they felt the warmth coming through the brown paper bag, that they would be at peace with the world the next morning, at least through breakfast.

According to a piece in the
Times
not long ago about how dangerous kitchens have become, that brown paper bag could have been holding a time bomb. “We’re seeing an increasing number of bagel-related injuries in the emergency service,” Dr. Stephen Adams, associate medical director of the emergency department at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, told the author of the piece, Suzanne Hamlin. It isn’t that bagels are considered dangerous to eat in the way that triple bacon cheeseburgers are considered dangerous to eat. It’s true that in recent years some bakers in New York have been making bagels with some pretty weird ingredients—oat bran, say, and cinnamon, and more air than you’d find in the Speaker of the House—but not dangerously weird. Nor is there any implication that bagels are dangerous because they are easily flung at people in the close quarters of an apartment kitchen.

The danger comes with people trying to get at bagels. “The hand lacerations, cuts, gouges, and severed digits,” it says in the
Times
, “are caused by impatient eaters who try to pry apart frozen bagels with screwdrivers, attempt to cut hard bagels with dull knives, and, more than likely, use their palms as cutting boards.”

Ms. Hamlin found no increase in New York bagel injuries. Reading about the havoc that bagels can wreak in Illinois or California, a New Yorker might say, in the superior tone customarily used by someone from Minneapolis describing the chaos caused in Birmingham by a simple snowstorm, “People there just don’t know how to handle such things”—or, as the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue said to the
Times
, “Those people just aren’t ethnically equipped.” The Bagel Barrens have been shrinking rapidly—bagel stores have sprouted in the shopping malls of neighborhoods that baked-goods sociologists have long identified with white bread—so maybe it’s true that a lot of Americans are being given access to bagels
before they know how to handle them, in the way that a lot of Americans are said to have access to 9-mm pistols or semiautomatic rifles before they know how to handle them.

But there is a more positive way to look at this. Twenty years ago, the bagels in Kansas City were accurately described by one of my daughters as tasting like “round bread.” It was impossible to conceive of anybody desperately going to work with a screwdriver to free up one of them for thawing. Could it be that outlander bagels have improved to the point of being something that people truly yearn for? If so, maybe what we’re seeing in Midwestern emergency rooms is the price of progress.

1996

According to a quotation carried recently in
The New York Observer
, Jorge Luis Borges, the Latin-American fantasist, was asked during a visit he once made to the New York Institute for the Humanities what he thought of Sigmund Freud. “Never liked him,” Borges said. “Too
schmutzig
.”