Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde: A True Story - Softcover

Dana, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425264939 ISBN 13: 9780425264935

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

“For a generation of women who grew up watching Sex and the City, Manhattan is the Promised Land—or as Rebecca Dana puts it in her hilarious, self-deprecating new memoir, it’s ‘my Jerusalem—the shining city off in the distance, the only place to go’…[An] insightful tale of two fish out of water.”—O Magazine

Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of moving to New York. After college, life in the city turned out just as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment and man. But when it all comes crashing down, she is catapulted into another world.

She moves into Brooklyn’s Lubavitch community, and lives with Cosmo, a young Russian rabbi and jujitsu enthusiast. While Cosmo faces his disenchantment with Orthodoxy, Rebecca finds that her religion—the books and films that made New York seem like salvation—has also failed her. Shuttling between the worlds of religious extremism and secular excess, faith and fashion, Rebecca goes on a search for meaning.

A mix of Shalom Auslander and The Odd Couple, Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde is a thought-provoking tale for the twenty-first century.

Includes a Readers Guide

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rebecca Dana is an author and journalist. She has been a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The New York Observer. She lives in Manhattan with her husband.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

To Nora

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

—JOAN DIDION, The White Album

Prologue

It’s ten o’clock on a Tuesday night, a light rain is falling on the wide streets of Brooklyn and I’m in my living room, strangling a rabbi.

This is the first time I’ve ever physically assaulted a man of God, and I have to say, it feels excellent. My fingers, with their chipped red nail polish, are digging into the soft white flesh of his rabbi neck. My heart is pounding loudly in my ears. Normally, I am the least violent person on the planet—a practitioner of yoga, a shopper for shoes—but in this moment, I’m completely unhinged. I’m a ballerina assassin, a ninja superstar, a platinum-haired dragon slayer in Stella McCartney vegan loungewear. Watch out, assholes: Jujitsu Blonde is in the house. (She lives here, actually. She was trying to read the December Vogue before turning in early on a work night, but then this bearded dude rolled up talking smack, and now she’s on the path of destruction.)

Somewhere off in the distance, someone is blasting the 10,000 Maniacs on a wheezing desktop speaker system, and I can just barely hear Natalie Merchant whining about something, and I make a mental note to kick her ass someday too.

Who is this guy, anyway—this Hasid, this pillar of his community, this ginger-haired fucker with the squinty eyes and the placid demeanor and the beige yarmulke the size of a dinner plate bobby-pinned to his head? I want to smack the Coke-bottle glasses off his pale God-fearing face. Has he ever even seen the sun? I can tell he’s wearing tzitzit, a religious garment, underneath his clothes because the fringe is hanging out like some short sham of a hula skirt. And the T-shirt he’s got on over it is a trip: It has a drawing of Calvin and Hobbes on the front and a dialogue bubble with the words “New York Attitude.” I’ll show this gentle Yid some New York Attitude. I’ll show him what two hours a day of Iyengar yoga and a bachelor’s degree in American history and an encyclopedic knowledge of the last eight seasons of ready-to-wear from Paris, New York and Milan and a diet of sushi, soy milk and organic spinach—and, oh yeah, a broken motherfucking heart—can do. I’ll send him back to Russia with a collapsed windpipe and no knees!

Because the night belongs to lovers!

You’re next, bitch.

The rabbi twists around forty-five degrees and looks at me with one straining eye. We’re basically the same size, only he has more padding around the middle, and he’s wearing some heinous pair of frayed brown rabbi shoes that lift him up an extra half inch. But still I’m thinking: no problem. I don’t care how “chosen” this flabster is, he’s going down. My hands are steel claws. I tighten my grip, taking a moment to contemplate my options: Would it be better to body-slam him down right here in the living room or drag his limp carcass out into the courtyard first so everyone can watch? Then I notice the muscles in his back tense, and—uh-oh. There are muscles in his back.

In an instant, everything changes. He reaches up and grabs my wrists and performs some freaky Mortal Kombat maneuver, nearly stripping the delicately exfoliated and moisturized skin of my forearms from the bone. He pulls me toward him, into his damp right armpit, and holds me there for just one second, just long enough that I can see the fire in his eyes, just close enough that I can smell his breath: pizza. And then without warning I go down, I don’t even know how, like one big bag of elbows clattering against the wood floor, blinkered and speechless, while above me, Cosmo the Rabbi grins madly.

Everyone has a fight-or-flight response, but in this case, both impulses strike me simultaneously. I want to run away, and I want to clock him. Fight and flight. Maybe it’s a Jew thing. Observance-wise, Cosmo and I are opposites, but in the technical aspect, we are the same. Equal in the eyes of God and the SS, we are both genetically Jews, both members of a tribe that has been chased around the world, kicking and screaming—fighting while fleeing—for the last three thousand years. Millennia of genetic imprinting and a lifetime of poor impulse control nearly propel me in two directions, at him and away, but in the end both lose out, and I sit there, motionless, holding back tears.

“At this point I would stomp on your face,” he says cheerfully. “Or kick you in the head, at least.”

That’s what happens when you fuck with God.

IN MY DEFENSE, he asked for it.

“Please, Rebecca,” Cosmo had said. “Choke me!”

“No,” I’d said. “Jesus! No.”

I’d been curled up in my usual position on an emerald-green velvet armchair incongruously plopped in the center of our large, dirty, empty parlor. For nine days, the rabbi and I had lived together like this, in circumstances any sane person would describe as “sin.” We were not involved, would never become involved—get that out of your head right now—but the means by which we had arrived at this point, and would remain suspended there, in awkward cohabitation for nine weird months, were, at a minimum, unusual. I am a twenty-seven-year-old nonpracticing Jew, a journalist who’d spent her adult life pursuing the feminine ideal as laid out by the Sex and the City television series. Cosmo is an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch-Hasidic Jew, an ascetic, a practitioner of a faith that forbids an unmarried man and woman from being alone in a room together, let alone living side by side, separated by one thin wall. I don’t know what the Talmud says about a rabbi drop-kicking a skinny girl in the middle of the apartment they share, platonically, but I suspect the scholars would frown on it.

There are a lot of complicated explanations for what was going on then in our shithole two-bedroom in Brooklyn—explanations that draw on ancient scripture and popular culture, that deal with the peculiar appeals and deceptions of modernity, the privilege of youth and the limits of faith—but for the time being, a simple explanation should suffice: I was broke. Rent was cheap. He needed the money.

A week before I moved in, Cosmo had taken up jujitsu. He was rapidly losing interest in God, so why not? He was not leading a congregation now. He was, instead, the smartest employee of the Fast Trak Copy Center in the neighborhood, where he duplicated keys and halfheartedly tried to rescue people’s hard drives while dreaming of becoming a rock star. Whatever nerves the retail job hadn’t destroyed, the creeping agnosticism had, and the godless rabbi needed an outlet. An amateur jazz historian with a six-year degree in philosophy, he spent much of his spare time playing the electric bass, for a time in a band called Denim Fajita, which he really thought was going somewhere, but which went nowhere. Fluent in six languages, he had briefly dated Leah, a Yiddish scholar who really got his motor running, until she ditched him. He had just wrapped up an extension course in introductory Portuguese, so, he figured, it made sense to study hand-to-hand combat next.

Jujitsu was great but also “gay,” in Cosmo’s estimation, since it involved rolling around on the ground with men. Whatever Maimonides might have thought of me, there’s little doubt how he’d view that. Cosmo had just arrived home from jujitsu class when he began nagging me to choke him—he wanted to practice, and at least I wasn’t a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425264939
• ISBN 13: 9780425264935
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland