Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik

loss of power in the face of all those new immigrants.
    New York Jewish comic manners were still around, only they were no longer practiced by Jews, or were practiced by Jews as something learned rather than as something felt. What had replaced the organic culture of Jewish comedy in New York was a permanent pantomime of Jewish manners. The fly doing the backstroke in the soup was part of a kind of chicken-soup synchronized-swimming event, as orderedand regulated as an Olympic sport: Jewish New York manners were a thing anyone could imitate in order to indicate “comedy.”
    One sensed this at Sable's, where Jewish traditions of shpritzing were carried on by non-Jews, and in television commercials, where New York taxi drivers were still represented as wise guys, even though they had not been for a generation or more. But it was true in subtler ways, too. On
Seinfeld,
which I had missed while living abroad but now could watch in reruns every night, everything is, at one level, shockingly Jewish, far more than Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks was ever allowed to be, with mohels and brisses and whining fathers who wait all week for their copy of
TV Guide
—but the unstated condition is that there be absolutely no mention of the “J” word, while the most Jewish character, George, is given an Italian last name, Costanza. This is not because Jewishness is forbidden but because it is so obvious. Jewishness is to
Seinfeld what
the violin was to Henny Youngman: the prop that you used between jokes, as much for continuity as for comedy. The Jewish situations are mimed by rote, while the real energy of the jokes lies in the observation of secular middle-class manners. In the old Jewish comedies, it had been just the opposite: The manners of the middle class were mimed by rote—the suits and ties, the altered names, Jack Benny's wife called Mary—while the energy of the jokes lay in the hidden Jewishness. (The comedy of Phil Silvers's great Sergeant Bilko almost scandalously derives from the one thing that no one on the show is allowed to mention, which is that Bilko is a clever New York Jew dominating a kind of all-star collection of dim Gentiles.) New York Jewishness was now the conscious setup rather than the hidden punch line.
    One Sunday morning, Luke and I walked over to Sable's and bought even more than usual; we were having company. But the Cambodian cashier and the Chinese slicer were unimpressed. The cashier looked over our order.
    “How many people you having?” he asked.
    “Eight.”
    “From out of town?”
    “Yes.”
    He sighed. “Me, I would be ashamed to put this on the table.”
    “You would?”
    He looked at the ritualized bits of cured sable and salmon and shrugged again—my grandfather to the life!
    “This is not worth putting on the table. I would be ashamed.”
    “What do you think I should do?”
    “Get a pound of herring salad. Pound of whitefish salad. Pound of bluefish salad.”
    I did. “Now I proud to put this on the table,” he said. “Now I no longer ashamed for you.”
    He had learned to do it at Zabar's, I realized as I left—the permanent pantomime of Jewish manners with wings on! Though it cost me nearly a hundred dollars, it was worth it for the lesson. The combination of an Asian sense of face with a Jewish sense of guilt may be the most powerful commercial hybrid in history.
    S o, see, I have an Esther in my family, too. The matriarch of my family. She dominated her sisters, in a grasping way, and then came to die of emphysema in my grandparents’ apartment in Florida. We went to see her in—this is in about 1993, I guess. Wheezing and pained, she said, ‘People tell me you are doing well, but I lie here in bed at night and worry, oh, I worry about you. How I worry. So now tell me, tell me, so your aunt won't lie here as she is dying and worry … tell me … how much are you really making?’ ”
    “You can't possibly tell that story,” Martha said. “It's anti-Semitic.”
    “It's