By Ed Harris,
JTNews Columnist
What if I never moved from New Jersey to Seattle with my wife and then-infant daughter over 20 years ago? How might life have been different if we remained in the New York area? This thought occurred over winter break on a trip to Boca Raton with my youngest son for a visit with my parents. Boca, after all, is effectively a sixth borough of New York, simply one with warmer weather and a higher concentration of Jews. Like the other five, it retains a special character that reflects the New York Jewish mentality. How does this way of life differ from the Emerald City? Let me count the ways.
Seattle is relatively uncrowded and stunningly beautiful. We are surrounded by snow-capped mountains and majestic wilderness — an outdoor paradise. The New Jersey of my youth featured summers with oppressive humidity and swarms of mosquitos, followed by winters of freezing, miserable sleet and ice. Nature existed to be defeated, not embraced. This is even more so in Florida, where for six months of the year elderly Jews race, if that verb is appropriate for people with slow and deliberate gaits, from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned restaurants, and then after dinner repeat the sequence in reverse.
New York is Jewish in the same manner as Israel. You don’t need to join a synagogue to feel part of a broader community when most of your neighbors are fellow Jews. At the start of my career in Manhattan as an investment banker, Jews comprised the majority of any conference room I happened to find myself in, even more so if the meeting included lawyers. In Seattle, I typically had one or two Jewish colleagues across an entire office. Recently, at Bed, Bath and Beyond, while attempting to find a knife set for my son-in-law, the store clerk helping me asked if I was shopping for a birthday present. I replied that the knives were indeed intended as a present, but for Hanukkah, and asked if she had ever heard of it.
“No,” she said.
That kind of incident doesn’t happen in New York.
Did I mention pushy yet? Jews in both Seattle and Boca go out for Chinese food on Christmas. Here, we wait to be seated in an orderly fashion until our table is ready. In Boca, at the kosher Chinese restaurant, the assembled mass of people on line resembled a rugby scrum.
As I forced my way to the front like a salmon frantically fighting upstream, a harried woman holding the small yellow legal pad that contained the official waiting list ignored my plea to put our name down. Instead, she scurried about the dining room scouting for empty tables, while a ravenous horde of impatient diners demanded to know where their entrées were. As I stood by the cash register surrounded by a pulsating throb of hungry Jews, a matronly woman elbowed her way ahead of me, chased after the hostess and said, “We’re next; we’ve been waiting.”
Out of practice from more than two decades of sedate, well-mannered life in Seattle, I stood mutely by as she shoved her way past me. If only I had been there a month instead of a week, my long-dormant New York chutzpah would have emerged and allowed me to fight to defend my turf. At the top of my game, nobody would have cut a restaurant line on me, but life in Seattle had softened me in ways New York would never have allowed.
This pushiness could also be observed in parking lots. Darwin didn’t have to go to the Galapagos Islands and study the various types of native finches to draw conclusions about natural selection. He could have just as easily set up shop at any Boca strip mall, notebook in hand, and watched survival of the fittest reflected in the fierce competition to pounce on the closest parking space, another favored Florida pastime.
And so a week flew by, one which included, for my poor, suffering carnivorous youngest son surrounded by a family of vegetarians, meals out every night in kosher restaurants, where he feasted on corned beef and pastrami, steak, orange beef, sweet-and-sour chicken, and, for the one meal we ate at home, prepared chicken schnitzel from the kosher supermarket. No, you cannot find a restaurant in Seattle that serves kosher New York-style corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, and perhaps the stunning beauty of Mt. Rainier is cold comfort when one considers the sacrifice required.
Which leaves only one remaining question: When can we go back to Boca for another visit?
Ed Harris, the author of “Fifty Shades of Schwarz” and several other books, was born in the Bronx and lives in Bellevue with his family. His long-suffering wife bears silent testimony to the saying that behind every successful man is a surprised woman.