The Yiddish-German words “shoen vergessen” are the punch line of the only joke I’ve ever been able to remember, and remember it I did when I read Rabbi Josh Franklin’s essay “Rethinking God” in The Star on Sept. 26.
The essay was published in connection with Rosh Hashana, the two-day Jewish New Year, which was Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 on the 2019 calendar, although the year is 5780 on the Hebrew calendar.
Rabbi Franklin tells a joke about two men going to synagogue. The first says he believes in God and is headed there to pray; the second says he is going because he wants to talk to the first. If, like me, you recall that as a child you looked down from the women’s balcony of an Orthodox synagogue and wondered what the hubbub below was about, the joke has resonance.
The uptown synagogue in Bayonne, N.J., which my family attended, was always noisy. The men “davened,” read aloud as a group from prescribed Scripture, and did so in irregular tandem rather than in some kind of chorale communion. An occasional bar mitzvah boy who joined them would be the pride of the congregation.
My uncle, the president of the synagogue, was a forbidding figure who ate unpleasant-looking foods like tripe. Occasionally he was at the kitchen table when I came home on a school day for lunch. Scrambled eggs on Wonder Bread toast was my ritual. I wasn’t shielded from what was on his plate, however, and it may be part of the reason I rebelled against everything he seemed to represent.
The words “shoen vergessen” are from another joke about two men. They are seated next to each other on a metropolitan bus. Both are wearing the black clothing associated with Hasidim, the ultra-Orthodox sect, and one man asks the other what his name is. “Sean Ferguson” is the response.
Sean Ferguson? The explanation is that the sobriquet was the result of the fact that the second man, whose spoken language was Yiddish, was so rattled when being questioned by authorities upon arrival at Ellis Island, that he could only say “shoen vergessen” — I’ve forgotten — and wound up with an Irish name.
My parents were taking no chances when they relegated old-time family names, Mendel and Hinda, to middle names for my brother and me; Martin and Helen have worked out fine as first names, even though they have no emotional or sentimental import. Over the years I’ve offered $5 to anyone who could guess my middle name; no one ever has.