Maxwell Street

Adam Gottlieb, August, 16, 2007

This is the poem the blood in my hands has been waiting to write since my last yiddish-speaking grandparent died.

From Devon to Maxwell Street, Chicago culture beats like heart of Black man singing blues, I look around my neighborhood and see a white flight I can only help but wonder whether I’m a part of.

My dad says when he was too little to see above a deli stand, his dad would take a quarter from that day’s earnings and let him make his way through the stampede of brown-eyed Brownian motion that was Jewish Maxwell Street. He’d lift his arm to the invisible vendor the quarter would transform into a hot dog. No ketchup.

But now my dad’s people are receding north as fast as his hairline.  Maxwell Street became Rogers Park, Rogers Park became Devon, became Arthur, became North Shore, became the North Shore. 

And the Jewish brats dominating the junior high theater scene in Evanston and Winnetka hardly resemble my grandmother.

Jeanette’s family came from a tiny shtetl outside Kiev called Katerinaslov.  My great grandmother fell out of a tree and crushed her leg. The deformity robbed the matchmaker of her title’s implied ability, and Jeanette was the daughter of two first cousins.

Me and my sister laughed and said it’s cuz we Jews are so inbred that we got allergies and bad eyesight. 

Me? I don’t even know whether I’m allowed to wear a yarmulke. The boys at Sunday school learned Hebrew and Arafat hatred so much quicker than I did, and my bar mitzvah had no rabbi and could be seen through the windows of Evanston’s Unitarian church.

There is no sympathy in my heart for wealthy racists and dogmatic do-gooders who only allow themselves to care about suffering if the victims look, dress, speak, and worship like them.  Today, Jewish food is hardly even kosher, pesach is treated like St. Patty’s Day, Israel is the most unholy land in the middle-east, and Maxwell Street is all Mexicans.

So now, what I want more than anything is for some soap-boxing Pentecostal to throw me a hook of “hebe” and a jab joining “kike”. If only there was more anti-Semitism in my life maybe I would feel like there was something in my Russian blood worth holding on to.

But the truth is, in 9 out of 10 cases, you can’t actually tell if someone’s Jewish the second they walk in the room.  Our religion may be a gene pool, but as far as I can tell it’s a fairly shallow one.  A Jew claiming discrimination and racial profiling is like a sickle-celled anemic claiming malaria.  Being Jewish is not like being Black, being excluded from the AFC is not like having your fifth job application denied, wrapping a talit around your neck is not like being lynched.

But to grandma, who I never called bubby, I want to write this poem in the spirit of remembrance.  When I was on the Skomor soccer team, I was the only Jew, the kids asked me if I picked pennies from the ground, teased me about going to hell, and I only wondered where all the Jews who were supposed to be in Skokie actually were.

From Egypt to Israel, from Israel to Russia, from Russia to New York, to Maxwell Street, to Devon, to Skokie, to wherever the hair on my dad’s head will go to by the time he is buried in the soil from the Mount of Olives, I hope for the Hebrews who can’t seem to stay in one place an exodus only from narrow-mindedness.

And for grandma, who never hated anyone unless they hated someone for no reason, all I wanted to ask you before you died was how I could find God as clearly as you did, so that I could be a prophet, and bring your love to the chosen people, deemed such by their meeting your standard of having a heartbeat.

Adam Gottlieb is a senior at Northside College Prep HS in Chicago.  He will be featured at the Chicago6Corners Launch Party on August 25 at 8pm at Acme ArtWorks (1741 N. Western Ave.)