The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews: A Memoir

CHAPTER 1

THE QUEEN OF THE JEWS

Istood off to the side of the large banquet hall, waiting to make my entrance.

There had been a short, simple email in my inbox that morning. I sifted through the words in my mind as if they were flour.

It’s been too long. We may see you in Naples, Danny Cohen.

I rubbed the scar on the knuckle of my right middle finger. My Fuck You finger. It always itched when rain was coming. In retrospect, trying to punch the door open had probably been ill-advised, but one doesn’t think about such things when a rifle is pointed at your head.

I scanned the room. There was no sign of him. I let out my breath, now aware that I’d been holding it.

On with the show.

The room, filled to capacity, put me in mind of the Golden Globes, only instead of lobster and champagne, the audience ate bagels and lox with a schmear and drank decaf coffee. Ted, the director of the Naples, Florida Jewish Book Festival, walked to the podium and started his introduction.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce, all the way from New York City . . .

When I’d met Ted at the hotel, he’d excitedly announced, We’re sold out! Over two hundred people. We’re gonna have to turn them away at the door!

I’d come down with the flu before I left New York and had taken so many cold pills to survive the flight that I was seeing two of him.

I’ll try to be entertaining, I told them both.

Looking into the crowd, I forced down the lump that had climbed up my throat like a regurgitated meat ball—or, in this case, matzoh ball.

An hour earlier, I’d taken three non-drowsy sinus pills. The directions on the back of the box read, Do not exceed two pills in twenty-four hours. The three pills kicked in like three lines of cocaine.

My scar itched. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my Levi’s and squeezed them into tight fists. Be funny. Don’t think about the gun, the locked door, the sound of screaming. Breathe, remember to breathe. I scanned the room again. There was no sign of Danny. Good. Good. It was going to be hard enough to entertain the room with a whopping case of non-drowsy-cold-pill jitters; I was grateful Danny wasn’t there.

The owner of New York City’s wildest catering company, the author of the hit memoir . . .

A year before, I’d never even been to a Jewish book festival. Now I had appeared at such things everywhere from Denver to St. Louis to Hartford, Connecticut.

Voted best wedding caterer six years in a row, she’s been called the wildest thing this side of the Mason-Dixon line by Zagat . . .

I took a deep breath and scanned the faces in the crowd one more time. My chest buzzed. The lump fought to crawl back up my throat. I needed something to shake myself out of it. Something to make me laugh. What a bunch of punims! My mother’s voice whispered in my ear, coated with the Yiddish accent she could pull on and off like a pair of slippers.

Punim literally means face in Yiddish, but really, for those in the know, it means Jewish face. Two hundred punims were chewing their bagels and looking at Ted. And were about to look at me. Most of them had that air of general dissatisfaction I’d come to know from decades of facing my Jewish relatives: I’m okay, but the coffee’s cold, and I have hemorrhoids. Jews have a fear of showing too much joy, lest we jinx ourselves.

"The New York Times called her ‘a new breed of rebel anti-caterer.’ She’s been touring the country, but today, she’s all ours!"

I watched a woman go to the buffet and discreetly place a half-dozen oranges into her purse. I smiled and took it as a sign that my mother was watching.

Please give a warm welcome to Chef Rossi!

As I climbed up onto the stage, I stumbled into a large woman with a challah roll hanging out of her mouth.

Sorry, I said to her stunned face.

She never stopped chewing.

I grabbed the microphone and went into my spiel. After my first Jewish book festival, I’d been anointed the Henny Youngman of book tours. I liked the tag, but lately it seemed not so many people knew who Henny Youngman was.

It sucked to be old.

Yes, I’m Rossi, better known as Chef Rossi, but perhaps you’d like to call me by the name I grew up with. It may surprise you to know that I was not born Chef Rossi. My name was Slovah Davida Shana bas Hannah Rachel Ross.

It had taken me three decades to embrace Slovah, my Yiddish name. It was the name my mother had called me in a sweet, adoring singsong-y way when I was a kid, but it had turned into a shrieking battle cry of frustration by the time I was a teen.

Everything fell apart when I was a teen.

Hearing my Yiddish name used to make me wince. Now I proclaimed it proudly.

Jewish names, as you know, are supposed to be ‘of the father,’ not the mother—but that ‘bas Hannah Rachel’ means ‘of Hannah Rachel’—my mother’s name. This was one of the few marks of feminism stamped on my childhood.

Now I had them.

A lot of people ask me why I wrote a memoir, and I say, if you grew up lowly Orthodox and highly white trash, were kidnapped and sent to live with the Chasids at sixteen, escaped two years later, became a bartender, and then a chef, and then New York City’s wildest caterer, you’d write a memoir, too!

Their jaws always dropped (challah and all) when I got to the part about being sent to live with Chasids.

After telling some crazy-but-true stories, mainly from the New York City kitchens I’d worked in, I ended my presentation by asking for questions from the audience.

A white-haired woman dressed entirely in pink waved Ted over and grabbed the microphone.

Would you consider a career as a stand-up comedian?

Only if they provide two-ply toilet paper. The sandpaper this hotel has is for the birds.

What’s the most interesting event you’ve catered?

"Hmm . . . I’d have to say that was when I was asked to cater the after-party for The Vagina Monologues, and they wanted all the food . . . shall we say . . . anatomically correct."

Pinkie looked puzzled. You mean—?

Yes. I fed the crowd a sea of vaginas. Oval croutons with Korean barbecue beef folded in the center, a sprinkling of black seaweed . . . use your imagination.

Some people shifted nervously in their seats. I’ve never understood why the word vagina makes so many people uncomfortable. Where would the human race be if not for the vagina?

A tall, gray-haired, baby-faced man in the back of the room stood up. I hadn’t noticed him until he did, even though he was one of the few men in the audience.

Why did you run away from home so young? he piped up. You were just a kid.

I recognized that high-pitched Mickey Mouse voice immediately. He was three decades older, and his red curls had turned gray, but his squinty eyes and freckled face were unmistakable.

It was Danny.

Thank God I hadn’t seen him earlier. My scar began to itch like it was on fire.

Don’t think about it. Try not to think about it. The scream, the gun, the scream, the gun.

I nodded, not about to let on that I recognized him.

I wish someone had told me I was a kid back then, I replied. I thought I was thirty-five! I approached the edge of the stage and looked squarely at him. I have to admit, there were times when I wished I’d stayed home a little longer. I could have used one more year to be a child.

One more year to trust, I thought to myself, as my next interrogator motioned for the microphone.

CHAPTER TWO

ESCAPE FROM MESHUGA MOUNTAIN

For as long as I could remember, I’d carried a secret. It had followed me like a shadow, except this shadow lived on the inside. I simply didn’t belong with the people who called themselves my family.

As an adult, I viewed an old black-and-white film my father had made using a 1960s eight-millimeter movie camera. For years, it had sat in mothballs in the family attic, until my younger brother Mendel converted it to VHS. Nice of him, since he wasn’t in it. He wasn’t born until eleven months after it was taken.

In the video, my sister Yaya was two-and-a-half years old. I was one. My mother Harriet and father Marty were both thirty-nine. They had been married ten years before having children.

A few things about the film captivated me: seeing my mother still beautiful, before the extra hundred pounds and diabetes; seeing my parents in love, laughing and rejoicing in the simple pleasure of each other and their two babies. They were yet to embark upon three decades of sleeping in separate bedrooms. But mostly, I was fascinated by watching baby me standing in my crib, holding onto the side for balance with a look on my face that could only be read as, Get me away from these crazy people!

Harriet wanted to raise her three 1960s children with values she’d internalized in the 1930s. She wanted her kinderlach to have as few goyish friends as possible, hoped that her daughters would marry Jewish doctors or lawyers and that her son would become the doctor or lawyer other mothers wanted their daughters to marry. Her children were expected to provide as many Jewish grandchildren as possible. Harriet might accept small deviations from her plan, but she drew the line at even the hint of intermarriage. She was convinced that the Messiah might one day sprout from one of her children and had no intention of allowing the line to be poisoned with Christian blood.

The moment we could understand English, she taught us a bedtime prayer, drumming it into us like an army sergeant. No one was permitted to go to sleep without reciting it: I pledge allegiance to the Torah, and to the Jewish people. I promise to live a good Jewish life and marry a nice Jewish boy (or, in Mendel’s case, girl).

One night when I was six, after I’d recited my prayer, I closed my eyes and tried imagining what the Jewish boy I was expected to marry might look like. Try as I might, I couldn’t conjure his image.

After months of fruitlessly smothering my face in my pillow and searching for my imaginary spouse, the image of Wonder Woman from one of my tattered comic books appeared. I had a sense that there was something wrong with this. Still, no matter how hard I tried replacing her, every night Wonder Woman appeared in place of my future Jewish husband.

A few months after WW’s initial appearance, I tried running away from home for the first time. It was while our family was summering in Florida—cheaper then, Mom had said. I collected all the pears that had fallen from a tree outside our bungalow and filled up a pillowcase with them. While my parents were out trying to find kosher food in the Florida Panhandle, I dragged the pillowcase out of the yard, down the street, and fifteen blocks to the highway, intent on selling the pears.

A few concerned citizens pulled over. Before long, I’d sold all the pears, which, besides being half-rotten to begin with, had been dragged fifteen blocks by a six-year-old.

What are you raising money for? an elderly lady asked in a deep Southern accent.

I’s running away from home! I answered, mimicking her drawl.

I walked back to my family with an empty pillowcase, five dollars richer and proud that I was a little bit closer to striking out on my own.

My second escape attempt was the raft.

I have a vague recollection of my dad as a fun-loving guy in a faded white T-shirt wrestling my sister, brother, and me on the living room floor in Bradley Beach, New Jersey. We were playing a game he’d invented called Get ’em, Boys, and I loved it. Dad played rough; I guess the Navy had neglected to teach him the fine art of taking it easy on children. Long after my sister and brother hobbled away, I was still playing.

I would let Dad think he won, then dive in for one more wrestling move. I always lost—hey, I was six—but I’d like to think I gave him a rough go of it.

Mom’s idea of a fun kid’s game began with calling us over to the couch to sit on her lap. The idea was to slide down one of her short, wide legs onto the carpeted living room floor. At forty-four, she already suffered from an array of illnesses I didn’t understand, but I did know there was something fragile about her. I would often forgo the sliding game out of fear of breaking her. Plus, to be perfectly honest, it was no Get ’em Boys. I was a budding tomboy, and it was my GI Joe dad, with his hammers and saws and Ford pickup, who suited my tastes. I didn’t want to play with dolls; I wanted to dig in the dirt.

By the time I turned seven, a seismic shift was occurring inside me that it would take me decades to understand. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I began looking like a girl. Seemingly overnight, Dad pulled away, uncomfortable with any physical contact with his daughter. Why had he suddenly put a wall between us? All I knew was, for reasons beyond my understanding, I had been abandoned. That feeling grew venomous, until the very sight of him made me angry.

Get ’em, Boys was retired and a harsh division emerged, leaving my dad and brother on one side of the cavernous gender divide and my sister, mother, and me on the other. The problem was that my little brother, the youngest of us, wanted to remain on Mom’s side, while I wanted to dig in the dirt with Dad. My sister, with her growing collection of dolls and aspirations to become the next Miss America, was the only one of us who seemed fine with the whole arrangement.

Mom loved to reminisce about her days as a teacher. She had skipped so many grades that she’d gotten her Master’s degree by the time she was twenty and immediately entered the workforce. She put my father through law school on her teacher’s salary and was her hometown beauty queen.

I would love to have known Harriet the beautiful career woman, but I never got to meet her. She suffered through eight miscarriages before she managed to carry a pregnancy to term. The moment she gave birth to Yaya, she abandoned teaching and proceeded to drown her boredom in food, coupon-collecting, and mothering her children like an overprotective Jewish hen on acid. The only Harriet I ever knew was a five-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound stay-at-home mom. She wasn’t exactly passive, but when it came to Marty, Harriet had a mantra: Your father is right.

Mendel was issued a catcher’s mitt and baseball bat and sent off to Little League and any other sport he was willing to play. Marty encouraged him to look under the hood of the truck and taught him to top off the oil, among other manly things.

Mendel was about as interested in these macho pursuits as I was in paper dolls.

I did manage to talk my folks into buying me a GI Joe, but only by telling them that my sister’s Barbie needed a boyfriend. Maybe they figured out that sweet, fey Ken would never produce any grandchildren.

One afternoon after school, I went into the backyard to play with our mangy half sheepdog–half beagle, Scout. In theory, he was white and fluffy, but since he lived in the yard, he mostly looked like dirt. At the far end of the yard, near the garage, I discovered a large pile of newly cut lumber. A gift from God! I began to hatch my plan.

Every day after school I ran home and, using Dad’s hammer and hundreds of nails, worked on my masterpiece. My raft. It would be just like the ones I’d seen on TV. Huckleberry Finn had built one and gone off on great adventures, so why not me? Our house was six blocks from the ocean . . . surely I could create a raft sturdy enough to sail away from my family!

Day by day, board by board, I laid the lumber out and nailed it together. I fashioned cross-pieces to hold the wood in place and made borders around the perimeter that I could hang on to if the wind picked up. Oh, it all made perfect sense to me. As soon as I was done, I would drag the massive structure (which probably weighed a hundred pounds) out of the yard, across busy Main Street, down six blocks, across another busy street, up the stairs to the beach, down the stairs onto the beach, across the sand, and into the ocean. Then I’d sail off to a distant land where nobody cared whether I was a boy or a girl.

One afternoon, about two weeks into my project, I was upstairs in my bedroom working on the next part of my plan: how to steal enough food for my voyage. Peanut butter and fish sticks, I was thinking, trying to be practical about it.

That’s when I heard the screaming.

I don’t recall what that new lumber had been meant for, but I do know what it had not been meant for: a giant tangle of planks that may have looked like a raft to me but to Dad probably looked like a bad car wreck.

I’d never heard my father make the kind of sounds that emerged as he tore apart my masterpiece, but they did seem somehow familiar. Then I realized: Godzilla movies.

"AAAHHH!" came the cry accompanying the sound of splintering wood.

"AAAHHH!" had come the screams of the Japanese people running from the fifty-foot lizard.

I hurried down to the yard to find my beautiful raft in pieces.

In 1971, parents saw nothing wrong with spanking their children, but Marty liked to up the ante by using his belt. The angry welts on my behind paled in comparison with the horror of seeing my creation destroyed.

Right there was where Dad and I froze in time: he the dictator, and I the rebel leader.

It would stay like that for decades.

CHAPTER 3

NOT-SO-NICE JEWISH GIRL

Don’t forget your prayers! my mother yelled up the stairs.

I buried my face in my pillow. The two large, fleshy orbs that had erupted from my chest over the past year made it uncomfortable to sleep on my stomach. I’d been unprepared for the horror of those two watermelons hanging from what had been my boy-power chest. For each bra size I went up, I added a layer of clothing. By the time I reached a C cup, I looked like the Michelin Man.

I walked into Forestdale Elementary School in the seventh grade a seemingly fat girl in sweaty layers of hand-me-down clothes. I grew my hair long and let it fall over my eyes. Maybe if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me.

It worked about as well as wishing away my C-cup breasts.

Harriet and Marty had thought they were doing their kids a favor when they plucked us out of Bradley Beach and moved to the wealthy country-club town of Rumson. They’d figured the school would be better and safer, and maybe they were right. The problem was, they sent us off to our new über-rich preppy grammar school dressed as if we were from the boondocks of Kentucky. Rumson kids belonged to a khaki-panted, Izod-alligator-shirted army. In our Kmart flannel shirts and thrift-store jeans, we three were an easy target.

I spent seventh and eighth grade eating lunch in the restroom and navigating an obstacle course of snickerers and bullies. I might have survived until graduation if the worst bully at Forrestdale hadn’t made me his pet project.

Bulldog—who more than lived up to his nickname—would seek me out wherever I hid and perform his monstrous chant: "Mooo! Mooo! It’s Bigfoot. Biiigfoot! Where you going, Sasquatch? When that ceased to amuse him, he’d throw a handful of pennies on the floor and yell, Pick them up, dirty Jew!"

For the rest of my childhood, I threw any pennies that crossed my palm directly into the garbage. I doubt Bulldog figured out that the graffiti of a fat, ugly dog being anally penetrated by a chimpanzee was created by me.

It was quiet revenge.

At two o’clock, I would start staring at the classroom clock, waiting for it to turn to three and mark the end of my daily torture. When the final bell rang, I’d race the two blocks to our house, run up the stairs, and bury my head under a stack of pillows. There, under pillow mountain, I would daydream. My favorite scenarios were the one in which I saved the school from a sniper, and the one in which I was a rock star. In reality, I would have been happy just to have a friend.

In eighth grade, a new girl walked down the hall wearing a 1940s black cocktail dress and black stiletto heels. It was like a scene from an old movie starring Bette Davis.

I loved Bette Davis.

I was still wearing my Kmart clothes, but I’d saved up enough from my paper route to buy a pair of red Converse basketball sneakers.

She took one look at my sneakers and gave me the thumbs-up.

While Sonya Katz looked like a movie star, her sister Sarah, one year younger, looked as if she’d just returned from Woodstock. She wore a peace necklace, and her wild mane of hair grazed her buttocks. Sonya was a beauty queen with carefully cultivated sex appeal, while Sarah was knockout-gorgeous without a bit of makeup. They lived in a sprawling, ranch-style house in the ritzy part of Rumson. Their folks were expatriates from mystical Manhattan.

In our house, my mom occasionally stuck posters of puppy dogs on the wall with thumbtacks. In the Katz home, there were paintings with artists’ signatures at the bottoms. They had a huge, L-shaped beige leather couch in the living room that Sonya said was a Calvin Klein.

I didn’t know who Calvin Klein was, but I sure liked that couch.

Sonya taught me how to smoke Marlboro Lights. She taught me how to break up a clump of marijuana, remove the seeds and hide them in the houseplants, then roll the pot into a tight joint and lick the sides while keeping the ends all together. She taught me how to light the joint and suck in, holding the smoke in my lungs as I counted slowly to ten, then let it all out in one whoosh.

Let me show you how to shotgun! she announced one day. When it came time to let out her whoosh, she pressed her lips over mine and blew it into my mouth.

As Sonya pulled her lips away, I shifted uncomfortably on the couch, trying to make sense of what I felt. There was a buzzing feeling on my lips. Must be the pot, I thought.

When we’d killed the joint, Sarah put a Todd Rundgren record on the family stereo, and we danced around the house. Sonya followed that up with a bootleg import punk-rock disc she’d bought in the back of Jack’s music store and carried home in a brown paper bag. It was the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen. She jumped up and down, and I mirrored her every move. After two years of being bullied, I was thrilled to jump and scream along with Johnny Rotten. Bouncing madly, shaking my head, I lost myself in the angry music.

My grades began suffering as I hung out endlessly with Sonya and Sarah. My mother wasn’t worried, though, as the sisters met her ultimate criterion. Thank God Slovah’s finally got some Jewish friends, she announced over a dinner of iceberg lettuce salad, no dressing, and microwaved kosher fried chicken.

By the time summer ended, and I entered Rumson Fairhaven High School, the fat, smelly girl was dead and someone resembling the love child of Janis Joplin and Joan Jett had stormed in to take her place.

I reveled in my newfound power. I was the queen of badassery: pint of Hiram Walker blackberry brandy in my hip pocket, Marlboro Lights rolled up in the sleeve of my torn Ramones T-shirt held together with safety pins.

A lot of kids I’d gone to grammar school with didn’t recognize me, but Bulldog did.

Mooo!

Blow it out your fat fucking ass! I shot back.

He was frozen in confusion. Kids aren’t used to major transformations. I mean, is anybody?

After two years of being bullied, my suffering-in-silence days were over. Why don’t you suck your own dick, you fat tub of lard! I added for good measure. I thought the boy would pass out from shock. Too bad he didn’t.

Years later, Mom would call my seventh- and eighth-grade period the years I wasn’t there. She’d worried about her sad daughter, lost in daydreams, but had appreciated the good grades and relatively proper behavior. This new alien creature, however, she was not to Harriet’s liking one bit.

She searched my bedroom looking for clues and found a marijuana pipe. What’s this for!? she demanded.

School project.

She picked up the downstairs phone while I was talking to Sonya, trying to listen in.

Mom! I can hear your breathing!