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Friday January 25, 2008

Wherever I go, I’m surrounded by Jews

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Last month I found Zion. And it was quite easy. You just take Interstate 15, keep an eye out for the Harrisburg Junction and veer onto State Route 9. Voilà! My girlfriend, her sister and I arrived at Zion National Park, a breathtaking scrap of craggy, snow-capped rock formations and hardy evergreens sprouting in the thriving metropolis of Hurricane, Utah.

For a Jewish man born and raised in the Bay Area, southern Utah (especially in the dead of winter) is a strange and often incomprehensible place. One can peer out of a window on a frigid morning and not see a single degree. Supermarkets hawk pickles and peanut butter in jars the size of R2-D2 (Mormon families tend to be large.). And, most beguiling of all, so-called “New York-style” deli counters come stocked with Jell-O salads in every color of the rainbow.

In short, this is a place where mention of the word “shtick” conjures up mental images of something buried by a dog, and every Jew, even one who looks like the man in the photo staring at you now, can’t help but feel like Alvy Singer at Annie Hall’s family dinner.

Yet, in the extremely rare instance of an event being both intuitive and counterintuitive, guess who I bumped into at Zion? Israelis, of course.

Ascending the frozen, wind-battered peak of Angels Landing requires hikers to hoist themselves up the side of the mountain on chains driven into the terracotta-hued rock. If one loses one’s grip of the frigid metal links, it’s a quick trip to the bottom of the canyon, several thousand feet below.

There were no angels on Angels Landing — though there was a condor with a wingspan dwarfing that of Kevin McHale who actually seemed to enjoy posing for pictures. And, sitting beneath a wizened old tree and rapping in Hebrew were a quartet of kippah- and tzitzit-wearing Israelis.

If you’ve been to Israel (the real Israel, not one of those biblically named towns in Utah), there’s a good chance you’ve had the same realization I did: At some point you peer out the window at the scurrying businessmen, garbage men, bus drivers, cops and schoolchildren and slowly form the thought, “Virtually all these people are Jews. I’m surrounded by Jews.”

Even if the worst anti-Semitism you ever faced in the United States was a pal using the term “Jewed-down” to describe his flea market bargaining prowess, the experience of Jewish ubiquity in Israel is stunning and, dare I say it, poignant.

It’s also the exact opposite of what one expects in southern Utah (on top of a mountain, for God’s sake). I quickly eliminated the possibility that the Hebrew quartet had tailed me from j.’s office and followed me to Utah from McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. Nope. It was just another group of Israeli Jews enjoying themselves in rural southern Utah. Happens all the time. Hey, maybe the condor was Jewish, too.

Not wanting to intrude on the Israelis’ conversation, I offered them a quick “Ani lo yodeah l’deber Ivrit” (“I don’t know how to speak Hebrew”) before descending the mountain. Their stunned expressions and subsequent grins revealed they were thinking the same thing as me: “Hey! A Jew!”

Amazingly, at the bottom of the rock formation, I ran into a religious Israeli family — he in a white shirt and tzitzit, she in a long-sleeved shirt and dress that brushed the tops of her sneakers. Both were shepherding about six miniature versions of themselves. My salutation of “Welcome to Zion” was not greeted with humor.

A few days later I was skidding through a snowstorm in even more rural Utah in hopes of finding someplace — any place — in which my girlfriend and her sister could enjoy a quasi-traditional Christmas Eve meal. After all, if there were a minyan of Jews within several hundred square miles, there had to be a Chinese restaurant nearby.

That’s in the Torah, isn’t it?

Joe Eskenazi and his pet condor, Scott, can be reached at joe@jweekly.com.

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