Jewish Geography

"David, this is my friend Dinah. She's from Scranton."

"Pleased to meet you." Pause. "Did you say Scranton? Do you know the Rosensweigs?"

"Sure. We used to vacation with them in the Catskills. Their daughter is roommates with our niece Feige at Brandeis."

"Really? I think I know Feige! Her last name is Goldstein, right?"

"Close, it's Goldman. Her father is Chief Surgeon at Mount Sinai."

"Oh, we know him well. He operated last year on our Aunt Sarah. He's originally from New Rochelle, isn't he?"

Etc.

And that's Jewish Geography.

One subject at which I do not excel is Jewish Geography.

One Shabbat, when I was a teacher in Boston, a friend invited me to his parents' house for Shabbat lunch. There were many guests there. I was introduced to one of them, an elderly gentleman, and was told that he was from Toronto. When he found out that I was originally from Toronto, he was visibly excited at the prospect of a round of Jewish Geography.

So he rolled the dice and started to ask me whom I knew and was related to, in search of a Connection. Connections, you see, are the entry into the game of Jewish Geography. They are the equivalent of chips in a poker game. When I mentioned the name of my uncle, a somewhat well-known personage in the Toronto Orthodox Jewish community, his eyes lit up. A Connection had been established.

He told me that he had known my uncle. He continued: "Your uncle is buried next to my wife." The beaming expression on his face, pregnant with expectation, when he revealed this morbid social tidbit to me, suggested that he fully expected me to be highly excited at this Jewish Geography Connection -- as if he had just revealed to me the address of a long-lost sibling for whom I had been searching for decades.

Good grief, as Charlie Brown and Charles Krauthammer, two of my heroes, would say. So from "Your son studied at the same Yeshiva as my nephew" or "Your cousins stayed at the same hotel with us last Passover", we had now come to "Your uncle is buried next to my wife in the same cemetery"?! What next?

My diabolically imaginative mind produced the answer.

Scene: A gay bar in San Franciso. "Harvey, I'd like you to meet my good friend Rico."

"Hi, Rico. Nice to meet you. Where are you from?"

"The Village. I live on the north-west corner of Washington Square Park."

"Really? One of my ex-boyfriends lives there. Maybe you know him? His name is Gary Donen."

"Gary? Sure! My neighbor George went out with him for a while a few years back. In fact, George caught HIV from him."

"He did? Me too!"

Small world.