Two Jewish Jokes Walk into a Book

My father liked to tell what he called Jewish jokes at the dinner table but really they were shaggy dog stories that got longer and longer each time he told them.  He had two favorites: the first was about a boy with a golden bellybutton. He told that one to my son, his first grandson, who at age five was diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. 

The story went something like this:

Once there was a little boy born with a golden navel. This little boy’s parents loved their son very much --golden navel and all--but they worried. Oh, they worried all the time. So they took the little boy—let’s call him Henry— they took Henry to one doctor after another. And the doctors examined Henry and what did they find? 

“His golden navel!” my son would shout. 

My father raised his hand for silence, not cracking the hint of a smile. They found that he was perfect. He was perfect in every way. But he happened to have a golden navel. 

“Isn’t there anything you can do about it?” asked his parents. “We want our son to have the same kind of bellybutton as everybody else.” The doctors shook their heads. There was nothing they could do about it. Henry had a golden navel and that was that. So Henry grew up and learned to walk and to talk, just like everybody else and just like everybody else, he started playing with other children. Some of the children made fun of him and said, “Hey look, this guy’s got a golden bellybutton!” 

So Henry’s parents took him to one more doctor. It wasn’t certain that this doctor was exactly a doctor. He had apprenticed in a hardware store to put himself through medical school. And he had a white lab coat but as for his diploma— well, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say maybe he forgot to get it framed and hung up on the wall. 

At this point in the story, my son would laugh. “Uh oh,” he would say.
Henry’ s parents paid the doctor his fee. “When can you perform the operation?” they asked. 
“Right now,” the doctor answered. 
“Uh oh,” laughed my son. 

The doctor took out a tool kit. It was full of tiny golden screwdrivers. He tried each of those little tools in Henry’s belly button. None of them were a match. The golden belly button wouldn’t budge. Henry wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not but he thought as soon as the doctor started to work on his belly button with his tools, it began to glow. It looked beautiful. In fact, Henry wondered if he had every seen anything quite so perfect. He found himself feeling fond and very proud of his bellybutton--just the way it was. 

‘‘Maybe we should go home,” he told his parents. 

The joke didn’t end so well for poor Henry, but for my son it ended very well because the clear message was this: It’s okay to be different. More than okay, it’s golden. Don’t mess with who you are. Don’t wish you were somebody else. Don’t worry so much. You glow! 
My son made my father tell that bellybutton joke over and over again. Soon after my father died, I started to write THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART and that joke walked right into my book. There is a second Jewish joke my father liked to tell my son that found its way into my book as well. My son made my father repeat that one even more often than the golden bellybutton. “Tell me Harry and the Hamentaschen,” he’d say. 

 In the spirit of sometimes having to “kill your darlings” as a writer, that joke didn’t make it to the final cut of my book. Now, with the approach of Purim, and the springtime launch of THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART, in memory of my dad and his tender relationship with my son, I’d like to tell it to you: 

Once there was a good little boy. He went to school and he played with his friends and he came home and he did his homework every day. He had one problem and that problem showed up only once a year. Every Purim that little boy—let’s call him Harry—was afraid of something. Can you guess what he was afraid of? 

Here it was up to my son to name all sorts of things Harry might fear. He would start with really scary things like an earthquake or a fire in the middle of the night and move on to silly things like farting in public and patiently my father would wait through the entire list, gravely considering and rejecting each suggestion no matter how ridiculous. Finally, my son would run out of ideas and my father would get to answer: “No, he wasn’t afraid of any of those things. He was afraid of hamentaschen. Do you know what hamentaschen are?” 
My son knew that Purim was the Jewish Halloween and every year he got to take out his Halloween costume and dress up for the Purim parade but the first time he heard about Harry, the boy who was afraid of hamentaschen, he didn’t know anything about the history of the holiday. So my father told him about the “ancient Hitler” named Hamen who persecuted the Jews until beautiful Queen Esther had the courage to go public with her Jewish heritage thereby bringing about his well-deserved downfall. And this evil guy wore a three cornered hat. So every Purim, Harry’s mother, along with all the other Jewish mothers in the neighborhood, baked cakes in the shape of Hamen’s hat. And those cakes were called hamentaschen.

After making sure my son understood the significance of the pastry’s three pointy corners, my father would warm to his story: “So here’s how you make the hamenstaschen. You spread out the dough, right?” My son would nod. “Then you fill the dough with nuts and raisins.” He would nod again. “Then you close it all up like Hamen’s three cornered hat and you eat it. And it’s delicious. But this kid Harry never got to the delicious part because he would always run out of the kitchen screaming: “Ahhhhh! Hamentaschen!” And he’d hide until they were all gone.” 

So one year when Purim came around, Harry’s mother decided that she was going to cure Harry of his fear of hamentaschen. “Look here,” she said. “Come into the kitchen and I’ll show you something.” 
So Harry came in and she spread out the dough. “See? Are you afraid of dough?” she asked. 
“No, of course I’m not afraid of dough,” said Harry. 
So she put in the nuts and the raisins and she said. “What did I do now?” 
“You put in the nuts and the raisins,” said Harry.
“Are you afraid of nuts and raisins?”
“No, of course I’m not afraid of nuts and raisins.” 
Encouraged, she folded one corner of the dough over the nuts and raisins. “What did I do now?” she asked. The boy sighed. 
“You covered the nuts and raisins with the dough,” he replied. 
“Are you afraid of that?”
“No, no of course I’m not afraid of that,” he answered. 
Relieved, she took the second corner of the dough and folded it over the nuts and raisins. “What did I do now?” she asked. 
“Nothing! You covered the nuts and raisins with the dough. I told you already!” said Harry impatiently. 
“Are you afraid of that?” 
“No, no. I’m not afraid of that!” 

Triumphantly, the mother took the third corner and covered the nuts and raisins but as soon as she folded it down, the boy opened his eyes wide, threw his hands up in the air and ran out of the room, yelling at the top of his lungs: “Aaaahhh! Hamentaschen!” 
And he wasn’t seen again until all the hamentaschen were gone. Like Henry the boy with the golden navel, hearing about Harry who was afraid of hamentaschen and would always be afraid of hamentashcen even when he was treated to a step-by-step demonstration of each ingredient comforted my son and gave him courage to face his own fears. 
 

Benjamin Geringer, on the 104th anniversary of your birth and the 10th anniversary of your death, thank you for introducing your family to Jewish humor, and for the many jokes you told my son. Two of those jokes walked into my book. One stayed and took up residence there. The other did not. 
My dad’s story of Harry and the Hamentaschen was a “darling” I killed in the process of revision. Yet it lingers, not as a scene in my narrative but in the DNA of the fictional character, Aaron, a little boy on the spectrum who, like my son, calls upon his grandpa’s wisdom as a way of facing down his fears.