Immanuel aka
Mani
by Albert Russo
The other boy I told you
about is Immanuel. They call him Mani; that name
suits him better, and he has mani things
I like. Whereas Ishmael makes me think of a
dashing golden deer, jumping and gamboling in the
forest to look for his belle, Mani is more like a
beautiful wolf, sitting on top of a boulder,
watching the world beneath, and maybe thinking of
what he might catch for his next meal - no, not a
deer, coz these two are great buddies.
Mani comes from a Jewish
ultra-Orthodox family that lives in Mea Shearim,
a religious quarter in Jerusalem. He explained to
me what kind of people they are. The men spend
the whole day praying and reading the Torah.
Outside, they walk in long black clothes and wear
black fur hats. These come in a variety: shtreimels
(in Yddish) are short, wide and shaped ligh
donuts (mmm, with strawberry jellow), while spodiks
are rounder, narrower and taller, then you have
the kolpiks, which are the same as spodiks
but in brown fur. Pick me a winner, I says. I’m
sure ‘shush’ is a Yiddish word.
These poor men - and yeah,
they ARE dirt poor - wear old pants tucked into
their old socks, with an old coat covering it all,
like their Polish ancestors. They wear all of
this, no matter what the temperature is, which I
find disco-mom-billowing, and downright
cruel, coz in Summer when it sizzles, Israeli
youngsters and even oldsters run around
in shorts, sandals and t-shirts, sometimes, bare
chested. Because of that heavy armor, these
Haredi men lack vitamin D and fall ill, at the
slightest cold. They catch their chill, and
sometimes their death, if they don’t go to
the doctor, as they should, coz here medical
health is free, for all and sundry, especially on
Sunday, since, in Israel, it is the beginning of
the week, not Monday. It’s the Jews who
invented the weekend.
Mani has six brothers and
five sisters, wa wo wee! His father and uncles do
nothing but pray and chant, while his mom and his
older sisters work to earn money; they also cook,
wash clothes and look after the other kids. That
I call female slavery. Of course, I didn’t
say this to Mani, it would the same as him
blaming my uncle for being a clostet homey.
Once married, Orthodox
women aren’t allowed to show their hair in
public. They either wear a headscarf or a sheitel
- a ‘wig’. The most zealous among them
shave their heads, not to make their hubbies
jealous.
The men have sidecurls that
look like twisted strands of licorice (mmm …
I could munch on licorice for hours). Some let
their hair, mustache, sideburns and beards grow
very long, on account that they want to show who
is the man of the family, yet, they don’t go
around bragging that it is the women who work to
maintain the whole family, ain’t that
strange?
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