Free Are You Kosher? by Russell Andresen Page A

deal of shame to his mother. Like any other Jewish mom, she had dreamt of the day that she could brag about her “son, the doctor.” She sat shiva for weeks in the aftermath, as if he had died. I’ve told you how we all thought of him as a nudnik ; well, the matzo ball doesn’t fall too far from the ladel. Anyway, the Nephilim I mentioned earlier were still running amok. They were stealing food, taking brides, talking to trees, and having casual sex with camels. It was anarchy, I’m here to tell you. This is not how life was supposed to be in the post-Tsvi era. People, including Bubbe, were beginning to wonder if there was any hope for the world.
    One day, I was sitting at home shaving my legs—don’t judge me—when Bubbe came into the living room in a particularly bad mood, muttering to herself under her breath in Hebrew. It was never a good sign when she was speaking Hebrew; it meant she was really on about something. I was only hoping that she was not about to ruin my evening, because there was an Egyptian town not too far away, and contrary to popular belief, there were Jewish Egyptians, and they were good feasting. Also, and I hate to disappoint you Kwanzaa scholars, the Egyptians were not black. I should know; I was there.
    Bubbe went about her business, starting on some basic household chores, muttering the whole time. This was one of those occasions that I wished my mother was in the room so she could be the one to ask the all-important question, but she was busy sleeping off a bender. Are you picking up on the theme regarding my mother? After watching her rant to herself for almost an hour, I decided to just get it over with. Bubbe may have acted like she didn’t want to share what was going on, but the longer you took to ask her what was wrong, the more pissed she tended to get.
    I finally got up the nerve and went into the kitchen where she was busy kneading dough for challah bread. This was bad; she only makes challah for holidays or when the lava of Mount Zena is about to erupt.
    “So what’s wrong, Bubbe?” I asked.
    She kept muttering. “Bubbe, what happened?” I persisted.
    “He’s finally lost what was left of his mind.” She spit.
    “Who?” I asked, slightly agitated.
    “The crazy alter kocker up the road,” she said, as if that was supposed to explain everything.
    “You are going to have to be a little more specific, Bubbe. Half the valley is full of alter kockers,” I said.
    She looked at me as if I were the biggest moron on the planet and said, “Noah, you shmuck. Noah!”
    This did explain a little of what she was upset about. Noah had the reputation of being quite eccentric and often came up with these absolutely ridiculous theories. Like the time that he said if you stared into the horizon long enough, eventually you could see the back of your own head. I remember when he tested his theory. For almost three months, he sat on the highest hill he could find and just stared off into space. He never moved, not even to go to sleep, which he did in a seated position, or to go to the bathroom. He just sat there, pishing and shitting himself, occasionally yelling out, “Wait, I think I see something!” and then getting pissed because it was just a bird or a prairie rat. His poor wife and sons had to wait on him hand and foot. He took all his meals on that rock the entire time and did his drinking there, too. Noah was not just a drunk, but an abusive one.
    Anyway, Bubbe turned from her dough and said, “He’s going around telling everyone that G-d told him that the world was going to come to an end in some great flood and he was personally commissioned to build an ark that would safely carry only his family and two of every kind of animal on Earth.”
    I couldn’t help but chuckle; this was original, even for him. “Did he really say that?” I asked.
    “No, I’m making it up!” she shouted, throwing flour on the board.
    “Well, what do you care what he says?” I asked, trying