He wasn’t hard to spot. He was a couple inches taller than me, with dark curly hair and brown eyes. What distinguished him was his clothing: a white shirt, necktie and dark pants. “Crap”, I thought, “don’t tell me he’s a Mormon.” Indeed not; Churchill was wearing the black velvet skullcap of an Orthodox Jew.
As soon as we were done going over the experiment, I told him I bet I knew why he was dressed up. “Feast of Tabernacles, right?” He seemed astonished but admitted it was so, that it was an intermediate day where he could do schoolwork, but wanted to dress as if it were as a full holiday. “Then why aren’t you dwelling in a booth?” He explained he only needed to eat in one. But how did I know all this about the holiday of Succos? I dug under my collar and pulled out the gold cross.
That provided the excuse for a longer personal chat. He said that his friends called him “Yossi”, a diminutive of his Hebrew name Yosef. My own nickname was “Lexie”, which came in handy when Amazon named a zombie robot by my real name. As for his last name, “you’re probably too polite to ask, but I’ll tell you. My grandparents were named Münsterberg, and when they came to this country they anglicized it to Churchill. They didn’t want their children to be called “Monsterburger” in school. So no, we’re not Winston Churchill’s long lost cousins.”
I told him I had a Chinese name but never used it. I was third-generation American and barely spoke enough Cantonese to avoid being cheated at a restaurant. I couldn’t read at all. My older sister and brother were raised in Queens and went to a Chinese post-school program, but no such thing existed in the wilds of suburban New Jersey. My family had been Christian since the 1850s or thereabouts.
“So if you don’t mind me asking, why do you hide that cross under your clothes?”
“Aha! Why do you hide your fringes under yours?”
Yossi pulled the side of his shirt up a bit and fished out a couple of his tsitsis. “There, you happy now? First of all it’s always been the custom of German Jews not to wear them outside clothing. Second of all, I tried wearing them out once and they got torn and dirty. But surely Christian symbols aren’t meant to be concealed, at least not since the time of Diocletian.”
“I never thought about it. I guess I figured it was out of place once I came to Columbia. But you’re right—I shouldn’t be embarrassed. Thanks for pointing it out. I wonder what else I’ve quietly concealed since I came here.” German Jews: that explained the formal dress and good manners.
Our friendship warmed and deepened as the semester went on. Yossi explained that he lived off-campus because that was the only way his parents would agree for him to attend Columbia. His parents had retired to Israel, so he inherited their rent-stabilized apartment around 70 blocks further uptown, in Washington Heights. I was already enough of a New Yorker to be consumed with envy. Yossi said he agreed completely with them. “I don’t trust myself to live in a dorm. There’s a limit to how much faith you should have in your own self-control. I’m pretty good in that regard, but what would I do when everyone around me is drinking and doing … other things? But I didn’t mean to insult your own choices, Lexie. You don’t seem to have suffered, but I imagine it’s easier for girls.”