The perils of speaking at a Jewish event

Seriously, the below really happened.  Please feel free to comment!

I gave a talk to a Jewish audience earlier this year.

I had a decent audience (for me) of around 20-25.

The talk started late – about 5 or 10 minutes late.

This is completely normal for a Jewish audience, where the term “Jewish Mean Time” (as opposed to Greenwich Mean Time) has become a standing joke, and sometimes people just walk in whenever they like.

Around 5 – 10 minutes after I start talking, a bloke wanders in.

He doesn’t sit down.

No, he comes right up to me.

“Hello, hi”,  he says … “How’s your mother?”

[Now, I will simply not believe you, if you tell me that this could happen anywhere else except at a Jewish event.]

“Er… she’s been dead 24 years”

“Oh (pregnant pause) … How’s your father?”

At this point, I thought it was politic to apologise to my audience for the interruption.

Not a single person stirred, not a single person coughed, NOBODY said a word.

[This may be because, as many of you reading this might know,

there is a game – popular in Jewish circles, called the “Jewish geography game”,

whereby every Jew, wherever he or she is, anywhere in the world,

knows that if they meet another Jew,

they do not talk about the weather,

they do not talk about which pop groups they both like.

No. The first three questions they ask are :-

1) Where are you from?

2) How many Jews live there?

3) How old are you?

The next 5-10 minutes is then spent in an often fruitless discussion, consisting almost exclusively of the following two sentences :-

Do you know … (add a Jewish name that the other party has probably never heard of) ?

Followed by a pause then …

Do you know … (add a Jewish name that the other party has probably never heard of) ?

Of course, in the unlikely (but certainly not uncommon) event that the two parties do both know somebody in common, they may then spend 10 – 100 minutes swapping rather inappropriate second and third hand stories of long forgotten events – involving those who are not present.

These two people will then be friends for life, and if they do know one person, it’s very likely that they both know many more people and might spend much longer swopping stories. ]

Back to the prologue.

Our conversation continued, and the world stood still ..

“How’s your brother, er, what’s his name?”

“He’s fine.”

“How’s your sister, what’s her name?

“Her name’s …….. She’s fine.”

Said visitor takes his seat.

I continued with my talk.

Another 10 minutes passes.

I notice that my new friend has fallen asleep in the front row.  Happily, he does not snore.

A member of the audience asked a question.

I answered it at length, in detail.

Ten minutes later, my new friend wakes up, and asks EXACTLY the same question.

I answer it, briefly, to be polite.

He nods off again…

The talk concluded.

For fairness, I must add that he did have a decent excuse to come up to me.

Before my talk, I had recognised him from around 25 years ago.

He used to go out with my father’s, cousin’s, Iraqi-Jewish sister-in-law.

Confused? Of course you are.

I defy you to tell me that this could happen anywhere else in the world except at a Jewish event.

Background.

My father’s South African cousin made aliyah (went to live in Israel) around 50 years ago and married an Iraqi Jewish woman near Tel Aviv.  Her sister lives in London.

I hadn’t seen the guy (my ‘new/old’ friend, that is) in c.25 years.