Tickle My Kishkas, Humorous Jewish Stories

By Larry Lefkowitz

A book of 30 stories in various genres which appeals to anyone with a sense of humor, for adults.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Lefkowitz
• Release date: Aug 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201663735

Larry Lefkowitz

Lefkowitz has also published a book of Jewish stories "Enigmatic Tales" published by fomite press, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

Book preview

Tickle My Kishkas

Humorous Jewish Stories

Contents

The Customer is Always Right

A Golem for Me

In Fink's Bar

A Good Day for Nudnik Fish

Eating Spaghetti with the Mafia

A Cake for Mr. Buchalter

Infusion

Sensual Singularity

Miss Antithesis

In Victoria's Bath

The Giant Shrimps are Coming. For Me

Oh Bartalina!

The Nun and the Rabbi

A Minyan of One and a Third

Beinke Versus the Giant Carp

The Literary Agent

The Golem of Jerusalem

The Ukrainian Bride

Krim the Artist

Talk Show Appearances

One Step Ahead of the Competition

Play it Again, Woody

High Society

Looking Back

Introduction

A Minyan of Two

The Restaurant Michelin Missed

The Self-Made Literary Agent

Borrowing Tarantino

Lilith and the Purple Suspenders

The Customer is Always Right

He didn't come up to me and say, Hi, I'm from the future. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

The first time I saw him was when I entered Tova’s Nosherai for my regular morning coffee and bagel and cream cheese. He was sitting there – the guy from the future, although I didn't know that yet. His name, I was to learn, was Rayplaxthn. He said that Ray was acceptable to him, maybe because he tired of my trying to pronounce his name correctly, difficult if you don't lisp.  

I noticed he was sitting, but without food or drink on the table in front of him, which struck me as odd since Tova was leaning on the counter instead of preparing his order. I nodded and said hello to her. Instead of replying, she nodded toward the table where Ray sat and raised her eyes toward the ceiling. A meshugener, she was signaling me, the description hers, which I had heard on her lips on more than one occasion.

I passed Ray, and he nodded to me. (Later, I wondered if he had been imitating Tova, or whether he knew this custom on his own, possibly learned from, A Time-Traveler's Guide to the Past Universe or similar manual.) I nodded back and sat down. Tova brought my black coffee and bagel and cream cheese, without my need to order same. I am an old customer. Your black coffee and bagel and cream cheese, she said.   Immediately, Ray said, over loudly, A black coffee and a bagel and cream cheese, please in a kind of funny metallic-sounding voice. Was he imitating me, at a loss to know what to order?   He kept beaming at me between bites on the bagel (tentative at first) and sips of the coffee. Tova's headshaking and chuckle showed she had noticed it, too. Her mouth mouthed meshugener and I nodded. Ray promptly nodded, too. Surely Tova was wondering if the nutcase was going to be a daily chore (or amusement) for her.

That was the first day – of my meeting Ray – though I didn't know it then.

The next day Tova brought my coffee and bagel and cream cheese. Did a flicker of disappointment pass over Ray's moon face? I wasn't sure. Black coffee and a bagel and cream cheese, he said to Tova. I sipped my black coffee and ate my bagel and cream cheese and Ray sipped his black coffee and ate his bagel and cream cheese. As I left, Tova whispered, Tomorrow if the meshugener is here, order something else for a change – just this once to see if he orders the same.

I did. I ordered black coffee and a piece of cheese cake. Tova wrinkled her nose, whether in approbation or condemnation, I couldn't be sure.

Ray ordered a coffee and a piece of cheese cake. Tova brought them to him and winked at me.

What you could call a nodding relationship, since all this time not a word had passed between us.  

After two weeks of what had become almost a ritual of me ordering, and he ordering, various sweet accompaniments to my coffee (which Tova begged me to continue to do, she is easily amused—and also easily angered – and I preferred to be on the receiving end of the first alternative), Ray got up from his table (a departure from practice which caused me and Alice a momentary shock), walked over to mine, and asked, Is it permissible for yours truly to dwell with you?

And then he laid it on me, I have come from the future. No conspiratorial voice, no change from the rather humdrum tone he had so far used. During the ensuing silence, I thought, Yes, a mashugener. I looked over to see if Tova’s ever-honed ears had picked up on it. To my disappointment, she hadn't. She would probably have laughed out loud at it, with her hands-on-hips guffaw when she really let go, and told him, Your future is Starbucks – 30 blends of coffee and a dozen food varieties. 

I broke the silence. That's nice, I said in an even tone, wanting neither to encourage him nor offend him.

I. have traveled from Terra 2 – Earth, as your nomenclature it – from the future.

The coffee and bagel and cheese cake there inferior?

He blinked at this, digested it. You are drolling, ah, jesting, he decided finally.

Ok, I would play along.

The future, eh. How far in the future?

A millennium – in your counting. A thousand years.

And how are things there?

Better than here, he answered.

"So why are you here?"

You are the reason. Because your genome is vital to the future.

My genome – my gene structure?

Precisely. You have a rare combination of genes.

The next question on my part was inevitable. Will I have to travel to the future or will a sample (here I gulped against my will and my wish to demonstrate savoir faire) be sufficient?

Apparently, he grasped my angst. You won't have to travel, a 'sample', as you put it, will suffice.

I was relieved.

And my genome is important to the future?"

Very important.

How exactly?

You are the dinosaur that didn't become extinct.

Which is to say . . .?

That's all I can tell you.

How long I was under his like hypnosis I do not know. When I came out of it, he said, Goodbye – and thanks. The future will not forget you, and disappeared. To the future, I assumed

Tova, whose back was turned as she cleaned the coffee machine, turned back. Seeing Ray's absence, she asked, Where is the meshugener?

You wouldn't believe where, I said. She wouldn't. He won't be back tomorrow for a coffee and cream cheese. Or the day after.

That's a relief, Tova said, I was running out of taste treats.

A Golem for Me

Why did I build a golem?

Because a good (human) man is hard to find. Harder when you reach thirty-five.  I felt like I was in a movie written by Nora Ephron, though she never had to build a golem because she was married three times.

I started to research how to build a golem. I knew zilch about how to build a golem. Only how to meet them.

In some versions of the legend, the golem was made of mud, not clay. In Cynthia Ozick’s novel, a woman creates a female golem out of the dirt of her flowerpots. Because of my childhood trauma resulting from getting poison-ivy every summer, I avoided plants of any type. Clay was less messy to work with. Clay reminds me of Clay Epstein, a would-be suitor who lived up to his first name, and though he was, briefly, putty in my hands, he may have been the subconscious inspiration for my idea to build a golem. 

I took a Barbie male doll (one can hope) and a butter knife and Play-Doh and began to mold a clay imitation the size of a man. Ok, he didn’t look like the Barbie doll, closer to the Golem of Prague but still an improvement on my dates. I repeated some incantations, variations of Arise, Golem, and Come to me, baby, and the protective incantation You may be bigger, but I’m smarter.

To my amazement, the clay started to smoke (I stopped smoking, finally, two years ago) and to heat dull red (like my lipstick shade, Indigo Rouge.), then a brighter red (Blatant Cherry), then cooling, turned an orange color ("Tangerine Joy’), and then dulled to something close to skin color. Clay had become flesh. The man then sprouted hair and a nose, eyes, lips.

I was proud of myself. Love at first sight? Not at my age, but it/he definitely had possibilities. I planted a kiss on its cool lips. The chest of the golem started to heave slowly. Not with desire, with life. His lips parted and a deep sigh issued from him. The eyes opened, at first unseeing, then seeing. Me. He stared at me blankly. I seized the opportunity and pirouetted to give him the benefit of my still lithe (relatively speaking) form.

As he was naked, I decided to test him further. I became naked. The golem did not react. Nu, I said, taking his hand and putting it on my breast. He removed it as if it had touched a flame. I gave him another kiss, more French than the first one. His face took on a frightened look.

Miffed, I told him that I wasn’t proposing marriage.

His visage took on a puzzled expression. 

I was patient with him, a quality I had developed over the years on countless blind dates.  Slowly he came around and we reached a modus vivendi. But his face I hadn’t sculpted very well. In my ceramics class face-mugs were my weakness. My teacher complained that I was hopeless. I think he said that because I resisted his efforts to mold me. My golem’s face made me feel like the Bride of Frankenstein, like in the old movie. His personality turned out to be better than ninety percent of my dates, but I couldn’t look at him over my breakfast frozen yogurt without feeling I was about to vomit. Reluctantly, I had to destroy him, or it, since it’ wasn’t exactly a he yet. Actually, I didn’t have to destroy him, he destroyed himself when I began to sing to him, Killing Me Softly.

My second golem actually rejected me. He began to rain Yiddish curses on me when I refused to learn Yiddish. The shayna maidel (pretty girl) stage was over. He had the chutzpah to call me a golem. That did it. I finished him off by singing, Killing Me Softly, which caused him to collapse on the floor, writhing in torment briefly before he turned to ashes.

Third golem. Bingo! He looked like Brad Pitt on a bad day, but still better than my past dates on a good day. And he liked me from moment one. Called me Esther and began praising me with quotations from the Song of Songs. I knew he was the one. We were married. He amazed the rabbi with his knowledge of the wedding ceremony and even more with his breaking the glass with his foot into splinters. Samson, the rabbi beamed. He carried me over the threshold as if I was a feather, but when he wanted to honeymoon in Prague, I began to worry. 

In Fink's Bar

The last person I expected to meet in Fink's Bar was the messiah. But then I may have been the last person that he expected to find there. On the other hand, if he was the messiah, he probably knew I was there. True, the messiah is not God; nevertheless, he isn't your average man, either.

The reader will ask how did I know that he was the messiah? The simple truth is