“What synagogue do you go to?” This is not usually the first question out of the plumber’s mouth, but not everyone’s plumber is Yuri. “I don’t go.” I said, but he didn’t really care about that so much. “It’s not possible to go every Friday. It’s just too much, really.”
Yuri was on my porch because we have chronic sewer problems. He’s a short guy, mabye 5’6″, a little bit of David Sedaris about his looks, a lot of Andre Codrescu about his accent. He’s from Lithuania originally, but he lived in Israel for 8 years. While he was there, he lived in Nahariya, which was down the road from where I studied Hebrew while I lived on a kibbutz. I think Yuri and I were there at about the same time, actually, who knows, I might have sat next to him on the bus or stood behind him in line at the felafel stand.
“That mezzuzah was my grandmother’s,” I told him. It was the last thing we took from my gramma’s apartment after she died. My step-father pried it off the doorjamb and my mom put it in my hand, wrapped in Kleenex. “She was Ukrainian.”
Yuri said that when they lived in Israel, they went to synagogue all the time, a conservative congregtion. When they moved here to the US, they started going to a reform congregation. “My wife, she says, what is THIS?! Men and women sitting together! We are used to it now, but it seemed very strange at first.”
His daughter is 16 and she really wants to go to Israel but Yuri’s wife won’t hear of it, even though his mother is still living there. “Every time my daughter brings it up, my wife just refuse to talk about it,” he says, shaking his head. I’m sympathetic and think to myself that I’m really glad I was there when I was. This is hairsplitting though, while I was there we were always rushing off to some bomb shelter because rebels/terrorists were tossing rockets over the Lebanese border. I don’t even remember who was shooting at us anymore – was it the PLO? Anyway, I took Yuri’s wife’s side on the issue. Israel’s freaky dangerous. Send your kid to New Zealand, that’s what I say.
We finally get around to the sewer, but when he’s sitting in our landscaping wearing workgloves and running the snake through the pipe he looks up at me. “You have the same last name as my wife’s grandmother!” He smiles at me, big.
We have to have one more ridiculously expensive thing done to our sewer before we’re done with this round. I’m hoping they send Yuri back to the house. Not just because he’s a nice guy, but because Thursday, they day he’s talking about coming back, is Purim and I really want to give him a plate of hamentaschen to take home to his wife and daughter.