Twenty years ago I'm walking through Jakarta to the port. A man of indeterminable race approached me with a smile. His greeting was in Hebrew to which I responded in Yiddish thanks to my studies of the writer Isaac B Singer.
"Are you Jewish?" The portly 30ish man asked with anticipation.
"No, but I'm the shabbos goy." I had spent the previous year on 47th Street schlepping diamonds between the Azhkanazi and the Hasidim. A good sale bought a round-the-world ticket. I was coming from Bali and headed to Sumatra.
"Then you're the closest thing to a Jew in this city." Jakarta was 99% Muslim.
"I like pastrami and don't mix dairy with meat." The Javanese weren't too friendly to Christians and the imans reserved a special vitriol for non-believers like myself. "Some of my best friends are Jewish."
"And I'll be your newest." David Mussery introduced himself as a Syrian Jew running a nightclub called the Pink Panther. We were the same age. I had worked at nightclubs in New York and Europe. We had mutual friends on three continents. That night I danced to LOUIE LOUIE and the Youngbloods DARKNESS DARKNESS with lithe hostesses and scary drag queens. David and I debated the truth according to the Talmud and Clint Eastwood. we drank gin and tonics with goddesses. I called mine 'Mata hari' or the eye of god. Her kiss was a dream. She could have been Miss Indonesia 1991. At dawn he offered me a job with very little pay.
"A sheygutz like you could make a fortune."
"Money and I are distant cousins." I was counting on getting rich in my next life.
"I could teach you the ways of my tribe." David was lonely. I had lived in Hamburg during the winter of 1982. Everyone was a German, but me. I also knew loneliness, but I had a ticket for a ferry this morning. David accompanied to the port with his hostesses. They bid me Selamat Jalaan with their hearts. The ladyboys cried on cue. David asked me to call him, if I passed through town again and I did the following year. He was a good Jew and being a good Jew has nothing to do with Israel.
It's a state of mind.
Not a nation.
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