Stumped

Note: this is a post from The Blog That Is No More, reposted here for your reading pleasure. I know, I know, the magnamity...


There is a takeout restaurant near where we live that has famously great kosher hamburgers. I like it there, for many reasons, principal among them: a) it's cheap, b) they're nice and love Barak there, and c) they have a quarter machine, so I can go there pretending I'm on a mission to get quarters for laundry and then happen to get fries as well.I went there yesterday with Barak, on a quarter run, and saw something that just confused me utterly, and my husband too when I told him later.

Well, before I launch into the story, I need to backtrack and give a little background. Orthodox Jewish men, to the uninitiated, dress something like Amish men. Black pants, black jacket, white shirt, black hat, often no tie, usually a beard. It's easy to spot the Amish guys, though, because they don't wear moustaches, never wear ties, wear suspenders instead of belts and don't wear buttons on their jackets. Amish women are very easy to spot, since their dresses are homemade and quite distinctive, whereas Orthodox Jewish women often blend right in (although we frequently look insane for wearing long sleeves, long skirts, and stockings in August.) So, there's your background.

When we walked into the restaurant, thoughts of burgers on our (okay, my) mind, I saw a family that on first glance I assumed were Amish or another brand of Mennonite, because I saw the mother and daughters in very Amish-looking dresses. Then I looked again, and saw boys wearing black kippot--now, that's not Amish at all. I ordered my food, and sat nearby because I was just way too curious not to. And got even more befuddled. The girls and mother had dresses that were hard-core Amish, to the extent that they were fastened in the back with a straight pin, not a button. But the mother's head was covered with a headscarf, not a white Mennonite-style prayer cap, and the daughter's head not covered at all (which would argue for Jewish, since Jewish girls don't cover their hair, at least not in this century). But (again but) although the mother's headscarf covered all her hair (=Jewish), it was not tied in a way that I would consider normative in this community (=probably not Jewish, but not necessarily). On balance, they looked not Jewish. Now, to the boys. Suspenders on all of them. White shirts. And yet those kippot! And the father had buttons on his jacket--definitely not Amish. Add to this that I distinctly heard the father address the mother as "Imma," twice. That's Hebrew. And just when I had finally decided that they were just some unique Hebraically-oriented but not actually Jewish religion they'd come up with all their own and they were the only practitioners of, I clearly heard them switch into a Germanic dialect--but didn't catch enough to know if it was old/high German or Yiddish. Now, you don't normally make your own religion and then learn a new language to go with it, though who am I to say, really. They'd clearly gone to a lot of effort making their own clothes. (Which, I might add, were lovely. I like Mennonite dresses, and these were particularly neatly made.)

I briefly wondered if they were Hutterites, or Hutterian Brethren, but that wouldn't help with any of the Jewish markers, and the girls' clothes weren't Hutterite either (I know a lot about Hutterites--long story.)

In short, I was and remain confounded. And hoist by my own polite petard, because even when the father actually struck up a conversation with Barak, and made every sign to be friendly, and we chatted a bit about the fat and calorie content of what we were all eating, I simply could not muster up the rudeness to ask, "Excuse me, this is killing me, I must know. Are you Jewish or what?" I did not see them say a Hebrew grace after meals, but they might have done it when I wasn't looking, or they might not have eaten bread (which allows for a shorter blessing).

Gah. Now I will never ever know. Unless I go back and get a hamburger tomorrow and just wait for them to show up again. Which is another excellent reason to go and get a hamburger.