Rosh Hashanah with a Different Accent

It’s still Rosh Hashanah, same prayers, different accent. 

Some of the differences drive the kids from their comfort zone:  Different friends to sit with, different pre- and post- synagogue meals, even the complaints about going to services are different.

We tested out two synagogues, one on each day.  One was considered reform and the other traditional.  While the reform service had a choir and organ, it was completely in Hebrew.  The Rabbi, a Member of Parliament, used the binding of Isaac as a launching point for her sermon on child abuse in the UK. 

The “egalitarian” traditional service had separate seating for men and women?

While the service is primarily the same, it is much more one sided, not terribly participatory, a lot of the Cantor chanting alone.  And when the congregation was asked to participate the tunes were all different.  I mean, completely different, not even Adon Olam.  I must admit, I longed for home.

And then the oddest turn came in the middle of the ceremony.  During the Rosh Hashanah service there is a lot of discussion of our King.  But when they say King, they mean, King.  Not the G-d from above, but the guy in Buckingham Palace.  So one prayer book, which was from the 1930s, had a prayer for King George and Princess Elizabeth, while the more recent edition asks for the safety of Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales.

A whole new spin on Avinu Malkenu (Our Father, Our King).

Dis-Connected

Author Ed Hallowell spoke at the American School last night on the "Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness"

His first point is what he calls the unexamined assumption that the closer you get to being number one, the happier you are.

What struck me was his central finding that “connectedness” is the key. 

Positive connection drives the best environment for kids

He said to create memories of connectedness.  Friendships really matter, make time for them and model them for your kids

Connect to school, how do they feel when they walk in the front door?

That’s all well and good, but what do you do if you take your well-adjusted connected kids from their safe/loving/protected environment, rip them from their core and bring them to London where they are completely and utterly disconnected.

First he said the opposite of connection is indifference, not disconnection.  But second he said the kids need to get connected, to something, and at first they will connect, or reconnect as it were, to the family.

That must be what my son felt when he said, “Haven’t we had enough of family time?”

Answer:  No

Golders Green

Took a bus ride up to Golders Green,  it is the same Jewish neighborhood I saw in Oak Park Michigan or Wheaton/Silver Spring Maryland.  It’s the place with the Kosher butcher and the bakery with the Pareve and "the buttery" side of the store.  There is the Falafel house and the other Kosher restaurants with the distinctive word (כָּשֵׁר) plastered on the door. 

These towns are recognizable regardless of city or country.  There is an energy, a hustle to them especially in preparation for a big holiday.

There is of course the bookstore with the prayer books to the left, the Tallit, yarmulke and other Jewish paraphernalia in the middle and the good stuff to the right.  Just like your grandmother’s house the silver is off in a separate room where children playing is frowned upon.

On a Sunday afternoon it’s bustling with black hats and tsit tsits blowing in the wind.  Everyone running, the high holidays are coming, a mix of Hebrew, British and Scottish accents fill the main street.

At Solly’s Restaurant I experience the exorbitant prices (since when do you get a Falafel sandwich with everything sold separately?  Do I want pita?  Hummus? So what exactly do I get for my 13 pounds?)

And the service I will simply call, rude Israeli.

But it was delicious and the atmosphere was pure Middle East.  On the telly there was a constant loop of Israel-UN-Iran- Palestinian Statehood.  And while the discussion at most tables was animated, amid all the chaos “back home” in Israel, you wonder how the inter-country animosity lasts all these years.  Because on the ground here is what I heard:  A grandfather who was grateful to have Sunday brunch with his family, although the chicken soup wasn’t hot enough; a man from Glasgow who needs a new prayer-book for his adult son; a 15 year old boy who grew out of his Bar Mitzvah tallis and needs, as his mother says, “A tallis that will stick to his bony shoulders.”

Looking for Work-Life Balance? Move to GMT

How do you improve the main challenge of middle age:  Work/Life balance? 

The Answer:  Move to London.

The cliché of the American who moves to London, in my mind, was the hard driving finance guy who moves here on his way up the ladder.  On the ground I see a very different picture of the American family experiencing a far bar better balance.

Every 40-50 year old male I know is trying to balance his work life-- so he works hard enough, makes enough money and does enough things to satisfy his inner man -- with his family life -- so he can be a good father, have dinner with the kids and make his wife happy.  And moving to London solves this?

I am not a morning person.  I do not get up at 5:00, workout until 7:00 have breakfast with the kids so I can be at my desk by 8:00.  I am also not the guy who is in his office at 7:00 in the morning so I can get a jump on the West Coast and try to catch up with Europe and Asia.

But living in London I can be that guy, without the sleep deprivation.

First of all, much of our work is still US focused, so our afternoons are much more meeting filled than our mornings.  So we can get up, go to the gym, see the kiddies off to school and still get into the office 5 hours before our US counterparts.

However, the real surprise comes in the evening.  Instead of staying at the office until 10 PM, when it’s closing time in the US, almost all the men in my unscientific study find they tell their teams in the US they will be offline for a couple hours, they leave the office at 5:30, even with a stop at the pub they’re home early enough for dinner with the family and nighttime activities.  Then they get online at 10 for another hour and complete the day with the US.

The time difference affords me, and most of the families we've met a far better work-life balance than we could have ever found in the States.

Pub Culture (Part 1)

I love the Pub and the culture around it and have made it my life’s work to de-construct it (not really). 

The Pub is a bigger part of British life than the Queen, St. Paul’s and Piccadilly.  While pubs are declining due to the smoking ban and the cost of alcohol, it’s cheaper at a package store, they are still visited by more than a third of the population at least once a week (those numbers seem low from my observation)

Here are some tips:

When you enter a pub you can take a table and wait as long as you like for service, but it will NEVER happen (I’m not saying this happened to me, but most Brits make a sport of watching the tourists wait for service). 

You go to the bar and get the Publican’s attention.  But never by speaking.  A raised cup, an eyebrow, a non-flirtatious wink is all you need.  Once you have their attention you order quickly and pay.  Please don’t stand there and ask, “Hey what do you have on Tap?” "What's a lager?" "Can I have a taste of the Guinness?" "Why isnt the beer colder?"

The regulars are exempt from these rules, they come in and can make comments like “Ow about a drink this millennium?”  A newcomer is strongly advised NOT to follow this lead.

Once you have your drink and pay you do not tip, that is very bad form and insults those serving the drinks.  You can however offer to buy them a drink with a phrase like, “And one for yourself?”  This is not an attempt in any way to hit on the Publican or server, instead it is simply offering a roundabout way of tipping.  You know they have accepted your invitation because they add it to your tab.

If they do not want the drink they can accept the money, put it aside and when they do take the drink they will point their pint in your direction and say "Cheers." 

Quite the complicated dance for a pint.

Forgetting to Take Notice

Rushing home on the Tube, it’s Thursday night and running late.  I look up from the Evening Standard and realize we’re only one stop away from home, St John’s Wood.  And then it occurs to me I barely noticed the day. 

I ate lunch at my desk not at some market tucked in a city corner.  I didn’t watch London from my office window with my coffee.  I didn’t appreciate the break in the rain.  I didn’t notice the sun setting over St Paul’s or the crush of people crossing London Bridge. 

It was just a day. 

Living here I feel like one of those terminal patients with a year to live.  The ones who talk about  every day being one less than they had the day before.  Every day is a gift, all the dying clichés. 

But I expect every day here to be special.  And the city doesn’t disappoint.  As long as I take notice.

Quiet Amid the Noise

The city is noisy.  The first few nights we wondered if we’d ever get to sleep.  Would we get used to the city life, the noise, the car alarms, screeching tires, fire engines, drunk kids walking home.  But if you listen closely there are also Church Bells, the clack of heels on wet pavement and birds. 

But with the noise all around us I actually have more thinking time.  Back at home the television was always on, in the car there's the radio, the phone, the distractions.  Morning television here is terrible, I talk with my family, walk them to school, plan the day together because without a car everything needs to be mapped out.  The rumble of the tube, quiet in the morning, loud chatter in the evening.  And then the walks to and from the tube and to work with just me and my head.

I’m finding more quiet in the noise of the city.

"You Can't Get Away From Yourself..."

In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises Jake says: 

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

You learn that after the anticipation of moving and then arriving and wondering what will be different, some things just aren't:  Will my stomach hurt less?  Is it really my back that hurts or just the mattress at home, “well, we’ll see when we move to London.”

But the truth is, no matter where you go it all travels with you, the same Michigas and the same problems.  It's the back, it's the stomach.

You escape from the hustle of home, but soon any perceived tranquility is broken by the creation of the new life and then after living here a month you find yourself rushing home from work on a Friday for a dinner party, and the kids have to be picked up from play dates because the son has soccer in the morning and a daughter has a play date and there’s a new art class in Hampstead and we don’t know how to get there by bus.

Then the afternoon is full and you have to pick up the son from tennis and take a cab home because it’s late and you have Wicked tickets and traffic.  But after the show you have to get home because there’s more soccer on Sunday and Hebrew school and a museum tour and then you want to get to Camden Market before you go to meet friends for dinner and watch the end of the Chelsea/Man U game, but American football is starting and there’s Sunday night swim.

Side Bar (One of the nice things about dinner parties here is that Blackberrys are welcome.  I left a party for 30 minutes on Friday night to take a call outside and three other men were out there.  Everyone is from somewhere else, everyone has business back in the states, everyone understands.)

And when you finally get into bed Sunday night and you reflect on the weekend realizing it was different.  Amid all the chaos there was the walk home late Friday night with daughter number 1, and the Jewish Museum tour where she got a chance to show you what she knows.  There was the chance to watch football with your son, back at home he would have been out.  And the piggyback rides with daughter number two as you explored (and got lost) walking through Hampstead Heath.

Individually we may be the same but our family’s life is different, richer.

It Would be Different in America

What are some of the differences? 

They charge you less if you take away than if you stay in.  So my coffee at Café Nero is 25p less if I get it to go.  In the US, everyone would buy it to go and stay in.

They Queue for everything.  And if you get in on the wrong side of a Queue no one says anything, nobody yells at you.  They look at you and hope the staring will set you straight.  In America we are impervious to dark stares, we wouldn’t move if it gets us what we want, faster.

And finally, when there is traffic or merging of lanes, it is civilized beyond recognition.  No one makes the maneuver of trying to get to the head of the line and sneaking in.

One would think with all this politeness an aggressive American could make a lot of progress in this country, along with a lot of enemies.  But instead we’re cowed in by the politeness and we don’t want to offend.

A birthday, at home and abroad

I always felt bad for the kids who had birthdays in July.  Nobody was around.  Maybe they were at camp, but it wasn’t the same.  It wasn’t getting up early, having your favorite breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It wasn’t a birthday party with your friends and your presents and your cake.

It’s made even tougher when you have a birthday in a new school, new city and new country.  Your parents are still there, but so are your sisters and there’s the Facebook notes, but most of the birthday wishes come much later in the day, when everyone gets home from school and logs on, and you’re getting ready for bed.

It can’t be the same.  At home we have traditions, there’s Beni-Hana.

So we do our best, Mommy let’s them have cupcakes for breakfast, but in the new house we can’t find any candles.  There are presents, but we expect fewer people at school know it’s his birthday.

But then everything is new for this birthday and sometimes new is better.  There are still presents and the big singing wake up.  And for some reason all the kids at school know it’s your birthday because Facebook told them.  And then we take an hour tube ride to Fulham Broadway to go see our new home football team play, Chelsea.  And instead of traffic to FedEx Field we laugh at the people trying to pile into an overcrowded/heated train.

And the stadium is like Fenway or Wrigley, right in the middle of a neighborhood.  And instead of Beni-Hana we have burgers and fries as we walk with the throngs to our seats.  And our team scores and we jump up and can feel the stadium ride and shudder with glee.  And after the win we run to the store and buy jerseys and scarves and balls and mugs.  We have a team.

And at the end of the night we tell Mommy all about our experiences, the stadium, the crazy German opponents with their flags and their chants, the tube ride, the store, the food, the pitch.  And he tells us what a great day it was as he gets into bed with his 300 Facebook messages.

Parents always lament how much older the kids are getting.  But we have done this since he was 6 months old (I can’t believe how big he’s getting, I can’t believe he’s walking, I can’t believe he’s in grade school, middle school, high school).

And he soldiers on with a big smile, because no matter what, when you see your birth date on the calendar, or in the paper or you write it at the top of a pop quiz, you know, in your heart, that it’s still your day.

Rude Britannia? Not Here

The main London attraction for me is not the pubs or the tube or the Abbey, but the people.  There is something about their charm, wit, the language they use, the appreciation of good humor (not mine).   When I lived here 24 years ago I was a college mutt, so the charm I remember was nothing more than the young Pizza Hut waitress who served me my first legal beer.  

So I took notice of the John F. Burns piece in the New York Times entitled “Rude Britannia” lamenting the “eroded sensibilities and courtesies, the coarsening of life in the public sphere and the rough-tongued disdain that seemed to have seeped into our streets… and the abandonment of standards that touched even great national institutions like Parliament and Scotland Yard.”

Burns spent most of his adult life in the US before recently moving back to the UK.

He goes on to discuss the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal as he sidles up to Labour leader Ed Miliband who suggests the scandal is a “symptom of a wholesale corruption of values in Britain’s public and private life.”

Burns’ list of lamentations includes policemen behaving badly, high salaries for soccer players, coarse language on the BBC, and a “beer culture” that has made public drunkenness a scourge.

With this article in my back pocket I arrived in London just days after the riots and I just don’t see it.  Like the great television shows that criss cross the Atlantic, these social maladies that he sees as so dire are like re-runs of the Office.  Not as good as the original.  The things that trouble him have been in the US for years and here in London they seem less so, less dangerous, less rude, less coarse, less bad.

The people of London that I  encounter, whether at the Pub, the Post Office, the Marks & Spencer, the barber, the Pret, the Costa Coffee, the Tube, the ticket booth, the guitar player in the Tube, the security guard, the cabbie.  They are as I remember.  The charm is there, but it’s bolstered by a sincere interest in trying to help.  They apologize for their slow technology, long delays and broken pieces, but the personal side is anything but broken.  It’s their best export. 

I Saw Them Queue for Rabbit Stew

Lunch is my big meal of the day during the week.  In Rockville I had such well known establishments as the Cheesecake Factory, Timpanos and PF Changs to choose from.  London has introduced me to a city-wide feast of lunching opportunities, and I have vowed to explore as much as possible every non-rainy day.

Last week I dined with a group at “the city’s best fish and chips place,” the locals rave.  Also a well known fact about the Happy Days fish and chippery, is it's the place where Jack the Ripper dropped his final victim.  It’s in the Eastern part of the city, a little more ethnic, in the literal and figurative shadow of the larger financial buildings.  They never caught the Ripper, in fact they question whether he existed or not and credit the string of WhiteChapel killings as a media-perpetrated event.

Today was Borough Market, a mad house of soups and ethnic dishes, fish and venison and yes rabbit.  Although I have seen the Brits now Queue up for everything whether the Post Office or the bus, today  indeed I did see them Queue for rabbit stew.  And while this sounds like the start of a demented Dr Seuss poem, they lined up for this and other delicacies.  This caught my eye because the dead rabbits were hung next to the food and people were taking photos as if they hunted them down themselves.

I had Syrian Falafel, Israeli salad with the Monmouth Coffee, the stuff that really drew me to the place.  All of this takes place just under the London Bridge, the oldest bridge connecting both parts of London and that sits just outside our office window.

The Bill of the Week?

After back to school night we spent an hour at a local pub with two other couples.  Three burgers, a salad and a piece of fish, 5 beers and 5 glasses of wine later we paid our £80 tab and were gone. 

We're a bunch of pikers.

An column in the City AM newspaper displays a photo copy of an extra-ordinary bar tab and then a description of what they bought.  They never disclose whose bill it is, but they do describe the restaurant, so I assume they are the ones who rat out the corporate account abusers.  An example:

THE CHAMPAGNE lounge at Kensington members club Amika is described as “the home of extravagance and indulgence”. And no-one reading this week’s bill would argue with that, because if two jeroboams of Cristal at £5,500 apiece don’t justify the description, then nothing will. Also making an appearance over the four international financiers’ £15,900 Saturday night out were a £1,840 bottle of Grey Goose vodka and a £940 bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label King George V – a blend of spirits produced only from distilleries that operated during the reign of the House of Windsor’s first monarch.

So The Capitalist is sure the eight Cokes on the bill were for refreshment and not for pouring into the “exquisite” whisky, made from malts so rare some of them no longer exist. After all, the club that styles itself as “the bedrock of elegance and sophistication” would expect nothing less.

THE ANTHOLOGIST, the Drake & Morgan-owned sister establishment to The Drift in the Heron Tower and The Parlour in Canary Wharf, is known for its mixology. So when six stockbrokers descended on the Gresham Street restaurant and bar, it was cocktails all round – from a Cream Tea Martini containing double-strength Earl Grey tea syrup to a Grapefruit Old Fashioned made with bloom gin and rhubarb bitters.

The extremely liquid lunch – accompanied by three courses of food as an afterthought – continued with two bottles of Dom Perignon champagne, six bottles of red and white wine from the restaurant’s cellar and then port, whisky, Kahlua, pudding shots and Baileys. At the final reckoning, the lengthy list of largely alcoholic refreshments came to a hazy £1,239.

Identity

In the middle of reading Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior, a recommended read from a teacher at school.  In it a British anthropologist studies her country, from the incessant discussion of the weather, their insistence on Queue-ing up for everything-- until a few years ago there was a law requiring you to Queue for the bus-- and the class distinctions that divide not just England, but all of Britain.

Michael Lewis’ latest is an article on German Banking in Vanity Fair. The article discusses a number of issues including German Holocaust guilt (“If some Martian landed on the streets of Berlin knowing nothing of its history, he might wonder:  who are these people called ‘the Jews’ and how did they come to run this place?  But there are no Jews in Germany, or not many.”), and their obsession with potty humor and phrases.  When he tries to characterize the Germans his well versed driver (and speaker of 7 languages) says there is no such thing as German national character, how can you generalize about 80 million people?

In Jews in a Whisper, a column by Roger Cohen in the New York Times he quotes a Philip Roth protagonist who says that in England the word Jew is mentioned with a little drop of the voice.  This prompted a memory from Cohen who as a child sat in his home (right near where we live in St John’s Wood) and asked his mother why she whispers the word “Jew,” which she denies.  “But she was — in that subliminal, awkward, half-apologetic way of many English Jews. My parents were South African immigrants. Their priority was assimilation.  They were not about to change their name but nor were they about to rock the boat.”

 And then after a long absence and return to London Cohen encountered a man who said, “Oh, you’ve got a JewBerry.” Huh? “Yeah, a JewBerry.” I asked him what he meant. “Well,” he shrugged, “BBM — BlackBerry Messenger.” I still didn’t get it. “You know, it’s free!”

“Jewish identity is an intricate subject and quest,” he says, questioning himself and others.

This all comes together for me as a Jew living in London at a business meeting in Munich.

City Living

In Modern Family Phil Dunphy calls his car, “The Cone of Trust,” which allows his children to tell him they don’t want to go to family camp anymore.  I find that having no car opens the kids up far more.

Maybe this isn’t a London thing but simply a city living thing that I’m experiencing after being cooped up in the suburbs.  Walking your child to school is a treat.  Why is a meaningful conversation more likely to happen walking side by side in the morning as opposed to sitting in a car trying to maneuver down River Road?  Is it because we are walking and not sitting, is it the lack of headphones, is it because it’s raining and we’re huddled together under an umbrella? 

We leave dinner and spend the 20 minute walk home playing a game with the sidewalk squares.

We ride the tube and the kids play games with the maps, the seats, the sleeping passengers’ faces.

We discuss what to do if someone gets separated from the rest of us on public transport.  An hour later we lost mommy at Leicester Square.

Experiences

"Never regret," Eleanor Hibbert said. "If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."

When you leave home you assume a new life, but not a new identity.  The truth is you don’t leave everything behind.  There are still Soccer tryouts.  There are friends to be made, un-friendly girls to overcome, bunk-mates to find for a week-long camping trip with your new sixth grade class. 

There are first dates with new friends, because everyone is new, even for Mom and Dad.  There is the barber shop down the street where you go because you figure it can’t be that bad and then you stand in front of the mirror like a 14 year-old wondering how long it will be before your hair grows even on both sides.  There is cold rain down your neck as you lug school supplies back home from the High Street and everyone clamors for a car. 

I tell the kids these are experiences.  This is life after all.

It's a Cultural Thing

“It’s a cultural thing,” I hear from my counterparts in the UK.  Whether it’s how we speak or when we speak.  How we respond, eat, drink, all the sense are covered.   While there is much broken here, as everywhere, the Brits have advanced the art of communicating well beyond Americans. 

One thing I’m seeing first hand and didn’t realize until I was here is that American business people don’t pick up their phones.  “You have a culture of voicemail,” the Brits tell me.  “Our contact rates in Europe are much higher.”

Every call I make in the UK, whether I reach the right person or not, someone picks up the phone, they are pleasant and attempt to be helpful.  Here in Europe they have far more vacation days and they view August as one big holiday, but when they work, they work really well. 

It is the infrastructure that more often fails them than the person.  So getting our office phone system, hooked up has been a process of colossal delay, months of wait, and once installed the pipes don’t work.

Recently a package from the US was caught up in customs and I had to call the local DHL office to find out where it was.  I call a number, a woman answers, she says she remembers my name from the paperwork.  She tells me what to do and then to call back a few days later and make sure it cleared.  I do what she asks and two days later I call the number on the envelope and again she picks up the phone and tells me they received my email and she will check on the status of my package.

“I’d love to help,” she says, “but my computer isn’t working at the moment.  Can you call back again, I’ll be here.”http://expat-blog.com/

Sunny Day

And today all the children got up and off to school, walking the older ones to school is turning into quite an education, although I’ve been relegated to standing at some distance as we approach school grounds.

The new house is still a little confusing, the light switches, the alarms, the various keys.  This morning I stood for minutes in a hallway looking for the light switch, I could swear it seemed brighter than usual, one of the kids must have left the light on.  And then I noticed it wasn’t my son, but in fact THE sun was shining in.  I hadn’t seen the Sun in the morning yet.

Getting jostled on the Tube and walking with the throngs across the bridge during rush hour, I do feel a connection to this new home.  But anyone paying attention could see I am still a stranger.  Maybe it’s the way my eyes linger at the Tube map a little too long, or that I am the only one carrying an umbrella on a sunny day.