Hooray for the hasidic retards
There’s a whole lot of hardcore frummers near me, and I love the various types. There’s the old men in the hip cycling shorts, paired with high white socks, open zips and a can of contraband Coke. There’s the terrified kids, riding their vast bikes (loaded up with improbable collections of groceries) swiftly past the gangs of Hackney youth that scream at them, although their fear reaches its unrivalled peak with the sight of any kind of dog. There’s the ginger chain-smokers that hang around the bakeries or just wander all night in a sleepless reverie, considering the changes to the local tree branches.
But my favourite are the Hasidic retards. The strangely-shaped women with the perma-grins. The ones who can barely see, are doused in acne and facial hair, and have teeth down to their chins, pottering along the N16 byways powered only by the drummed-in law of the secret stiebels. Perhaps they’re a legacy of a community where in all probability, you end up marrying your Mother, but I don’t care how they come into the world. I just love to listen in to their chats on the street, on the buses (always bottom-deck of course) and down the tiny aisles of the dour supermarkets. The talk is obsessive but also fatalistic, the refuge in tiny details of the Jewish year being their salvation. What’s your favourite item of crockery? Who’s got my wig? Will you wear your contact lenses for the yearly Sunday trip to Ikea? And the classic family dinner conversations – except, are they even fertile? Is it not really dangerous to them?
The rhythm of their chat is a staccato moan, their eyes flitting to the beat, keeping their thoughts unfettered by the outside world, like other bus passengers and other creeds. What do these people dream of? And how did they reach this state of bliss? If the stereotype of ennui on the TV really is still the 50s suburban housewife, I think they need to get wise. The Hasid retards are always women (the male Hasid with learning difficulties isn’t noticeably Jewish in his problems), and they appear to be sold into the bond of marriage to men with beards at an early age. And from that moment, the dirty hair comes off, and they only talk to each other. But that’s where their problems are erased, and the curtain of routine comes to save them.
They come in all (weird) shapes and sizes, but they’re never old. Perhaps they have a sudden realisation at 40, like most of us have at 12 or 13, that this whole Jewish malarkey isn’t a smooth circle, but is instead a jagged complicated and lovely complication. But it must blow their minds to realise that. Those further 40 years of well-fed cycle suddenly look a lot less attractive, and the Pandora’s Box of Jewish contradiction is open. I like to imagine that their eyes finally go blind, their teeth eat their faces and the craters of their acne fill with flowers and branches as they turn into the precise roadside trees that their menfolk so love to contemplate and ride by. In a world of discipline and uniformity, they’re the primal scream of the freakish and the uncategorisable. And we should embrace them because they are, and could only be, pure-breed Jewish women.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Have a look at any film by Harmony Korine, the heroic Jewish American filmmaker, especially Gummo. See those stammering, misty characters he specialises in? Blatantly based on Hasidic retards. Check them out and love them.
