ABSTRACT
Sitting across the aisle from me on my Pan Am flight to France en route to Israel had been an elderly man wearing a prayer shawl underneath his black vest, a kippah over his nest of white hair, and then a black hat. He waved the stewardess on when she offered him headphones and the tray holding his preordered, supremely kosher meal that was certified fit by the pickiest of rabbis. His wife, a gray-green wig perched on her head, called the stewardess back: “Give me the tray, sweetheart. Later he’ll eat.” The entire flight, except for when he went over to the curtain separating first class from economy and leaned into it to pray as though it were the Western Wall, he held a minuscule Talmud inches from his eyes and studied it through a magnifying glass. While he absorbed himself in the sayings of the wise, I passed the time leafing through airline copies of the magazine Working Woman, and while the girls slept, I began the Amanda Cross mystery in my satchel. I blended right in with most other passengers on this flight, cosmopolitan-looking 133gentiles and secular Jews who carried Wash n’ Dries, who freshened up their hairdos from time to time, who obeyed the pilot when he said to sit down, who saw a flight as a few hours of life that didn’t count. If this plane were to tumble onto an island and I were to spend the rest of my days with this group, I trusted I would have enough in common with them to live harmoniously.
