“Gods damn it, Rita, the membership is just too high. I’m not ten thousand dollars Jewish. Hell, I’m barely five hundred dollars Jewish!”
Daniel Pearlstein sat as he always did, slumped back like a sloth at the kitchen table, wringing his hands in a neurotic ritual that should have torn his skin off by now. The glow of incandescent light always shone on his bald head, the few remaining hairs of his curly combover dancing like silver tinsel. Beads of sweat congregating on his face, a nervous leg bouncing on the floor like a broken blender, and the moans and groans of t*****e were like stress-induced performance art.
All this stress was for his daughter Caroline. Soon, Caroline would be bat mitzvah—a Jewish woman with all the rights and obligations of an adult, whatever those are. But unti
