Creative Aging: What Happened to Fairfax?

15th in a series

I stopped at Canter’s the other day to buy Black-and-White cookies — a traditional Jewish bakery favorite — for my grandchildren. Inside Canter’s, nothing has changed since I’d been in high school, over 50 years ago. Same booths. Tables. Chairs. Floors. Display cases. All in the same configuration. Same aromas. But Fairfax, that block itself? It reminded me when I had been in Saint Petersburg, Russia, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was like a cake that had been left out in the rain for years to melt and corrode. I counted nearly 20 empty store fronts. Lots of trash and graffiti. What had been LA’s thriving Jewish center is now nearly abandoned of Jewish presence. It made me sad. 

In 1973—yeah, a long time ago, the year after I graduated college, right before the Yom Kippur War­—I worked in the Youth Department of the L.A. Jewish Federation. One of my jobs was to organize the citywide Yom Haatzmaut celebration. It had traditionally been at Rancho Park. But that year, we changed things up, recreating the event as a street festival. We closed down Fairfax Avenue between Oakwood and Rosewood, the same block that now reminded me of the Lamentations description from Tisha b’Av, lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem.  

We had pulled off that celebration on a dime. Someone donated a flatbed truck as the stage, which we placed across Fairfax at Oakwood, just beyond Canter’s. The decorations were homemade banners, Israeli flags and blue and white crepe paper.  We brought on local Israeli singers and dancers. We found camels somewhere out near Palm Springs and had them transported to Fairfax, giving people camel rides. We had a belly dancer who performed to an Arabic song, “Aina Zorga,” (“Blue Eyes”). I remember a Yiddish-speaking lady I knew from the neighborhood, Esther, who came up nearly hysterical, “Genucht. Enough.  Dus is a shande for the rebayim. This is an embarrassment for the rabbis.” 

But what made the festival most successful were the merchants on the street. Scores of them. Several weeks prior to the event, we sent a letter to all the store owners, asking each one for their participation, to decorate, keep their stores and restaurants open, to put out tables, to make money and not raise their prices. To make them feel included and needed, we translated the letter into Hebrew, Yiddish and Hungarian, the languages spoken in each of their establishments. We hand delivered them to Canter’s, Schwartz’s Kosher Bakery, the Budapest Restaurant, The Tel Aviv Cafe, Solomon’s Book Store, Hadarim Israeli Dance Studio, HaTaklit Records and others I now forget. We asked the newsstand to move all their Jewish newspapers — the B’nai Brith Messenger, The Federation News, the Yiddish Forwards, the Yiddish Morgan Tuk Journal, the Israeli Davar, Haaretz and Jerusalem Post — to where people could see them.

Hundreds of young people were excited about Israel in those days and got involved in the organizing effort. Thousands of people showed up, many of them dancing in the street. It was attended by synagogues, Jewish schools, Zionist youth groups and other organizations.  Between the merchants, the volunteers and performers it felt like a grassroots community celebration in an area we all considered home.

As the chief organizer, I remember urging the Federation leadership, who of course had to give speeches, not to use Yiddish words. I told them it would exclude the Sephardic Jews (many of them I knew from Fairfax High), and the Mizrachi Israelis who were there in droves. They had no idea what I was talking about. The first speaker greeted the crowd, “What do you think of such a freiliche (happy) event organized by all these kinder (kids)?”

Fifty years later, I carry my bag of Black-and-White cookies to the car, no longer hearing Jewish languages on the street. But as I walked, the memories, the echoes and the whispers of what once was, were all still there for me. 

Fifty years later, I carry my bag of Black-and-White cookies to the car, no longer hearing Jewish languages on the street. The neighborhood has changed. There are still a few Jewish spaces, but the old ones are now tennis shoe stores, T-shirt stores, high end electronic gadget stores, a hot chicken restaurant, a few pizza restaurants, among others. Fairfax is no longer the thriving hub of Jewish life in Los Angeles. But as I walked, the memories, the echoes and the whispers of what once was, were all still there for me.

Gary Wexler woke up one morning and found he had morphed into an old Jewish guy.