Checking out the flip side

Shashi Ishai, 60, from New Jersey to Netanya, 2009

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
Shashi Ishai (photo credit: COURTESY THE ISHAI FAMILY)
Shashi Ishai
(photo credit: COURTESY THE ISHAI FAMILY)
As a newcomer in Netanya in 2009, Shashi Ishai mistakenly deposited a bag with her wig in a public trash receptacle and a bag with her dog Stanley’s droppings at the salon.
The mix-up epitomized her general confusion over the new language and the new culture, so acute that she very nearly packed up and went back to Teaneck, New Jersey.
But because Ishai has been gifted since childhood with the ability to see the funny side of life – and because she and her husband really couldn’t afford the American Orthodox lifestyle and day-school tuition – she stuck it out.
“I stayed by default,” she admits.
“And after the first year, I felt more comfortable. Netanya is small enough that I know everybody and everybody knows Stanley, so I’m happy here. I take a jitney to Tel Aviv and it reminds me of New York. I always loved shopping in thrift shops, and by now I’ve found all the secondhand and vintage shops in Tel Aviv and Netanya.”
She pauses for comic effect. “For me, to buy retail is a sin worse than idolatry.”
Growing up in North Bergen, New Jersey, Shashi Charton thought of her parents and her older brother as her best friends. “With our family, everything was perceived in humor. When I was 37, I gave stand-up eulogies for both my father and mother, who died seven months apart. Humor is the flip side of tragedy.”
Close as she was with her parents, they didn’t quite get her Zionistic leanings.
“When I was 13, Habonim Labor Zionist movement came to North Bergen and it articulated what I couldn’t express in words: that the reason I felt different and couldn’t really fit in was that Judaism was my nationality and essence, not my religion. I always carried this around with me. My parents were sympathetic, but they felt American first, Jewish by religion.”
It was only a little easier for them to understand their daughter’s desire to be a stand-up comic after she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a double major in psychology and English literature.
“I realized that my true passion in life was to make others laugh and feel good,” says Ishai.
Pursuing comedy as a career – along with voice lessons, writing workshops, cartooning classes and eventually a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language – meant many years of working at temporary office jobs and scrimping to get by.
“I lucked out and got a beautiful affordable studio in Weehawken,” a New Jersey township across from Midtown Manhattan. “A savings account was a foreign concept to me. But I didn’t miss anything.”
Well, there was one thing. At nearly 37, she still hadn’t found “a lid to fit my pot.” Relationships with several Israeli men had ended badly, and Mr. Right did not seem to be anywhere on the horizon.
But then she went back to her childhood Conservative synagogue for Rosh Hashana that year and spotted a young stranger among the usual worshipers.
The usher, an old friend of hers, told her that the man was new in the community, soft-spoken, well-mannered... and Israeli.
“Israelis in America were not a fortuitous thing for me. But I went to sit by the tall, handsome Israeli. He was indeed nice and soft-spoken, and we spoke a bit.
I realized all eyes were upon us.”
At the end of the service, under the approving gaze of older congregants, Yacov Ishai asked Shashi Charton what she was doing the next night.
“I was then working for a casting director in New York, making bupkes. I explained that the next night I had to go to New York to see a show for my boss.
With his limited English, Yacov thought that meant an invitation, so we got our first date by a misunderstanding.”
On the third date, they discovered the discrepancy in their ages. Each had thought the other to be about 30, but in reality Yacov was 23. Nevertheless, they were kindred souls. “Every day after work he picked me up and proved to be the antithesis of the Israeli boyfriend nightmare,” she says. “We just celebrated 21 years of marriage.”
They moved to a house in suburban Teaneck in 1997, where they became involved in the local Chabad.
When they wed, the Ishais had agreed on three things: no smoking, no children and no moving to Israel.
“He came from a family of eight, and neither of us relished the thought of having children; we liked our privacy,” she explains.
Of course, there is a comic punchline to this. “We adopted two children seven years into our marriage,” says Ishai.
“And now we’re an Orthodox Jewish family living in Netanya.”
Zehava Liat, now 14, was adopted at the age of less than one year from China.
When Zehava was six, the Ishais adopted her baby brother, Zaki (Yitzhak Moshe, named after their fathers), from Guatemala.
“The kids feel more comfortable in an Israeli psyche than American. They dream in Hebrew. I speak to them in English and Yacov speaks to them in Hebrew. They love having lots of family here,” says Ishai.
They also have two pets: the aforementioned Stanley, named in honor of former Bank of Israel chairman Stanley Fischer; and Tzipi, the surviving half of a hamster pair nicknamed Tzipi and Buji for the Zionist Union politicians Livni and Herzog.
Ishai tried for a while to transfer her teaching career to Israel. “I have taught seventh and eighth grade in religious schools here, but my Hebrew was not good enough, and the children were so different from what I was used to,” she says.
Instead, Ishai turned her full attention to her humorous blogs, written in the form of Dear Abby advice columns from biblical times under the title “Ask Avigail.” The posts appear on the Times of Israel, and she recently compiled them into a book, Ask Avigail: Advice from a Biblical Era Sagette.
“My husband loves to study Torah, and we discuss it together. I take things from the present to give a little twist on the past,” she explains.
Ishai’s work has appeared in various publications and online, including a piece dubbed “Confessions of an Ex-Purim Queen” for Virtual Jerusalem. Another of her columns will be published this fall in the journal Arc.
As for her husband, he and one of her childhood friends are partners in ParkAnd- Willow.com, an online food and beverage distributorship based in New York.
“We come in the summer and run the business while the partner is on vacation, and we get to see family and friends and all the culture we can squeeze in,” says Ishai.