Jewish Geisha Takes on Manhattan Bar
Geishas, the Japan Guide web site explains, “are professional entertainers who attend guests during meals, banquets and other occasions…. Their role is to make guests feel at ease with conversation, drinking games and dance performances.” And, according to a front-page story in this week’s Village Voice, they can also be Jewish.
In her first-person account of a month-long stint as a hostess at a Midtown bar called Kaoru, writer Victoria Bekiempis muses that her Hebraic features proved a unique selling proposition in an establishment run by, and catering to, Asians. “In the first two weeks, the customers were curious, but kind of cold,” she writes. A colleague “had said that they’d be intrigued by the fact that I’m Jewish, and apparently look it. Sometimes they’d straight-up ask: ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ and would add that they ‘could just tell.’”
But Bekiempis’s complexion and supposedly Semitic mane provoked the most curiosity, she claims: “Indeed, a lot of the initial conversations began by their musings on my supposedly Ashkenazi characteristics. Their observations had the sound of a lepidopterist commenting on a freak moth.’
“‘Hm. Very pale,’ they’d say. ‘Your hair, it just does that? Is it a perm? Ah, Curly-san,’ Mama-san called me, petting my head. ‘Natural?’
“’Yep. Look — you can pull it like this,’ I said, pulling taut a ringlet, so that it was straight. Then I let the tendril go, so that it contracted into a spring-like shape. ‘And it goes back like this. Like the tail of a pig.’”
Bekiempis’s geisha career ends, though, when it becomes clear some customers want more than chat and karaoke. Kaoru’s owner “was right. It takes about three weeks for the customers to warm up to you. What she didn’t mention is that it also takes about three weeks for them to get grabby,” Bekiempis writes. “And that’s why it seemed like a good idea to spend no more than a month at Kaoru — I’d figured out what it was like to work there, and wanted to leave before anything really weird happened.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
