Jewish Foods of my Youth

The Motherlode.

Jewish food does not rank high in my list of preferred cuisines. Part of it is psychological—my initial exposure to Jewish food was during tension-filled visits to my grandmother, who lived in the Bronx and hadn’t left her apartment in years. She was a profoundly terrible cook, but, like all good Jewish mothers, was filled with anxiety at the thought that her family wasn’t eating enough. I still remember her baked chicken—I think it was Mimi Sheraton who once referred to badly baked chicken as balsa wood, and my grandmother’s tasted like paprika-soaked balsa wood. It was so dry that when I started choking on a piece, it took me a while to realize I was choking on a bone fragment rather than a piece of meat. Capped off with a goodbye which involved my grandmother shrieking and pressing bottles of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda on us,this did not make me associate classic Ashkenazi cuisine with good times.

My father had a lot of nostalgia for the foods of his youth and one of the few times I remember him cooking, he’d make matzoh brei. I dimly remember jars of Manischewitz gefilte fish in our house around Passover. My mother, a nice Midwestern Methodist who converted, was a good sport and I think she tried to make gefilte fish.  Once. To this day, I can tell she shudders when the phrase gefilte fish pops up.

It could have been worse—in From My Mother’s Kitchen, Mimi Sheraton’s terrific collection of Jewish recipes and family stories, she mentions her parents buying a live carp and keeping it in the bathtub. The freaking bathtub.  If I went into my bathroom and saw a carp swimming in my tub, I would calmly turn around, walk out the door, and move into a hotel, thanks.

Bagels were a big deal to my dad. He was very depressed that my brother and I liked Lender’s Onion Bagels, and still do. He maintains that no one outside of the five boroughs knows how to make a proper bagel. I cannot confirm or deny this. I will say that when the husband and I were courtin’, I would travel from Boston to Staten Island to see him, and before he dropped me off at the train station, I’d stop for a bagel at Tottenville Bagel, and it was AWESOME—a crusty poppy seed bagel, with a generous frosting of especially creamy and not oversweet scallion cream cheese.

According to my father, the only remotely acceptable source of bagels in the Boston suburb where we lived was a place called Eigerman’s, on Route 9 in Natick. At this point, I think the store is now home to the politically incorrect Oriental Furniture Warehouse.  I believe the store had a sign in the shape of a bagel, and to my taste, the bagels were about as edible as that piece of lit-up plastic. These bagels were leaden, but my father didn’t care—every weekend, he’d buy a dozen. My brother liked their onion rolls, at least, while I always found them to be a big disappointment. I mean, the outside has these nice burned bits of onion, but the inside has no damn onion; it’s like eggy Wonder Bread in there. Give me a bialy any day. Now, there’s some damn onions. 

Really, the food that seems the most Jewish to me is distinctly non-kosher Chinese food, because it was usually what we ate to break our Yom Kippur fast. I use the term “fast” loosely. Our observance of the High Holidays, particularly Yom Kippur, involved waiting for my Dad to get into a good mood. During Yom Kippur we would tiptoe around Dad because this was a man who loved food, and fasting was his idea of hell. Yom Kippur was not a time to ask him anything—in fact, it was a great time to completely avoid eye contact.  We would not eat breakfast, or else we’d pretend we hadn’t, except for my mom, who serenely drank her Sanka; this was clearly Dad’s show, not hers.

Every year, we reluctantly accompanied him to Conservative services in an auditorium at Brandeis University. Since my brother and I didn’t have much Jewish education--we were Brandeis Sunday School dropouts (like Beauty School Dropouts, only less fun), we couldn’t understand anything and we were bored out of our minds. I remember being appalled that the eternal light in the space was clearly an-ill concealed light bulb. If my dad was feeling especially melancholy, we’d sit there for a couple of hours, during which time I would contemplate throwing myself in the aisle and screaming from boredom. The only thing that piqued my interest was the singing of the Aveinu because it sounded sort of operatic and dramatic to me. The rest of the time I would stare at the Hebrew and the English translation of various meditations and prayers and think, OH GOD, WHEN CAN WE EAT?

Eventually, when my father had decided we’d all atoned enough, or, more likely, he got tired of my mother hissing, "No, we're not leaving yet, stop asking," we would get out. Leaving services and getting outside was like emerging from a coal mine. I am surprised, given my penchant for dramatics, that I didn't weep and kiss the ground. 

In the car I would hold my breath, waiting for my dad to decide that we needed to go get something to eat. And then, oh then, a glorious Chinese lunch, with completely trayf pan fried pork dumplings, mu shu, and beef with broccoli. Happiness and peace restored!  My family is always happiest around a table. In contrast to the relentless, thudding solemnity of the morning, the spice and the bright colors of stir fry, the lunatic abundance of dishes (we always ordered way too much), the cheerful excess of it all-- it seemed to help us find our balance again, and be grateful for what was, after all, a pretty good life.

As we sat in the Pine Garden, I’d burrow into my booth, look at the red flocked wallpaper, the Chinese Zodiac placemats (I was born in the year of the Tiger but my brother was born in the year of the Rat, which was an unending source of pleasure to me, HA, my brother’s a rodent) and Chinese lanterns, and think, damn, I love me some Jewish holidays.