The dissolution of my family’s Christmas, then, had little to do with my adopting Judaism. In a way, the erosion of Christmas was one of the things that made it possible. That Harry and I moved to America helped ease the transition in many ways, one of which was that it absolved me of having to tell Oma that I was not going to come celebrate Christmas with her and my siblings anymore. I was in faraway Chicago, and my being there explained, more to her friends and her neighbors than to her, why I wasn’t coming for Christmas. It also gave her a convenient way of not having to face the truth head-on—not only had her granddaughter married a Jew, but she had become a practicing Jew herself.
I never had the urge to re-create the magic of my childhood Christmases for our three children, maybe because it was devoid of spiritual content for me, so the emptiness it left overpowered any possible nostalgia, or maybe because the magic of candles, cookies, and gifts can easily be transferred to Chanukah.
Oma passed away four years after I moved to the States, so her trademark Christmas cookies no longer arrive in their shoebox package, cushioned with tissue paper. I do spend one afternoon with my kids cutting sugar cookie dough into the shapes of dreidels, menorahs, and Maccabees. I cherish that each evening of Chanukah, the five of us gather in the living room to light the candles and spend half an hour watching the flames flicker. Sitting in the living room, just to be together, is something we rarely do otherwise. The kids send dreidels knocking about on the hard-wood floor and wrestle each other for another coin of chocolate gelt, and Harry and I look on happily. Thankfully, that magic of Chanukah lasts for eight days, not just one night. If one night is too harried, there’s always another one to invoke it again. Thankfully, too, there aren’t weeks of hustle and bustle that lead up to it, except one evening of grating potatoes and frying latkes—those thirty minutes are all there is to it.
Gone, then, for me, is the awkwardness of Christmas. What remains is the exhilaration of holiday preparation, free of the weight of expectations, and the homage to friends and family. What exists in its stead are quiet winter days, free of obligations.
I have the fondest memory of the first Christmas I did not celebrate. That first December in Chicago, my mother came to visit, and she and I spent a remarkably stress-free day wandering through the shopping crowds on Michigan Avenue. Without a single errand to accomplish, we let people push us along. We marveled at the glittering orbs that hung in the atrium at Water Tower Place. We listened to old favorites like “White Christmas” playing overhead. We stood in awe in front of the giant fake Christmas tree in the Bloomingdale building. Then, on the twenty-third, Mom left for Michigan to stay with her brother. Harry had a job at the University of Chicago Hospital and had volunteered for the night shift on the twenty-fourth. Our student housing building was empty; everyone had gone home for the holidays. I was home alone.
I was exhausted from a year of big changes—I had finished my first MA degree, married, converted, moved countries, and survived my first quarter at the University of Chicago. Christmas Eve found me stretched out on our neighbors’ couch. We were feeding their cats and thus had free use of their living room and TV. Since we did not have a TV, this was a treat. I lay there, wrapped in a blanket against the draft from the single-paned windows, and watched one Christmas movie after another. It was the first time I really watched It’s a Wonderful Life. I had a pot of tea and some of Oma’s cookies. It was snowing outside, and the whole house was quiet, and I was all by myself. It was peace, and it was bliss.
Harry and I with his parents and our kids, 1999 (Our third child wasn’t born yet.)
GEFILTE FISH
THE ONLY PERSON EVER TO ADMONISH ME TO DO something specific to “become a proper Jew” was Harry’s Aunt Rachel of Queens, New York. Aunt Rachel was actually a first cousin of Harry’s father, the only one to survive Auschwitz.
One afternoon in the summer of 1992 found Harry and me at Aunt Rachel’s dining room table. We were in New York to attend a friend’s wedding, and of course we had to visit Aunt Rachel and her husband, Uncle Max, also an Auschwitz survivor. Family was immensely important to them, as they had so few relatives left. Had we lived in New York, we would have had to spend every holiday with them.
While we sat at the table, Aunt Rachel shuttled to the kitchen, bearing Tupperware filled with tuna salad and plain romaine lettuce, aluminum pans with cold roasted chicken and gefilte fish, and launched into her usual line of questioning.
“So, whose wedding are you going to?” she asked Harry, munching loudly on a piece of romaine. In her Yiddish accent, a w sounded more like a v.
“My friend Eliana.”
“How do you know her?”
“From the Zionist youth group.”
“In Munich?”
“Yes.”
“There is such a thing?” One of Rachel’s eyebrows was cocked.
“Yes, of course. Why not?” I could see the heat building in Harry’s eyes. He put a bowl of egg salad down with a thump. That Harry’s father had remained in Germany with his family was a sore point with Aunt Rachel.
She reached for another stalk of romaine.
“What is she doing in New York?”
“She works here.”
“Where?”
“Some refugee organization.”
“Who is she marrying?”
“A guy she fell in love with.”
“Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s he from?”
“Great Britain.”
“Why is she marrying a Brit? Don’t we have enough Jewish boys in America?”
Harry didn’t reply to that one but rolled his eyes.
Aunt Rachel asked, in a more matter-of-fact way, “Where is the wedding?”
“Rockefeller Center.”
“Why Rockefeller Center?”
“Really, Rochl,” Uncle Max interjected, using the Yiddish version of her name, “let the man eat. And sit down yourself and eat.”
But she wouldn’t sit down; she kept going into the kitchen or rearranging the food containers on the table. Then, biting into another piece of lettuce, her hands still wet from rinsing it, she wielded the Tupperware of gefilte fish in my direction. “Here, Annette, have another piece of gefilte fish.”
I had already had one, and gefilte fish are not my favorite food. They are a staple of East European Jewish cooking; without them, a holiday is not a holiday. “Gefilte fish” literally means “stuffed fish,” but what is meant is the stuffing itself, served cold as unassuming, palm-size lumps of beige matter. This batch was too salty for my taste, and so I said, “No, thanks. I already had one.”
Aunt Rachel thrust the Tupperware toward me, her dark eyes flaring up. “Come on, have another piece. You must learn to be a proper Jew!”
For a moment, her eyes, her outstretched arm with the tattooed number on it, and the Tupperware were suspended in dead silence. A look of horror passed over Max’s face, and before Harry could huff and I could decide whether to be annoyed or amused, Max said to Rachel, “Let her be.”
He began to clear the table. Harry exhaled and said, “I don’t know how you stand it, Motl,” referring to Uncle Max by his Yiddish name.
In response, Uncle Max stopped behind Aunt Rachel, who was sitting down now, still chewing on that lettuce. He leaned over her to peer at Harry and said, “No one has suffered more than this woman has. It is unbelievable what she has suffered. It is unbelievable how she has managed to live her life.”
In the family rationale, Harry’s father hadn’t “suffered” because he had not been in the camps. At age twenty-one he had been put on a bike when the Nazis invaded his hometown of Slonim on the Russian–Polish border. His father told him to ride east into Russia and wait at a customer’s house; the family would follow by carriage and meet him there. But they never made it. Harry’s father found himself alone in Russia. He joined the Red Army, which gladly accepted any able-bodied man. Twice the Germans overran his unit; twice he manage
d to catch up with the rest of the fleeing Red Army and evade capture. Only his commanding officer knew he was Jewish. When he returned to Slonim after the war, no one was left.
Aunt Rachel was the only one to survive of those who had remained in Slonim. She and Harry’s father were close; to each the other was the only one who knew what life in their small Jewish town, the shtetl of Slonim, had been like. To each the other was the only one who spoke the same kind of Yiddish, knew the same jokes, remembered that chickens were kept under the kitchen bench in winter, that ox-skin tails should be saved for soup, and that for a yeshiva (Talmud school) student like Harry’s father, not every day could be an Esstog (eating day), when someone would take him home for a meal. Some days, no one would take him and there would be no meal.
I wondered about Uncle Max’s suffering—this slight man who was such a gentleman of the Old World, in his vest when the weather was cool, his shirts and slacks, his hat and tan overcoat. He always pulled out my chair before I sat down, helped me into my coat, and held open the door. His past as a camp survivor was not talked about, at least not within the wider family, while Aunt Rachel’s was well known. She suffered from epilepsy due to the severe head injuries she had sustained in Auschwitz. Anything, her son had warned me, could set her off—you might be in the subway with her, and all of a sudden she would be writhing on the floor and the screeching of the train would, for her, become the screams of torture victims. She would be back in Auschwitz, crying for her younger sister, whom Dr. Mengele himself had torn from her.
HARRY AND I HELPED CLEAR THE TABLE AND THEN SAT BACK down. Aunt Rachel made tea, and Uncle Max retired to his armchair, five feet from the dining table, where the living room officially began.
“Motl!” Aunt Rachel yelled from the kitchen. “Get that newspaper off the floor! The print gets on the carpet!”
Sure enough, the ivory carpet was spotless. Uncle Max rose slowly, picked up the section of the paper he had dropped on the carpet, folded it, walked into the kitchen, and placed it on the little Formica table by the kitchen window.
“I think,” he said, “it’s time for Annette and me to go for a cup of coffee.”
Rescue the woman first, I thought. Harry was one of the family; he could stand the inquisition a little longer.
“Come,” Uncle Max said, and he took me by the elbow. “They have good coffee down at the market.”
He guided me toward the door, followed by Aunt Rachel’s protests. “What do you need to spend two dollars on coffee for? We have good coffee here. Make yourself a cup. Make her a cup. I don’t understand why you have to spend money on coffee.”
But already her protests sounded halfhearted. She knew it was useless. We escaped for thirty minutes to the freedom of the sidewalk and the paradise of the grocery.
Her remark about my eating gefilte fish and becoming a proper Jew remained in my mind, not as an insult but as a little dart reminding me of my place. She was here, and I was there. Of course I knew that I didn’t have to eat or even like gefilte fish to be a proper Jew; nevertheless, her remark stung. It called out what nobody else said but everybody thought: You are the newcomer, and we are watching to see whether you really fit in. You say you want to fit in, but we will be the judge of that. In reality, becoming a Jew was not accomplished by swallowing another piece of fishy matter or by ducking into the mikvah and getting the bet din’s stamp of approval. It had to be lived over many years and through the milestones of life. Even if I didn’t question where my heart was, others would. And even if I didn’t have to prove anything to myself, I would have to prove it to them, and that would take time.
IRONICALLY, THE FIRST TIME I MET AUNT RACHEL, SHE TAUGHT me how to make gefilte fish “the American way.” Both Harry and his mother had insisted that Aunt Rachel should show me how to do this, and I still use her method, to the critical acclaim of “proper Jews.”
Shortly after we had moved to Chicago, a good friend of mine from the University in Munich was in New York, collecting oral history for her MA thesis. Since I had not been to New York City yet as an adult, I went to visit her for a weekend. She was staying with her American boyfriend, who happened to live one block from Aunt Rachel and Uncle Max’s apartment in Queens. It therefore followed that I should spend Shabbat at Aunt Rachel’s.
In retrospect, I am astounded that I went by myself to meet Aunt Rachel for the first time, wholly unprepared for the ferocity of character I would encounter. But I also had the power of the stranger then. Family is dangerous only if they know where your buttons are, if they know who you are. And Aunt Rachel had no idea who I was. She must have grilled Harry’s father before my visit, but, given that he was one of the few people who could withstand her and gossip wasn’t his style, he might not have let on much. He might have said only, “See for yourself.”
I showed up at Aunt Rachel and Uncle Max’s apartment early Friday afternoon, allowing enough time for her to show me how to prepare gefilte fish before Shabbat began.
The door opened to a small woman in a housecoat who studied me with a mixture of suspicion and interest out of amazingly alive dark eyes. At least, I thought, I am not the typical blond German girl—although my eyes are blue, my hair is brown and wavy. When I introduced myself and extended my hand in greeting, she said, without smiling, “Come on, give me a hug; you are family now.”
I had to bend down to hug her. Her gray hair was dense and cropped short, and from her aquiline features I could see that she had been a beautiful woman.
“Come.” She waved me into the apartment. “Motl is still out.”
The hallway opened into an impeccable living room with plush ivory carpet, doilies spread on top of armchairs, and porcelain bowls gleaming on a polished coffee table. No magazines or newspapers were strewn about, like they were at my place.
I followed her into the kitchen, dragging my overnight bag. Again, no clutter on the kitchen countertops, and the Formica table by the window was wiped clean. She opened a door into a small adjoining room. Harry had told me I would be staying in that room because it had a foldout couch and was the only extra space in the apartment.
“Here,” she said. “You will stay here. Put your bag down.” It was a charming room with two windows, bookshelves above the couch, and family photographs smiling from the corners.
She sat down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her.
“Come, sit. Tell me about yourself. What brings you to New York?”
“I’m visiting a friend who’s collecting oral history for her master’s thesis.”
“What oral history?”
“About the Upper East Side, the old German community.”
She frowned. “And where have you been staying?”
“Her boyfriend lives around the corner from you.”
After some back-and-forth about my friend’s boyfriend and how he could possibly live so close without Aunt Rachel’s knowing him, I said, “Harry wanted you to show me how to make gefilte fish.”
“Yes, come, come,” she said, rising and walking into the kitchen. “We better get to it. Here, do me a favor.” She pointed at a cabinet. “You’re tall. There are two jars of gefilte fish up there.”
I handed them down.
“Here,” she said, waving an apron at me. “Put this on.
“What comes out of the jar is not edible,” she said, opening one of the jars of Manischewitz gefilte fish. She slid one wet beige lump out of the jar, teased a piece off with a fork, and offered it to me. It didn’t taste fishy, only bland. Still, those lumps in that jar were a marvel of Jewish life in America. Prefabricated gefilte fish! No such thing was available to the small Jewish community in Munich.
At Harry’s instigation, his mother had shown me how to make gefilte fish from scratch earlier that summer, before we left for the United States.
“I don’t think Annette will do what I have to do. They have better things in America,” Harry’s mother had said, but she had acquiesced to a day of making gefilte fish
.
My gefilte fish session with her began with three beautiful blue carp, cooked whole in a big pot.
“Do you know the best part of the fish?” she asked, balancing her cigarette on the rim of her ever-present ashtray. While she dressed elegantly when leaving the house, she wore what looked like cleaning-lady polyester dresses at home.
“I do,” I said, digging out the cheek from under one of the carps’ eyes with the tip of a knife. Oma had taught me that. Harry’s mother was pleased.
“By the way,” she said, “call me Nana. Everybody calls me Nana.”
With a butcher’s knife, she chopped off the carps’ heads. “The head comes off more easily when the meat is cooked and soft,” she said. Their dead, milky eyes stared at us.
At least the fishmonger had gutted the carp for us. We skinned the fish, pried out the spine, keeping as many rib bones attached as possible, and combed the gray meat for more bones.
Boiling the bones makes a broth, and when cooled this broth becomes the wiggly gelatin that the gefilte fish will sit in. We cooked the heads and skin and bones in a big pot of water for about an hour, then poured it through a sieve for the fish stock. We scrambled eggs, chopped onions, julienned carrots. We spooned chunks of carp into the meat grinder and seasoned the mush that oozed out with salt, black pepper, and paprika. We kneaded in the eggs and onions and added some matzo meal. Then we wet our hands so the mush wouldn’t stick, formed palm-size lumps, dropped them into the roiling broth along with the carrots, and cooked it all for another hour and a half. Then we arranged the gefilte fish in a ceramic dish, strained the fish stock, and poured it over them. This, we placed in the fridge, where the stock would jell and the gefilte fish would cool so they could be served cold. Then we rubbed our hands with lemon halves to kill the fish smell.
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