It is ironic that Harry’s mother, who grew up in Paris and never experienced shtetl life, should teach me this shtetl way of cooking, not Aunt Rachel, who came from the shtetl. But this was not only the shtetl way of cooking; it was the Old World way of cooking. No prefab, no mixes, no modern appliances. Making do with what was available. Having spent four years of her childhood hidden in a barn in the French countryside, Nana certainly knew about making do.
“Here,” she said during a smoking break, as she opened one of the avocado-colored cabinets and rummaged through a stack of cookbooks. She held out a spiral-bound, index-tabbed book. “You should have this. You can read it; I can’t. I got it from my cousin in Canada years ago. It’s the typical Jewish kitchen.”
The book was Second Helpings, Please!, published by Mt. Sinai Chapter #1091, —Montreal, of the B’nai B’rith women of eastern Canada. It would become one of my standard reference books.
While Nana and I were mushing and seasoning, adjusting the stove and watching the broth, I had already decided that if there were better things in America, I would not be grinding fish. The preparation time alone was stupendous to my 1980s, get-things-done-in-one-swoop mind-set. I was used to preparing feasts for Thanksgiving and other parties, but that entailed fixing one dish after another, planning oven time so the roast could go in when the cake came out, not spending an entire day preparing one dish.
“SEE, THIS IS WHAT YOU DO,” AUNT RACHEL BECKONED IN her kitchen in Queens.
“Chop onions into big chunks,” she said, pushing three onions, a cutting board, and a knife my way. I sat at the Formica table and chopped. My eyes started cramping from the onions, until they filled with tears and I couldn’t see anymore. I wanted to go on and not be a wimp, but I had to get up to stumble to the sink for some cold water. Only cold water would help now.
“The onions bother you?” Aunt Rachel asked. I only nodded as I wet my hands and clapped my fingers to my burning eyeballs.
“Funny, that never bothers me,” she said. Of course not, I thought. Someone who’s gone through hell on Earth is not going to be bothered by onions.
I heard her run the faucet.
“Here,” she said, tugging my sleeve. She thrust a damp towel into my hand.
“Thanks.” I groped my way back to the table, sat down, and pressed the towel to my eyes. Slowly my eyeballs relaxed. The burning subsided. Aunt Rachel kept shuttling about, and when I opened my eyes, the onions were gone and a few carrots had been peeled and chopped.
“Come,” she said, motioning for me to join her by the stove. “Now all this gets cooked to make a broth.” The carrots tumbled into a big stockpot in which the onions already waited. As I looked on, she tossed in a few sprigs of parsley and dusted it all with black pepper, salt, and a load of paprika. Then she rolled up her sleeves, grabbed the pot, and held it under the faucet to fill it with water.
As she held the pot, I saw the number tattoo on her left forearm. I was surprised how blurry the numbers were. She must have felt my gaze, because she said, “It doesn’t bother you to see the number?”
“No, no, of course not,” I said, embarrassed. Why should it have bothered me?
“You know,” she said, as she heaved the pot onto the stove, “some people had it taken off. But I will never take it off. People should see, you know?” She looked at me with a challenge in her eyes.
I nodded.
“We have to let it cook for a while,” she said, as she ignited the blue flame under the pot.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked, rubbing the inverted inky triangle that was tattooed in front of the numbers.
I should, I thought, but I didn’t.
I shook my head.
“This was the sign for Jews,” she said. “They never finished it.”
I nodded again. Two triangles make a Star of David.
“Do you like salad?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Shall we have salad for Shabbes?”
I helped wash lettuce, chop radishes, and slice tomatoes. After a while, Aunt Rachel was ready for the next step in the preparation of gefilte fish. She pried the Manischewitz gefilte fish out of their jar, dropped them into the broth, and brought the whole thing to a boil again.
“Now it needs to simmer for a while, and then it has to cool off,” she said. “We started too late, so they won’t be cool enough for Shabbes, but tomorrow they will be good.”
In the midst of our cooking, Harry called to wish us a good Shabbes. The phone, mounted on the wall by the kitchen door, had an incredibly long cord. Aunt Rachel tucked the receiver between ear and shoulder and talked to Harry while moving a pot of soup from the fridge to the stove. The cord swung behind her.
Then she said to Harry, “Talk to your wife,” and handed me the receiver.
“Hallo, wie geht’s dir?” I said, before catching myself, wondering how Aunt Rachel might react to German being spoken in her kitchen.
Harry must have thought the same, because he immediately said, “Do you think it’s a good idea to speak German?”
I eyed Aunt Rachel, who was going about her business unperturbed. It was awkward to speak to Harry in English—German is our language together—so I decided to speak to him the way I always did.
“Ich glaube, das ist okay,” I said. I think it is okay.
I leaned in the doorway while I talked to him, and after a while Aunt Rachel sat down at the dining room table, which was in front of the door to the kitchen. She sat as if she were concentrating, listening intently.
When I hung up, she said, “What were you speaking?”
“Well, German, of course,” I said.
“Then why don’t I understand it?” She was asking herself more than she was asking me. I didn’t know what to answer.
“Were you speaking a dialect?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “High German. I don’t really know how to speak a dialect. I only know a little Bavarian.”
“Then why don’t I understand? I heard this for years.” Thankfully, she wasn’t looking at me but contemplating the surface of her dining room table. She tugged at a pleat in the tablecloth, smoothing it out.
“Maybe what I heard from the guards were just other things,” she said, getting up and scuttling by me into the kitchen.
How true, I thought. Concentration camp guards certainly spoke of different things to the prisoners than a wife speaks to her husband on the eve of Shabbat. Especially guards who tried to beat someone like Rachel to death. Harry had told me that in Auschwitz one time, when Rachel showed up at the camp kitchen for her daily ration of soup, the officer on guard barked at her that she had already gotten it. When she replied that no, she hadn’t, he beat her unconscious and tossed her into a ditch to die among a pile of corpses. One of her bunkmates saw her stir and crept out at night, pulled her from the ditch, and dragged her to the infirmary. Normally, no one emerged from the infirmary alive. If you were sick, you weren’t able to work, and thus you were of no use and left to perish. Nevertheless, Rachel managed to recover a bit and escaped to her barracks, where two bunkmates hid her among the straw and nursed her back to functioning again by sharing their bread rations.
“Let’s see how the gefilte fish are doing,” Aunt Rachel said, and she lifted the lid off the pot. A cloud of steam rose, smelling of paprika.
Aunt Rachel was the straightforward cook compared with Harry’s laboring mother. Her kitchen was not fogged up by fish steam. Nana’s gefilte fish were famous in the family, mainly because of all the work, but to my uneducated tongue they did not taste significantly better than Aunt Rachel’s. And, thankfully, Aunt Rachel’s had the family stamp of approval. No one could argue with her gefilte fish, not even Harry’s father, so I was safe to embark on making them her way. Of course, much of her method depends on the right combination of salt, pepper, paprika, and onion, or the gefilte fish will turn out too peppery, too salty, or too bland. So far, every Rosh Hashanah and every Passover, I ha
ve had a good hand.
“Why don’t we have gefilte fish more often?” Harry asks every time he dips the first lump into the customary beet-red horseradish.
“Because then it wouldn’t be special anymore,” I always answer.
Gefilte fish are still not a favorite food of mine, but I don’t dislike them either. Were it not for Aunt Rachel’s easy method, I doubt I would have kept the tradition. As it is, I have a particular stockpot I use for making gefilte fish, and I have gone on to teach my daughter the Aunt Rachel method. Aunt Rachel has passed away in the meantime, but her ferocious spirit and practical approach come to life in my kitchen at holiday time.
That day in Queens, a remainder of blubbery gelatin was left in the jar.
“You can save that for later and pour it over the gefilte fish if you want,” Aunt Rachel said, looking at me while holding the jar over the sink. For a second, our eyes locked.
Then, in one swoop, the gelatin was splattering into the sink.
“But I don’t like it,” Aunt Rachel said, turning on the faucet, “so I don’t do it.”
Neither do I.
HASELNUSSTORTE
WITH THE HELP OF THE COOKBOOK NANA GAVE ME and the copy of Jewish Regional Cooking Harry and I had bought on our first trip to Israel, as well as occasional pointers from Nana and Rachel, I learned to prepare the traditional Ashkenazi holiday dishes: not only gefilte fish, but matzo ball soup, kugel, and cholent; honey cake for Rosh Hashanah; latkes for Chanukah; and hamantaschen for Purim.
For Passover, however, I was happy to find that I could serve Oma’s beloved Haselnusstorte, hazelnut torte. Made with only four ingredients—ground hazelnuts, eggs, sugar, and grated lemon rind for taste—it is kosher for Passover. It thrills me when non-Jewish recipes fit into what is traditionally served on holidays, such as candied apples for Rosh Hashanah, but that Oma’s favorite torte could be our special Passover dessert, that was plain good fortune.
For every birthday of my childhood, Oma baked Haselnusstorte. As Wiesbaden was a four-hour train ride away from where I grew up, the torte would arrive in the mail if Oma wasn’t visiting for my siblings’ or my birthday. She would save the right-sized cardboard box for those parcels, wrap the cake in aluminum foil, and buffer it with newspaper against the bumps of the postal voyage. Even after we had grown up, when Oma wouldn’t necessarily send it right on our birthdays, the tradition prevailed: the next time we visited her, a hazelnut torte would be waiting on her kitchen counter, glazed in glistening dark chocolate and decorated with a gummy bear per slice, or, for the more grown-up among us, a blanched almond.
Everyone at our Passover seder loves Oma’s hazelnut torte, and so, every Passover, I bake the traditional version using hazelnuts (also called filberts), but over the course of the eight days of Passover, I also bake an almond and a walnut version.
HAZELNUT TORTE
6 eggs, separated
3 cups finely ground hazelnuts (or about 9 oz. ground filberts)
1 1/3 cups sugar
Grated rind of half a lemon
1 bar semisweet chocolate (3.5 oz.)
Canola oil and matzo meal for pan
9" round springform pan
Preheat oven to 350ºF. Beat egg yolks until they are foamy. Add lemon rind, then beat in sugar until creamy. Add nuts. Beat egg whites until stiff (until peaks in the foam stay when you turn off your beater). Carefully fold the egg whites into the nut mixture. The nut mixture will be a little stiff, but it will loosen up with careful folding in of the egg whites. Coat the pan with oil and matzo meal. Pour batter into the pan. Bake at 350ºF for 1 hour. Let cake cool off. Melt the chocolate, add 1 teaspoon canola oil (to keep it just a tad soft for cutting), and spread it over the cake. Old Bohemia will enter your kitchen.
A GERMAN JEW LIKE YOU
AFTER GRADUATE SCHOOL, I WORKED AS A SECRETARY to the CEO of a hand-tool company on the southwest side of Chicago. With little work experience and the US economy in a slump, I was thankful for the job offer. I had to start somewhere. This was a manufacturing company that had been bought by a French conglomerate and needed an executive secretary fluent in French to handle the calls and correspondence with headquarters in Paris and Strasbourg. That’s where I came in.
For the most part, I was bored. I sorted the drawers in my desk, revamped the filing system, and organized the bookshelves. There weren’t many letters to type or faxes to send. Mainly, I was to be on hand should my boss need assistance, and then that would not take more than a few minutes. Because of the time difference, phone calls from France came only in the morning. There weren’t that many, and all I had to do was pass them through, take a message (this was before voice mail), or hunt down my boss in the case of an urgent call. Paging the CEO via the overhead speaker system was not appropriate.
One time, the group chairman called from Strasbourg. He had called before, so I knew this must be important. I called my boss’s office. No answer. I said in my nicest French that I was going to look for him and placed the call on hold. I got up, smoothed out my pencil skirt, and stuck my head in my boss’s office, just to be sure he wasn’t engrossed in something. His desk, oddly feminine on its spindly legs, looked back at me silently. The controller’s office next door was empty as well. I hurried down the brightly lit hallway, surveying the open office area of Accounting, passing the offices of the export manager and marketing manager, and on into the hum of the customer service desks. My boss was nowhere to be seen.
I ran out into the clanking of the shop floor, where, in the middle of the buzz of tool making, the Engineering office could be found. Maybe he was there? My pumps were not the right shoes for running on the polished concrete floor, and so I was hobbling as fast as I could, but that jaunt was in vain as well. He was not in Engineering.
I would have to page him. I hobbled back to the administrative offices and hurried down the hallway to the reception desk, still craning my neck, hoping I would spot his tall figure among the cubicles. All the while, that HOLD light was blinking on my desk.
I arrived at the reception desk, panting. The receptionist looked up at me.
“Please page Mr. F___ for me. I can’t find him anywhere, and I have the chairman on the line.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “We’re not supposed to page the CEO.”
“I know that, but I can’t find him anywhere, and this is urgent.”
So she paged him, his name ringing out via the overhead intercom.
The door to the cafeteria, right next to the reception desk, flew open, and he emerged, frowning like a bull ready to charge. Before he could reprimand me, I told him who was on the phone.
“Are you sure? You got the name right?” he asked, and he fell into step with me, hurrying back down the hallway, toward our offices at the other end of the building.
“Yes, yes, I have the name right, and he’s been on the phone too long. I couldn’t find you,” I replied.
As we were passing the open cubicles of the Accounting department, he was talking about the chairman’s background and said, in the loudest voice possible, “You know, he’s a German Jew like you.”
What? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw heads pop up from desks. I kept walking, my heels stomping on the linoleum floor, but I threw a puzzled sideways glance at my boss, who was right at my elbow.
“Yes, yes,” he went on, “he comes from this big German family . . . ,” but then we had reached my office and I veered off to get the call off hold and he went straight into his.
I pressed the HOLD button, mumbled, “Sorry to have kept you waiting so long” into the receiver, and transferred the call. When I heard my boss rattle on in French, I closed the connecting door, walked around my desk, sat down in my chair, and exhaled.
Then I started thinking about what he had said. A German Jew? Is that what I am? I never would have thought to describe myself that way. I was American, I was German, and I was Jewish.
Some ears in Accounting had surely caught the German Jew phrase,
but no one said anything about it later. At least not to me. Perhaps this wasn’t worth noting as much as I thought it would be, even though Jews were not commonly sighted on the southwest side of Chicago and I was, to my knowledge, the only practicing Jew at this company of 250 employees. For me, however, that labeling was momentous. It was telling that it should come from this boss of mine, who was a Jew himself, a fact he neither denied nor advertised, having told me once that he was a “Jewish renegade.”
Born and raised in Egypt, where the upper crust of society spoke French in the 1930s and ’40s, he spoke French like a native speaker, but he could also turn on the Arabic when one of his old friends called. He had left Egypt to work for a global energy technology company in Peru and had no problem conversing with our Mexican workers. That company had transferred him to Atlanta, where he had perfected his English. He was the most linguistically accomplished businessperson I have ever met, for he not only spoke those languages fluently but also wrote and read them with ease. His English and French, the only two languages I could judge, were flawless. In fact, once in a while he would point out an English grammatical error to me that someone had made in a document he was reviewing.
He was also the only boss I have ever had who objected to my taking days off for a Jewish holiday.
We were standing in the office hallway one Friday afternoon, going over some last-minute stuff, and I reminded him that I was going to be off Monday and Tuesday for Rosh Hashanah.
“What? Two days?” he said.
“Yes, of course. Rosh Hashanah is two days.”
“No, it’s not. It’s one day.”
“No, it’s two.”
“I’m telling you, it’s one.”
“Even in Israel, it’s the one holiday that is two days,” I said.
“I don’t see why you need two days.”
“I am taking two days off for Rosh Hashanah,” I said, looking straight into his penetrating brown eyes. “I have the personal days. Or you can take them off my paycheck. But I’m not coming in.”
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