Carmit Delman - Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing Up Between Cultures--A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Childhood

More praise forBurnt Bread and Chutney

Delmans debut book is an exquisitely written coming-of-age story laced with the challenges of being an Indian Jew in white Jew America. Her vivid descriptions evoke a richly detailed picture of the Bene Israel and the larger Indian culture. Delman writes with such immediacy that the reader cannot help but be pulled into the story. [She] can also be devastatingly humorous.

ClevelandJewishNews.com

Her memoir captures the textures of a life spent straddling the traditions and cultures of western India and the United States.

Library Journal

Elegantly written.

Kirkus Reviews

A One World Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 2002 by Carmit Delman
Readers Guide copyright 2003 by Carmit Delman and
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

One World is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Ballantine Readers Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.oneworldbooks.net

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003093359

eISBN: 978-0-307-51606-0

v3.1

O f all Jewish communities to have sprung up, mushrooms and dandelions in odd corners around the world, perhaps most obscure are the three Jewish communities in India. The ancient Jews of Cochin (now called Kochi). The Baghdadi Jews. And the Bene Israelthe Children of Israelfrom western India and Bombay (or Mumbai). This last group, the Bene Israel, is said to have the most shrouded history of all. And though there are many theories explaining how it came to be, its true origins may always remain a mystery. This is the community from which my family is descended.

Tradition connects the ancestors of the Bene Israel to the ancient kingdom of Israel, which was once occupied by ten of the biblical Twelve Tribes. According to one legend, a boatload of people left that region somewhere in the final centuries B.C.E . They sailed across the ocean and were shipwrecked on the Konkan coast of India, far from their initial destination or contacts. Seven men and seven women survived that shipwreck and took up residence in villages along the shore. They and their descendants were cut off from the Jewish world at this point in history until they were rediscovered and reabsorbed many centuries later. So the Bene Israel evolved quite uniquely, without many of the holidays, rituals, and rabbinic rulings introduced meanwhile in the general Jewish Diaspora.

Though they adopted the local language, Marathi, and manners of dress like the sari, along with some of the other Indian customs, the Bene Israel mostly kept to themselves. They maintained the few ancient Jewish rituals which could be passed on, such as the Sabbath day or Shabbat, circumcision, basic prayers, and laws of kosher food. They were skilled in oil pressing, and the community grew throughout the generations, even building up its own stock of folklore and customs. This Judaism absorbed an Indian essence which emerged in the prayer melodies and rituals, the fasting, pilgrimages, and castelike patterns that distinguished full-blooded Bene Israel from those who were products of mixed unions.

In recent centuries, the Bene Israel began to move from the villages to the great city of Bombay for its many work opportunities and the chance to serve in the British army. There they established synagogues, schools, orphanages, journals, burial grounds, and many kinds of societies and charities to foster Jewish life. Because they were not persecuted by non-Jews for their beliefs the way that Jews in other countries often were, the Bene Israel achieved a solid relationship with the general Indian community and succeeded in the military, medicine, and the arts. They faced another kind of discrimination, however, because once they reconnected, the dark color of their skin and their centuries of isolation sometimes led other Jewish communities to look down on them and question their Jewish purity.

The Bene Israel had always longed to return to Israel. In recent times, as Jews internationally came together to create the modern state of Israel, many young Bene Israel immigrated there, too, to help build the new land. This began the movement of much of the community to Israel, leaving fewer and fewer Jews in Bombay and in the other two Indian Jewish communities with each passing year. In the end, all that transpired could be tracked in the mixture of names in any given Bene Israel family, which might include Biblical, Indian, European, and modern Israeli variations.

And my own family? Where do we sit in all these passing generations? My mother and her mother and all the mothers going all the way back up are descended from one mother who crawled out of the ocean like an amoeba, salty after that ancient shipwreck. They lived in India for hundreds of years until my mother, as a child, along with other relatives and Bene Israel youngsters, went to live, learn, and work in Israel as part of the Youth Aliyah movement. She married my father, an American Jew of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) descent, and then followed him to the United States. But after all this time of missing a Jewish homeland in our very genes, now that a modern state actually existed, we could not just dismiss it. My parents, this time with four children, picked up again to try and live in Israel for good. Later, we ended up coming back to the U.S. But that move topped off the many layers of influence in me: Judaism, India, America, Israel.

What follows is my story, and the story of my family. This work of creative nonfiction is not a perfect account, and it would surely be told differently by every other person involved. It does not attempt to represent a larger community or culture from my limited experiences. It is just my one humble version of all that has happened, tinted by poetry, time, wistfulness, misunderstanding, and the could-have-been, should-have-been holes of history and memory. Some details and identities have been altered for this book and to protect the privacy of the people I love. But I hope that I have been true here to the essence of our lives.

T he day I saw Nana-bai eating hot dogs, I knew that she was dying.