Elizabeth Ehrlich - Miriams Kitchen

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Table of Contents

For Leon
and the three who joined us

INTRODUCTION

My grandmother used to sit before her stove on a tall, four-legged stool, stirring sweet-and-sour cabbage soup in a white enamel pot, dishing out salty perceptions of life. She was a capable woman. She carried herself with dignity about the neighborhood, as befitted the pharmacists wife. Widowed in her fifties, she went back to work in the millinery trade she had learned as a nineteen-year-old immigrant in New Yorkproud to pay a cleaning woman, carry a union card, and earn health insurance on her own. With her proper passport case tucked into her two-handled pocketbook, she journeyed to Europe, at home in the world.

But my grandmothers blue-and-white tiled Brooklyn kitchen, in which so much life had been lived, was her truest sphere. There she chopped, grated, salted, peppered. There she handed on traditions brought from the Old World and translated amidst the exigencies of the New. Much of my valuable learning took place in that kitchen and in other rooms like it.

I grew up at a distance from my two immigrant grandmothers. In our Detroit neighborhood, my family became an idiosyncratic minority: Left wing, bookish, hypersensitive, white, Jewish, anti-middle class. A time came when we alone on our street lit Friday-night candles, and we lit them while holding few institutional ties to The Faith. My parents, first-generation Americans, selected from and approximated the traditions they took for granted. Still, they did so with affection for the old ways. They never stopped telling the stories that distilled immigrant essence and adaptation.

I knew who we were, and that stayed with me, even during years when I would have preferred otherwise. For a long time, though, there was much that I forgot.

I forgot the childhood appetites that could only be satisfied in my grandmothers kosher kitchens. I forgot the practical, mystical teachings, spiraling back through time, that the grandmothers had once dished out with their soup. I forgot the dignity my immigrants had, that comes with the connection to something larger than everyday life, even when you are doing nothing more than stirring soup. I had the bequest of my grandmothers details, but I devalued all this for many years, as one does.

It came back to me when I became a mother. I wondered what to teach my children. I wanted to build a floor under my children, something strong and solid.

Then I remembered and unwrapped a bundle of family tales, many located in or near the kitchen. In these I found wisdom and innovation and the fading rituals and habits of an assimilating clan. I had been carrying that bundle all my life.

What made me value my inheritance as treasure, not burden? The luck that has placed me, as an adult, in range of Miriams kitchen. My mother-in-law Miriam, born in a small village in Jewish Poland, survived the Holocaust. A keeper of rituals and recipes, and of stories, she cooks to recreate a lost world, and to prove that unimaginable loss is not the end of everything. She is motivated by duty to ancestors and descendants, by memory and obligation and an impossible wish to make the world whole.

When I am with Miriam in the kitchen, she speaks of the past. I listen, trying to imagine the world from which her cuisine came. I know gefilte fish tastes different when you chop it by hand; Im sure the flavor is altered when you have lived Miriams life. Yet serious cooking is an essentially optimistic act. It reaches into the future, vanishes into memory, and creates the desire for another meal.

I am trying to learn Miriams recipes now. For me, it is a voyage of discontinuity and connection. Some of her dishes, and expressions, and perceptions, I remember from the kitchens of my childhood. The cadence is differentreflecting the differences, finally, between refugees like Miriam, and those like my grandmothers who emigrated at least somewhat by choice, and those who, like my parents, leave their immigrant homes to seek their own Americas.

The cadence is evolving for me now, as I seek to bring tradition home. With ambivalence and some sense of irony, I light a candle, recite a prayer, grate a potato, and move toward making my kitchen kosher. Thus, I forge links from my grandparents, and my husbands grandparents, to my children, who wear their ancestors Hebrew names.

I think about it as I go, from a sinkside, stoveside, personal perspective, not a rabbinical one. I turn over the old stories in my mind and collect new ones. I choose my own history, deciding which snapshots, decades, recipes, versions of arguments and events are to be discarded, and which will stand for the whole. That history is my own little temple where I measure my life against a reliable standard. Increasingly, I find meaning there.

It is a many-colored history, and it is one small strand in an intricate old ever-changing tapestry of migrations, extremes, accommodations, observances, contradictions. My father is part of it: Marxist, atheist, he collected signs and omens, lit memorial candles for the dead. As is my mother, who did not love to cook, who studied Chekhov, covered her head for a Friday night prayer, and could recite poetry at the drop of a hat. And at a distance, the grandmothers in their kitchens, preserving complicated rites in adopted cities, not only for the sake of the past.

I embrace them all. I consider the law, the restrictions, the presumptions of holiness, the doubt. I inventory layers of translucent recollection evoking food, love, home, apocrypha, anger, ritual, laughter, conflict, and regret. The result is a collage, but also a way of life. That collage is my religion, and it is what I am passing on.

September

LONGING

September

Work and house and errands and physical fitness and activities and things. The expediencies of every day. This cannot be all there is.

Something more is calling. It is of the past, it embodies tradition, yet tradition is only the vehicle. It is of the heart, but it is more than diffuse sentiment. Some of it is dimly remembered, yet remembered for a reason.

It is a coherent way of life and the taste of home. It is a way to teach the children right and wrong, consciousness, history, and appreciation of all we have. It connects them to their grandparents and mine.

It is an ancient religion. It beckons, and half the time I am not even sure why. Its rituals tantalize and will not be denied.

What is the lure of ritual when passionate belief is hardly ever to be found, when fulfillment of ritual is a matter of choice? It is more than the preservation of an empty vessel. It is the conviction, deep and unspoken, that ritual, the vessel, contains a precious substance, though I cannot name it. My ignorance is my problem, not that of the vessel.

Why do I, having long ignored the rituals, yearn in their direction? Some of its caretakers have been those I loved best and respected most. I cannot forget them. I start from there.

A COAL STOVE

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