Remembering My Parents
September 22, 2007
This may seem like a particularly odd recollection for Yom Kippur, when we’re all supposed to be fasting, but my memories of my parents and connections to Judaism are really triggered by two things: food and conversation.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything, for any number of reasons, including the fact that I’ve always felt I had to make each post fairly research-driven and focused on educational issues. But it occurred to me this morning that I was increasingly unhappy about not blogging because I missed the opportunity to communicate this way, and maybe limiting my posts strictly to educational issues was limiting me … I do, of course, exist on other planes as well :)
Today, I was inspired by the holiday and by danah boyd’s recent post on social scripts for rituals and ceremonies, of religion and culture in which she talked affectionately about her “…snarky secular Jewish friends” who tend to tweak holiday customs to suit their needs rather than “…reject them altogether.” That’s it, exactly, of course. It’s not about the religion, it’s about the culture … and the culture of Judaism that I grew up with is all about cooking, eating and talking. This may seem like a particularly odd recollection for Yom Kippur, when we’re all supposed to be fasting, but my memories of my parents and connections to Judaism are really triggered by two things: food and conversation.
My fondest family memories involve entertaining, during holidays, of course, but otherwise as well. I’ve often told my kids that my entire understanding of what it meant to be “grown up” was based on my parents regular Saturday nights out. First, cocktails in the living room – scotch on the rocks or my dad’s special martinis (shaken, not stirred), accompanied by cheese and crackers, perhaps a little herring, and on special occasions, my mother’s extra special chopped liver.
Sometimes they went out to dinner, but came back to our house to talk politics. The dinner parties were even more fun, especially when unsuspecting family friends came and my father, who loved to play the devil’s advocate, kept those of us ‘in the know’ in stitches. Guests at the table were the perfect foil for his political charades, though he never let their discomfort rise to the now common Ali-G level. The depth of his knowledge enabled him to take an alternative view on just about anything that arose, and that, coupled with his sharp wit and our giggles, always diffused the tension.
We laughed a lot and ate a lot. We repeated the same joke about a knife being able to stand in my mother’s ‘gedicht’ vegetable soup year after year and recounted the VERY short list of things she knew how to prepare: pot roast, turkey stuffed with kaska, the best blintzes ever made …
Each year, as I celebrate the holidays, and particularly as I prepare the food for Rosh Hashanah and the Yom Kippur break-fast, I remember my parents. I think about what mattered to them and about why they were so attuned to foreign affairs (Israel) and secular causes (creating the YM- YWHA in Westchester County, NY). Although not religious at all, having had parents who lived through the pogroms and having lived through WWII themselves, they were completed committed to their Judaism. They passed that on to me and in case you didn’t know, it was in last week’s chopped liver and tonight’s kugel.
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