by Yvonne Fein
What do you think about, Hannah Arendt? Claire wondered. How would you classify such pain—theirs, my mother’s, and mine? There was little comfort to be gleaned when Claire contemplated what might have awaited her grandparents on the cold ocean floor. She found it hard to believe they would meet God in his Oneness, full of holy desire to reclaim the sparks they had gathered for him at such great cost to themselves.
In the end Claire knew that the boat was never found, and it made her glad, their total vanishing. It left open the question of their final destination. Who was to say where they ultimately alighted?
For it had always seemed to her that in the water, but especially on boats, people are somehow stripped of their humanity. They are a cluster of indeterminate refugees, clinging to the sides, hoping their vessel won’t capsize. They are nameless and stateless. It is not until they stride the firmness of the earth—whether struggling from the primordial ooze for the very first time or leaving that ark beached improbably upon the mountain; either emerging from the Red Sea, or disembarking at Port Melbourne after the German nightmare, or even finding sanctuary in Germany after the Syrian nightmare—that they can hope to lay claim to any sort of distinctive identity. But hasn’t it always been so, since the very first child rode the very first wave out of the womb and into the light?
Ex post facto, surely the dean would understand. He had to be able to make the connection between her grandparents’ boat, their wild dash towards oblivion, and her own fierce leap into an academic chasm, challenging the conformist stance in memory of her grandparents’ bravery.
She ripped open the envelope. At a glance she read the dean’s note.
‘Dear Ms Gold…’
She closed her eyes, as though not looking at his words might somehow change them. Still, she thought she could understand his thought process, could actually peer over his shoulder as he took a blade to her dreams.
Bloody Jews, he would have whispered as the keys beneath his fingers began to click.
NACHMAN’S RECIPE
Ninety-nine, stormily independent, all faculties firing, my grandmother did not die of cancer, malfunction of the kidneys or failure of the heart. Which cells would dare run riot in her body, which organs fail? She died because it was time and she was ready. But she rang me first. On a Friday. At midnight. Which meant it was already the Sabbath, so I could not pick up the phone. But I could hear her voice on the machine and if she was calling for me, I had to come, even if it meant a longish walk through rain-spattered streets. Driving, of course, was not permitted on the Sabbath, either.
‘Nathan,’ she said, but gently. ‘My Nachman,’ she said, even more gently, so that my heartbeat scuttled. She used my Yiddish name so rarely that surely it boded ill.
‘Nachman, it’s time. In fact, it’s past time.’ She paused, holding her left hand aloft. It was gloved in a much-mended sock which, for reasons best known to herself and to God, she had decided to darn yet again. At midnight. On the Sabbath. Also forbidden.
‘Did I ever tell you what Nachman means?’
‘That’s why you called me here? Nanna, it’s Shabbes, its midnight, it’s raining.’
‘The name itself means “the one who comforts”. I know you know that; but it has what your grandfather, may he greet me at the gates to the Garden of Eden, used to call “constituent parts”. Chemists talk like that. In German, not a language I care to use too often, nach means “after”, mann means “man”. So you are my Nachman, my Afterman. Because you came after.’
‘After what?’
‘After the idiot doctor told your mother she was barren. Anyway, that’s another story and we don’t have time for other stories. Now is the time for me to give you the recipe.’
‘What recipe?’
It seemed all I had were baffled questions.
‘For chicken soup. Every rabbi should have one, especially you. It will change the direction of your relationship with your basherte, the one whose destiny is intertwined with yours.’
‘Nanna, I don’t even have a girlfriend.’
‘Old, yes. Senile, no. Of course, you don’t have a girlfriend; but eventually you’ll find her. Your basherte. You’re twenty-five, you’re handsome, intelligent; you make a good living—’where I was concerned, my Nanna was not rigorously objective—‘and when the time comes, you’ll have the secret weapon.’
So she spoke in great detail, mainly in Yiddish. She began with the kind of pot best suited to the enterprise and ended with a fragrant and savoury elixir.
‘You’ll know when it’s ready because it will be gold and glistening. Then you must add fine, handmade noodles and shavings of the whitest chicken breast to float on top.’
She paused and looked at me to make sure I was listening.
‘Now I don’t expect you to remember all that, so I have written it down.’
She fished inside the sleeve of her nightgown to retrieve thin pages of closely written Yiddish script.
‘Take it. Make sure you make copies and, of course, you must keep the original in your recipe box in the kitchen.’
‘Nanna, I—’
‘I know. Why should a twenty-five-year-old, handsome, intelligent man who makes a good living—or would if he could find a decent job—have a recipe box? Take mine. Mine! What can truly be owned by a mortal being? It belonged to your great grandmother and her grandmother before her. And to all the grandmothers since the time of Esther in Persia. You are the first man worthy of receiving it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you are one of the few who could pull himself back.’
‘From where?’
‘I think you know.’
Something stirred inside my mind. For a moment I thought I had it; then it was gone. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’
‘Not now,’ she replied. ‘No time, no time,’ for a moment sounding more like the white rabbit than my grandmother.
‘You’ll find out soon enough. It’s not over.’
I felt a frisson of unease.
‘Now, the box is in the cupboard on the shelf over the stove. It is made of the finest rosewood and has compartments for soups, main courses, for desserts, for Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus—’
She seemed to catch herself, even at this last of moments, and halted her rambling. ‘Never mind all that. Just listen to me and take it home.’
‘After Shabbes, Nanna.’
‘Now. Take it, carry it. It’s no sin. You don’t want to come back and have to fight with your cousins about it. There’ll be enough fighting without the recipe box when I’m gone, believe me.’
I stood there, not really understanding.
‘Nu? You stuck to my floor or what? Go home already. I need to sleep. Oy, I need to sleep, Nachman. If you knew how tired I was…Come kiss me, my boy. A mother’s not supposed to have favourites, I know, but a grandmother? A grandmother can do what she likes. You, I always loved the best. Go explain, Nachman, my golden one. Because, between you and me, you might be twenty-five; but that intelligent, that handsome—only a grandmother could see it in you.’
I wasn’t shocked or even disappointed by her admission. I felt like cheering her for finally uttering the truth. For myself, I knew exactly how unremarkable I was.
‘So go explain,’ she repeated with the same softness that had awakened the feeling of dread inside me. ‘Even after all that has happened, I still see the rainbow in your neshama, my Nachman. Not everyone has a rainbow in their soul. But you? God blessed you with His promise and gave you such soft bright colours to dance inside you all the days of your life. So go explain. It makes you too gentle, too mild. A man shouldn’t be so kind that a woman thinks he is simply a bunch of grapes to be trampled till he oozes sweet red wine for her pleasure.’
‘Nanna—’
‘Remember it, Nachman. You cannot go back down there.’
>
Down where? I wanted to ask but no words came. What did she know that I didn’t?
‘You stand there like a Golem,’ she said. ‘Go home already.’
I approached her and placed my lips on her cool papery brow. I inhaled her essence as it rose from her scalp: a fragrant vapour of lavender oil, milk of magnesia, Marlboro Lights which she thought no one knew she smoked, and a faint tang of crisply fried onions. The smell of those onions had always pervaded her house, even beyond the front door and out into the street.
Then I went to the cupboard and hauled down the box, dismayed at its weight. She saw my expression and laughed. ‘God will help you carry it. He looks after His own.’
‘He probably expects me, or any of His rabbis, not to carry things through the streets on Shabbes night.’
‘He expects you, and all His rabbis, to listen to their elders. And while I remember, you see that walking stick in the corner? Take that too. It is made of sandalwood with an ivory handle. A beautiful thing.’
‘Why would I need—?’
‘Don’t ask so many questions, Nachman. You never know. Just take it and let me sleep. It is time.’
And so I took a final look at her, drinking her, breathing her. She knew the look, understood the breath.
‘Ah, Nachman, boychick, you, I’ll miss,’ she said softly, the last words she uttered to a living being. She died that night, I hope in her sleep, a righteous soul, albeit a little cavalier about the laws of the Sabbath. She went back to her God on His day of rest when He would have time to spend with her, listen to her and rock her in His great arms. The wretchedness of her early, her earthly life—fences that had sizzled on the skin of her siblings, showers that washed her parents away—would leave her, allowing her to float away lightly, lightly, like the finest noodles shivering on the clearest broth.
There are singing rabbis and dancing rabbis, teaching rabbis and congregational rabbis. There are circumcision rabbis, counselling rabbis and rabbis who specialise in performing upbeat versions of Grace after Meals at weddings and bar mitzvahs. And there are rabbis who only do eulogies.
Me? Most recently I have become a cooking rabbi. What exactly is a cooking rabbi? A cooking rabbi is a rabbi who cooks.
My grandmother knew this vocation was inside me long before she made me a present of her recipe box. She would watch as I balanced on a small ladder beside my mother at the kitchen bench. There I would poke sticky fingers into the satisfying resilience of a raw meatloaf mixture. Go, as she might have said, explain.
I tried teaching; my students just laughed at me. Eventually ignored me. Which was the kindest thing they could have done. I’ve heard horror stories about the persecution of rabbis by their bokhrim, their boy students, which would stagger an Obersturmbahnführer, so I suppose I was lucky. I’d walk in, put my books on the desk and they would resume their playing of battleships or launching of paper aeroplanes. Sometimes they would even prepare work for teachers with longer, stronger arms than my own. My classroom was an easy-going place until the day the Rosh Yeshiva, the head, stormed in unannounced. He did a spot quiz on the laws of Passover which each one of my students, to a boy, should have had a clear grasp of by now. Regrettably each one of them, to a boy, failed the interrogation with spectacular solidarity.
After my dismissal I did a few weddings, a few bar mitzvahs, a few funerals, but I wasn’t a natural. I didn’t have the requisite zest to celebrate occasions with people who were total strangers. I couldn’t mourn with families who had only engaged me because their own rabbi was on a cruise or possibly dying himself.
For a while I delivered flowers on Fridays for families who wanted blooms to brighten their Shabbes. I even signed on with another Hasid to do a bit of gardening. That wasn’t so bad—outdoors, honest labour—but I think we ended up smoking as much grass as we mowed.
Then one day—because my grandmother in heaven is making sure magic happens—I saw an ad on the noticeboard at Glick’s, makers of fine bagels, rolls and the sweetest, softest challah on either side of the equator. Friday afternoon, mad pre-Shabbes panic, with old Mr Glick contributing to the mayhem by ignoring the number system and serving all the pretty girls first. And there it was on the noticeboard: Cook wanted.
I removed my glasses and cleaned them. Not ‘book wanted’, or ‘chook’ or ‘schnook’.
Five bokhrim and five bakhurot—boys and girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty—had come out from Israel four months ago and were living in quarters close by the Yeshiva. In lieu of their final year of military service, the boys were learning biblical text six days a week and the girls had teaching positions in the kindergarten. They studied text part-time. All were under the supervision of an Israeli rabbi and his wife, a teaching team who had come out with them to act as surrogate parents, psychiatrists and police officers.
Now they needed a cook. Urgently. The first had walked off the job.
‘He became provoked when the students wouldn’t eat,’ the rabbi said to me at my second interview. ‘He would tell me, “I used to run a restaurant and now what I cook isn’t good enough? They got something against boiled beef, boiled tongue, boiled chicken, boiled potatoes…?”
‘He boiled everything. I think he even boiled his shoes. So the students began to put on weight.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t—’
‘They were hungry. They couldn’t eat his food, so they bought chocolate and potato chips, every kind of candy and soft drinks to wash it all down.’ He grew serious. ‘I hope you won’t send them out onto the streets like that.’
In the beginning I cooked what I knew. Pale green or tangerine soups, pureed from leeks and zucchinis and broccoli or pumpkin, sweet potatoes and carrots. A sprinkle of cumin or Dutch cinnamon or a swirl of sour cream if the meal was vegetarian. My special talent was to take any cut of meat—fowl, beef, veal or lamb—season, marinate and baste it, bake it or roast it until it was so tender it fell to pieces under the knife. Its juices would bloom in aromatic steam. The fat on its skin would be converted to a crisp sizzle that hissed all the way from oven to table. I roasted potatoes in rosemary, garlic and olive oil. Or I mashed and seasoned them until they yielded their firmness to a creamy white froth impossible to resist. I drenched rice in my own lemon-butter mixture and stirred in herbs and spices to make a fragrant bed for salmon, tuna or sea perch fillets, swiftly seared in olive and sesame oil.
At breakfast I crushed all manner of berries and fruits, blending them into smooth nectars. I provided hot and cold cereals, pancakes, eggs, vegetarian sausages and good strong coffee to see them on their way. For lunch, the girls came in from the kindergarten and the boys left their texts to eat cold cuts and salads rolled into mountain bread wraps or atop rye bread or sourdough. No sooner had I finished clearing away the detritus of one meal than it was time to start preparations for the next. With ten students and their teachers, a few guests—invited or simply hopeful—the table rarely seated fewer than sixteen. I had never been so busy.
At four-thirty, their work finished for the day, the girls would come in once again. Eighteen-year-old Adminah, whose undergraduate research back in Israel was in the field of gender politics, was the youngest of them all. She would hoover up all foodstuffs that were left momentarily unsupervised, and was intrepid in the face of my most astringent reprimands.
‘Unusual name,’ I said when I first met her.
‘Means “Of the Red Earth”.’
‘Never heard it before.’
‘My parents were hippies. I think they made it up.’ Since then she had made herself at home in my kitchen.
‘Brisket,’ she said one afternoon, dipping her finger into the marinade and nodding approvingly. ‘It must be Tuesday.’
I rapped her knuckles with a wooden spoon. Undeterred she sampled the egg dip with a different finger and managed to gulp down a forkful of mixed bean and potato salad before I c
hased her away from the bench. She laughed and sat herself down at the kitchen table.
‘I like that you cook,’ she said. ‘Most Jewish men expect to be cooked for. It’s a refreshing role reversal.’
Not wishing to become involved in one of her dialectical discussions, I said nothing. Instead I busied myself with chopping vegetables for the soup I was going to serve that night. She looked at all the ingredients.
‘Mondays, fish,’ she said. ‘Tuesdays brisket; Wednesdays lamb; Thursdays vegetarian surprise. For “surprise” read mushroom quiche or zucchini frittata. It’s never really a surprise, is it? Fridays are always the same for Shabbat; Saturdays are leftovers and Sundays are meat loaf with hard-boiled eggs through the centre. Of course, there are soups and vegetables, desserts and fruit. I’m not complaining, you understand, but come aawn, Nathan, there has to be something else you can think of.’
She still spoke like a New Yorker because her parents had emigrated to Israel when she was fifteen. American—not English—was always going to be her mother tongue. The odd word had acquired an Israeli lilt and her syntax occasionally collapsed when she was mid-argument and passionate.
‘The only thing I can think of right now,’ I told her, ‘is that those shelves in the cupboard above the refrigerator haven’t been cleaned properly since before Passover. If you want to stay in here, take the ladder from the pantry, find a shmatte and start wiping.’
‘How come I always get the cleaning gig? I should have gone out with the others to play baseball. Israelis aren’t so good at it so if you saw me play, you’d know why the team needs me.’
‘If you’re that good you shouldn’t have come in here,’ but I smiled as I said it.
‘I’ve knocked the ball right out of the park. More than once.’
‘Sounds dangerous.’
‘When it has to be.’
She fell silent, but I knew she wouldn’t leave. Her fascination with all things culinary came second only to her delight in tasting dishes as they progressed toward completion. Yet to this day, I don’t know what compelled me to direct her to those shelves. Was my grandmother really keeping such close watch over me?
