The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  When she wasn’t cooking, she cleaned. I woke to the sounds of furniture dragged across the floor, rugs beaten, appliances wheeled. Cleaning was my mother’s form of meditation; it was also the one thing she could control. Her world may have fallen apart, but at least she had clean surfaces, laundered clothes, food on the table.

  Even when we couldn’t afford brand-name jeans or pocket money, our fridge was always full. My mother found ways to prepare meals on a tight budget—simple recipes that called for basic ingredients. She calculated her garlic usage for a whole year and bought dozens of bulbs when they were cheap. She ground them all, filled jars with the pulp, and froze them: two rows lining the shelves of the freezer door like teeth. For a whole week, the smell of garlic floated through our house; it stuck to our clothes and hid in the toothpaste, clinging to our hair like campfire smoke.

  My mother fed me, did my laundry, cleaned my room, but it wasn’t enough. I followed her around as she worked, trying to engage her in conversation. When that failed, I found more effective ways to get her attention.

  We fought about everything: my performance at school, my fashion sense, my messy room, my friends. I screamed that I hated her, stomped my feet, and slammed doors. She told me that I was ungrateful, that one day I’d have a daughter just like me. At the end of tenth grade, after my dedicated work at the teen magazine led to five failing grades, for which I was nearly expelled, my mother demanded that I focus on my studies and threatened to put restrictions on my job, which made me feel deeply wronged and misunderstood, a truly tortured artist. How dare she go after my writing? Our relationship became so strained that once she passed me by on the street and didn’t even acknowledge me.

  “The problem,” my brother once said, “is that you’re too much alike.”

  I snorted. “We’re nothing alike.”

  I became a fickle eater. I hated cilantro, despised tomatoes, detested eggplants. I subsisted on hot dogs at the stand outside my high school, and burgers and fries at MacDavid, the kosher fast-food chain that predated McDonald’s in Israel. Then I discovered restaurants, where I began conducting many of my interviews, charging the magazine with the expenses.

  My family never went to restaurants. My mother thought paying for prepared food was foolish, considering her cooking was the best out there and came for free. For my mother, eating out meant us standing on the sidewalk in front of Falafel Nadav in downtown Petah Tikva, lit by a broken neon sign, and biting into our bursting pita pockets, bowing to keep tahini from dripping over our clothes.

  Now I was ordering shrimp, calamari, cheeseburgers with bacon: things my kosher mother would never touch. Sometimes I even ordered schnitzel. Maybe it was the thin slices, the lack of garlic, or my guilt that soured it, but it was never as good as hers.

  CHICKEN LIVERS

  MY FIRST APARTMENT IN TEL AVIV was a two-bedroom on Dizengoff Street—a major artery in the heart of the city—that I shared with my best friend, Elsin. It was in an old, graceless building streaked by rain, with dark, musty stairways and a backyard strewn with garbage.

  My mother donated her entire selection of cleaning supplies, and Elsin and I scoured the apartment for two days straight. When we finished I walked barefoot on the tile floor, its touch as tantalizing as a chilled bottle of beer to a sweaty hand. My feet felt lighter, my head clearer. I never knew cleaning could feel so good. I never knew it was such hard work either; growing up, I’d been reluctant to help my mother with the housework.

  “Wow.” Elsin admired my work. “You should do this for money.”

  The next day I made a few handwritten ads: A young, energetic housekeeper for hire. I posted them on telephone poles and bulletin boards, my phone number hanging in detachable fringes. I was now, like my mother and grandmother before me, a housekeeper. In Israel’s early days, most housekeepers were Yemeni women, working for Ashkenazi families. Back then the term Yemeni in its female form was synonymous with maid.

  My first two homes were my two brothers’ bachelor apartments. Over Friday dinner at my mother’s, one of them mentioned to her, “Ayelet does an excellent cleaning job.”

  “She does?” My mother’s face stretched in astonishment.

  “Why is it so hard to believe?” I bit into a piece of challah.

  * * *

  —

  FOR DINNER ELSIN and I made pasta with sauce out of jars, pizza on pita bread, tossed salads with store-bought dressing. One day Elsin came home from her mother’s with a tray of chicken livers and suggested we prepare them the following evening. Chicken liver was a staple food we had both grown up eating. My mother made it often, fried with caramelized onions. It was a cheap source of iron, one of the many ways my mother fed an entire family on a limited income.

  The next evening I was late from work, and by the time I came home, Elsin had cooked her portion. I stared at the smooth-skinned livers in the bowl.

  “I didn’t know when you’d be coming,” she said. “You just have to fry them.”

  I chopped onions and garlic and tossed them into an oily pan, leaning backward, away from the splattering oil. I added the livers, which sizzled loudly. “It’s burning,” I yelled.

  “Lower the heat,” Elsin answered from her room.

  “There’s almost no oil left.”

  “Add some more.”

  “Won’t it splash all over me?”

  “Should be fine.”

  When the livers began to brown, I gingerly flipped them onto their sides. After a few minutes, I hollered, “How do you know when it’s ready?”

  “I don’t know,” Elsin said. “Intuition?”

  I stared at the pan. “Well, can you get your intuition over here and tell me if it’s ready?”

  Elsin walked into the kitchen and looked at me in a new way. “Oh my God. Who would have thought? You have a kitchen phobia.”

  My face reddened. “I just…I never really learned to cook.”

  She stirred the livers and then turned off the gas. “You know, it’s never too late.”

  JICHNOON

  ISRAELIS LIKE TO ASK EACH OTHER, “What’s your background?” since most families are originally from somewhere else. Once they know your heritage, they can conjure the smell of your parents’ kitchen: couscous or gefilte fish, rice or potatoes, spicy or bland. When Israelis discover that I’m Yemeni, their eyes often glaze in envy.

  “Does your mother make jichnoon every Saturday?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “How about malawah?”

  “Yes,” I say. In fact, my mother prepares dough for malawah, flattens it between sheets of parchment paper, and stacks them in the freezer, so at any given time, I could throw one in a pan. I don’t tell them that. It would just be cruel.

  * * *

  —

  IN A COUNTRY riddled with cultural prejudice, the stereotypes associated with Yemenis over the years have ranged from romanticizing to fetishizing to patronizing. When they first arrived in Israel, Yemeni immigrants were considered savage and primitive. A fundraising film from the fifties, meant to highlight the work of Moetzet HaPoalot (Working Women’s Council), said Yemeni women are “fruitful and multiply but they need proper instructions”—instructions given by Ashkenazi women, as the film demonstrated. Growing up, I was told Yemenis were “nice,” “modest,” “satisfied with little,” and “such great singers and dancers!” These days, Yemenis are often the butt of racial jokes and the subject of mockery. But everyone seems to love our cuisine. Jichnoon and malawah have made it into the national comfort food hall of fame. Malawah is made of thin layers of puff pastry, like a crispy pancake. Jichnoon, Yemeni Shabbat bread, is rolled into croissant-like shapes, layered, and baked overnight in a special aluminum pot with a tightly sealed lid.

  Friends invited for jichnoon on Saturday morning often look over the table an
d timidly ask for a fork and knife.

  “You hear that?” we sneer. “She wants cutlery!” Taking pride in our hand-eating skill is our way of turning the prejudiced view of Yemenis as savages on its head.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW YEARS ago, my cousin Yifat moved to Vancouver with her Canadian husband and rented the apartment downstairs from Sean and me. At that point I was no longer afraid of the kitchen. After I’d moved to Canada, away from my mother’s watchful eye, and spent most of my days unemployed and alone, I began trying my hand at basic recipes I’d found on the internet. When my boyfriend and his friends complimented me on my cooking, I was encouraged to attempt more complex dishes. I became good at Indian and Thai curries, shopping at specialty stores for obscure ingredients and grinding fresh spices.

  Soon after Yifat’s arrival in the city, she invited us for a traditional Yemeni Shabbat breakfast. “It won’t be as good as your mother’s,” she warned.

  Late Friday night, the smell of jichnoon started creeping through the house, and by the time I woke up on Saturday, it hovered in our apartment, thick as fog. Downstairs, Yifat served brown eggs, tomatoes grated to a pulp, and spicy bisbas, a cilantro chutney-like condiment. I tore a piece of moist jichnoon and it emitted a swirl of steam. Sean grabbed an egg and examined it. “I always wondered, what makes the eggs go brown?”

  “They’re in the oven all night with the jichnoon.” I laid a spoonful of bisbas on my plate.

  “Do you cook them first?”

  I hesitated. “I think?”

  “How come you don’t know that? I know how to make my mom’s food.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “It takes a whole day—”

  “You don’t even know how to make bisbas. That can’t be complicated.”

  “Seriously?” Yifat said. “You never made bisbas?”

  “My mother never taught me,” I protested.

  “Why not?”

  I shifted in my chair. “Maybe she didn’t like sharing the spotlight.”

  Sean and my cousin exchanged glances.

  “Maybe you should have asked,” Sean said, yanking a piece of jichnoon and dipping it in tomato.

  BISBAS

  THE FIRST TIME I TRIED BISBAS, it bit my tongue like a bee sting. My mouth turned hot and numb, and my eyes started watering. It tasted like danger. It didn’t help that my mother sometimes threatened to put it in my mouth if I was bad.

  Bisbas, a green paste made of cilantro and garlic and sprinkled with red chilies, was an essential condiment in our house, served with every meal and used the way one would use salsa or chutney. At twenty-two, after my first backpacking trip to India, I returned to Israel with a newfound appreciation for Yemeni cuisine, a fondness for fenugreek, cilantro, and turmeric, and a higher tolerance for spiciness. The first time I grabbed the jar of bisbas and spooned some onto my plate, my mother and sister paused from eating and stared at me. “What?” I said.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A pale February in Israel when Sean and I arrived for a visit, hungry from the moment we stepped into my mother’s house, ready to be fattened up. After Friday night dinner, Sean cornered my mother in her kitchen. “I’d like to learn how to make bisbas,” he said.

  “You do?” She laughed.

  “You do?” I said, choking on the water I’d just sipped.

  He looked at me. “You okay?”

  The next day, my mother invited Sean into her kitchen. I was shocked by how easy it was. I tagged along, a few steps behind, still feeling like a trespasser. I hid behind my camera, snapping shots of my mother stuffing cilantro into a meat grinder with garlic, chilies, and cumin. When strings of green spewed from the other end, they smelled like freshly cut grass. Sean wrote notes while my mother explained every step with the meticulousness of a television chef. She then filled little jars with bisbas and froze them, putting a few aside to give away to her sister, her mother, her sons.

  “Can I watch when you make tzli?” Sean said.

  My mother beamed.

  TZLI

  MY MOTHER’S TZLI is her signature dish, the main event at Friday dinners. Over the years she tried replacing it with other recipes and was faced with overwhelming dissent from my siblings. The tzli (simply translated as “roast”) is a five-ingredient wonder—chicken, potatoes, onions, oil, salt—yet somehow it makes the most satisfying, flavorful arrangement. Some days, when I miss home, it translates into a craving for my mother’s tzli that nothing else can satisfy.

  The first time I made tzli, the potatoes turned to mush and the chicken fell off the bone. The second time, the chicken and potatoes were tinted an unappealing yellow. Other times, I added too much water, burnt the onions. It seems so simple, yet I find it impossible to perfect. It’s a recipe that makes me humble.

  My mother cooks by intuition and memory, the way a musician plays an instrument without reading notes. She owns no measuring cups, no cookbooks. Her recipes call for a bit of this and a bit of that and the addition of spices according to taste. Sometimes they’re just a list of ingredients you have to rearrange like an anagram.

  “You’re sure the tzli has only salt?” I asked her after my first failed attempt. “How does it get brown out of nothing?”

  “It’s the onions,” she said. “You have to caramelize them, then add the chicken legs. Keep turning until they’re brown on all sides. Add potatoes and water. Easy.”

  * * *

  —

  ONE FRIDAY MORNING, on a visit to Israel, I woke up to the smell of fried onions and stewed chicken tickling my nose. When I stepped into my mother’s kitchen, I found all four burners at work: three covered pots and one plump eggplant laid in the blue flame. The kitchen table was covered with steaming Pyrex. At any given time, there was enough food in my mother’s kitchen to feed a small village. Relatives and friends often showed up unannounced at lunchtime.

  “There are only five of us tonight,” my mother said. “We’re having a small dinner.”

  A small Friday night dinner was still an elaborate affair: an assortment of appetizers—fried cauliflower, roasted yams with rosemary, chopped salad doused with lemon and olive oil—followed by tzli, Yemeni soup, and ugat shmarim for dessert.

  The eggplant whistled, shriveled, and blackened, thin chimneys of smoke shooting from its cracks like lit cigarettes. My mother poked the eggplant with a fork and it released a sigh. She stripped off the flaky skin, letting the meaty guts spill onto a plate. She cleaned up the burnt bits, mashed it with a fork, and added tahini, lemon, salt, and a pinch of minced garlic from a jar.

  “My eggplant salad never tastes like yours,” I said.

  “Do you burn the eggplant? You have to burn it until it’s black.”

  “I have an electric stove.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Just put it on a pan. And use a fork. No blender.”

  She seemed so eager to share her knowledge with me. Over the past few months, she had been nothing but helpful, not at all what I remembered or expected. As a child, I felt unwelcome in her kitchen. I figured she didn’t want to reveal her secrets because she needed to be indispensable. We all had our creative outlets: my siblings and I drew, painted, made music, and wrote. Cooking was her gift, her genius; if she shared that with us—then what would she have left?

  Only years later, I realized I had been wrong. Like most adolescents, I was self-absorbed and so engrossed in my own grief that I couldn’t comprehend the extent of both her tragedy and her triumph. She had lost her husband at forty-one, was left with six children to care for (which she had done swimmingly, despite the dwindling financial resources and her broken heart). It wasn’t so much that she pushed us out of her kitchen as that she was holed up in it. In a house full of kids, where she was always in demand, the kitchen w
as her sanctuary, her shelter, and she had to guard that territory jealously so she could keep going, so she could keep sane.

  We were sitting at her kitchen table when I shared that insight with her, my mother rolling jichnoon with oily fingers. As I spoke, she nodded repeatedly, without speaking, her face open and grateful, her eyes gleaming.

  YEMENI SOUP

  AT THIRTY-FIVE, I learned how to make Yemeni soup.

  It was winter in Vancouver, dreary and cold, and my naturopathic doctor advised me to eat more soups.

  I never liked Yemeni soup as a child, hated how turmeric stained my fingers yellow, scowled at the wilted cilantro, despised hilba, a ground fenugreek paste that clouded the clear soup the way water fogged arak, the Middle Eastern anise liquor. Hilba emanated from your pores the following day, a tang Yemenis were often teased for. Whenever Yemeni soup was served at my grandmother’s house, I sulked, refused to eat it, and left to play outside.

  Yemeni soup was one of the dishes my mother had learned from her mother after she got married. It was a recipe my grandmother had been taught by the aunt who raised her in Yemen, a recipe that made it through the desert and across the sea, surviving for decades, never written down.

  When my mother was a child, this soup constituted their weekly serving of meat. My grandmother gave the chicken wings to the girls so they could fly away, marry off, and the legs to the boys so they could form the foundation of the house.

  * * *

  —

  FOR ONE WEEK in November, my mother and I met in Los Angeles, where my sister and her family were living at the time. “I’m making Yemeni soup,” my mother said. “I even brought hawayij.”