Uprooted

I’ve spent much of life thinking about food. Loving it. Hating it. Resenting its allure. Only now, deep in my adulthood, has the chatter about food been muted in my psyche. That’s purely a function of my GLP-1, which is gradually taking the roundness from my belly. I couldn’t possibly control my appetite without it. For decades, I have been in thrall to what I eat. They say that when I moved to solid foods, the only thing I would eat was lamb chops. Since I have an authentic memory of those childhood meals, it must have gone on for a very long time.

Some of this, of course, was over-determined. I grew up in a kosher home, moderately observant, but very careful about diet. We were a middle-class family, but we had many sets of dishes, meat and dairy, Passover, and “regular.” It meant multiple distinctions between can and can’t, and embedded patterns of permissibility.

This had very little to do with the cuisine itself. My mother was an indifferent cook, scripted, instead, for a life in the world. She felt trapped by the routines of the kitchen and launched herself as soon as she could. She had very happy memories of the dishes of her childhood—chremslach, gribenes, taiglach et al.—and she rolled their fragrant names on her tongue with a kind of longing, of sighing nostalgia. But when it came to actually making them in our kitchen, she treated them all like versions of kryptonite. My own experience was sparsely furnished. We had bagels and lox, and pastrami on rye. I know from my reading that Polish Jews ate more.

But my parents were already the children of immigrants. Whatever pleasure they once took in boiled tongue, I think they were happy to put it behind them. European Jews made their cuisine out of poverty: tough cuts of meat, groats, and potatoes. I’ve read the cookbooks, but I don’t feel the appeal. Apart from that, the Poland in which many of these dishes took shape is a ruined civilization, a gruesome catastrophe. Even if those dishes were originally delectable, they would refer us to a world that no longer exists. There is no homeland in which they could continue to evolve.

Our situation, in other words, is disrupted and aberrant, one of the many overhanging losses of our history. The result for me is both grievance and envy. We were in New York last week, and I had a superlative meal. The scene was Szechuan Mountain House in midtown Manhattan. As always, I chose from the vegetarian menu, and each dish was the best version I had ever tasted. The food was alive, irresistible, compelling. Spicy, charred beans never tasted so good. And all around us in the clamor were young Asian diners nourishing their bellies and enlarging their souls. The chatter was alive with English and Chinese and a cosmopolitan at-homeness in many different cultures.

It was what I have always wanted for myself and other Jews, to have an authentic connection to the world before my own in a set of inputs that go beyond memory. Not a reconstructed world, but a living civilization that communicates its values, its experience and its mindset in direct, powerful and captivating ways. So much has been lost. Can any of it be restored?