Originally posted on 3/16/2012
As you can probably tell, this is going to get a little Jewish.
So I’ve been reading Ruth Reichl’s terrific memoir Tender At the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. It’s dangerous when I read food books – I either end up jealous, hungry, or wanting to write one of my own.
Reichl writes beautifully and about a million different incredible food-type things, but mostly she’s made me want to cook Jewish food. Tonight, in fact, I made matzoh brie, inspired by her description of making it for her high school friends late at night while her parents were out of town. She talks about making it with sticks and sticks of butter. I almost never cook with butter, but I used some tonight. Not a lot! But enough to really brown the onions and matzoh, to crisp them the way oil doesn’t.
But it still didn’t turn out right. I’ve never been able to make Jewish food in California. It could just be because I don’t really know how – though my grandmothers make some great classic Jewish food like matzoh ball soup and pot roast, I never learned how to make it myself. Why make what your grandmother makes for you, even if she only does it once a year?
All my friends have heard me whine about bagels in California. It’s my West Coast Holy Grail, and I’m still on a quest to find it. Why is that? Why can’t people make really good bagels out here? I’ve heard all the dumb arguments about the water and the whatever, but I don’t buy it. Californians can make anything taste good. Everyone in the world seems to come here to cook and to eat. And yet I have tried a lot of kinds of bagels, even the ones people say are “authentic,” and…no dice. Their texture isn’t right, and they’re bland. Bagels have a taste, you guys! Bagels are supposed to have a taste without adding cream cheese or raisins or seeds of various kinds.
It’s like – there’s this place in Berkeley, Saul’s, that’s supposed to be this sustainable, organic, ethical blahblahblah Jewish deli. Like many restaurants in the so-called Gourmet Ghetto (see: Chez Panisse), Saul’s is truly great. I had one of the best corned beef sandwiches I’ve ever had in my life there, and their potato pancakes are ah-mahzing. But it’s weird being an East Coast Jew in a place like Saul’s, because places like that feel kind of…judgy. We love Jewish delis! But we want to take the Jewish deli and “improve” it, make it more “moral,” less gross. I never thought I’d be this person, but I like the Jewish deli the way it is! I’ve never found a good Jewish deli out here either, and it makes me sad.
Of course missing food is often not really about the food. It’s about the people. I miss my family. My family are the kind of East Coast Jews that Hollywood loves, dropping Yiddish and making jokes. My grandparents on my mom’s side grew up in Long Beach, Long Island. My grandfather was the son of a butcher; my grandmother was one of five children of a self-made millionaire. My dad grew up in New York – mostly Queens – and his mother lived there until she was 60.
My grandparents were classic model minorities, back when Jews were the immigrant group to emulate – they pushed education as the most important thing a person could acquire, they networked and stuck together, they tried to pass. They’re successful and unashamed of it because they worked damn hard for it.
I wasn’t raised religious, but I was raised 100% culturally Jewish. I miss it.
The Bay Area is a weird place to be a Jew. I speak of course only from my own experience, and won’t attempt to generalize. But I’ve often felt strange here, exotic – which makes no sense, because there are Jews in the Bay Area. I’ve been told there are quite a few. Somehow, though, I don’t know any of them, or if I do, we don’t talk about it. Jews seem very quiet here about their Jewishness. Every year I’ve been here for Hannukah (which has been almost every year for five years – though I’ve gone East for Christmas, I often didn’t leave until just before) I’ve struggled to find Hannukah candles to light my menorah. I’ll never forget the year my well-meaning roommate asked a clerk at Target where they kept their Hannukah candles. What’s that? the clerk asked. I thought: Really?
Recently I’ve been re-watching episodes of Season One of The O.C., a show I’ll still stick by in terms of its dialogue (at least early on) and it suddenly struck me how Jewish that show is. Like – Sandy Cohen, as ridiculous as he is, reminds me of so many of my family members. Well-meaning, a little too self-righteous, self-deprecating, always joking. Not that Jews have a monopoly on any of these characteristics, mind you. All I’m saying is Sandy feels familiar, and if I’m honest with myself, I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a Seth Cohen – awkward, funny, maybe a bit tied up in my own head, never quite fitting in. Kind of in love with the blue-eyed Anglo kid who’s tougher and sexier and says less stupid things because he just says less? There is no story more Jewish than that.
At the moment I’m in the process of making some serious life decisions that may very well mean leaving the Bay Area and moving back East. Yesterday I spoke with my grandmother on the phone about it, and mentioned how I miss being near family, and by extension, other Jews. She told me the story of the first time she went to Florida, and how it was amazing to her partly because it was the first time in her life she’d been “a Jew among Jews.” Even in New York, she said, that had never been true.
I realized, in that moment, that this is true for me too. I’ve almost never been a Jew among Jews. In elementary school in D.C., I was always the only Jew in my class, the kid who got called on to tell the story of Hannukah like my big nose meant I was born knowing it by heart. In private high school I knew more Jewish kids but not many, and all of us were too politically correct and brainwashed by our funky alternative curriculum to talk about it anyway. In college in Minnesota, I went to a seder held by the Jewish student group and felt like a failure when I realized the whole thing was done in Hebrew.
Now in California, I’m too “New York” for Berkeley—even though I’m not New York at all.
Let me just say – I am not advocating the re-ghettoization of the Jews, like my life would have been better if I’d been raised with less diversity or something. I love that I’ve been fortunate enough to know so many people from so many different places and backgrounds, and California has exposed me to more new and wonderful things than I can even name. But there is part of me that wishes I could have it all – the comfort of my Barry Levinson/Woody Allen/Aaron Sorkin-esque Jewish family, and the excitement of everyone else too.
As my grandmother might say, would that we could all have these problems.
And hey, if anyone knows where to find a great bagel in the Bay Area, they should hook me up.