Hot on the Trail

So, if you’re following this, you know that my hunt for the history of the knish began with an obsession with a family knish store. Not my family, but felt like it. Mrs. Stahl’s of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. The knish destination of my father and his forebears. The kind of place you take for granted… until it’s gone.

When it vanished I sprang into action – found out the recipe was bought by an Italian guy, also of immigrant stock. And since then I’ve been cavorting around New York, Poland, Israel in search of the knish. I come from a mixed marriage– Bronx and Brooklyn, but I’m 100 percent knish, through and through. My Bronx relatives are from Knyszyn, Poland.

But, back to Brooklyn. What’s the big deal about this photo?
It’s from the New York City Municipal Archives, for one. 1980. The system works based on lot numbers and block numbers. Adn thankfully, the researcher helping me out had the good sense to look at the lot number next to the one I was searching for and voilà. I have other photos that show the storefront full on, but I like this one for the context and for the teamwork that got it into my hands. This part of my research is sponsored by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University for a section of the book project called Knish Sister: Mrs. Stahl, the Sholom Auxiliary, Bella Sherman and me.

Stay tuned for more on these visionary ladies who know how to roll in (and out) the dough.

Kindred

“The more we are ourselves,
the more we can invite the audience in.”

one of the great quotes about art-making and life here at the Conney Conference in Madison, WI.

A knish baking session with dancers, artists, academics. A talk about Knish Reminiscence and a lecture for an undergrads in a class Food in Rabbinic Judaism. The majority of them had never encountered a knish. The first question from a student:

Q: What does a knish taste like?

A: The answer: a taste the previous day’s output.

Bursting Out All Over

Spring is, at least in these parts. And with spring, the knish, too, sprouts eternal.

I’m getting ready to go to Madison, WI for the Conney Conference on Jewish Arts. Knish-making, after all, is a Jewish art, is it not? One need not be Jewish to produce or enjoy the fruits of the knish.

But, of course, it can’t hurt. Nor can it hurt to make another appearance at the Mustard Museum in Middleton.
Years ago, maybe 15 or more, my folks and I went to Wisconsin. They celebrated their anniversary with a weekend at Seth Low Cabin and I stopped by to visit. They went on to visit the Mustard Museum, and I was downtrodden to have missed this special pilgrimmage.

Just goes to show, we never know what’s in store.

Bring It On Home!

Wow, thanks everyone.
We’ve got backers across the U.S., Canada, Israel and perhaps even… [insert your location here?]

Knish + Halloween = One Big Yellow Costume

Read about the square get-up on the Huffington Post and the Forward’s Jew and the Carrot blog.  It’s not just pomp, persuasion and fancy pants: I’m also working on grant applications for some moola ($10K…) and a workspace. Wish me luck…

Give a click if you’d like to join the movement. Thanks very much. Hugs and knishes.

The Difference Between Cholent and Peace

Cholent, a secret agent of peace?

I’m honored. And humbled.

In a first-ever e-mail addressed to Knish Hunter (well said!),
native Yiddish speaker and soulful singer Wolf Krakowski
kindly pointed out my most-fallible phoneme mix up:

Hi Knish Hunter:

I sing “shulim” (sholem) not  ”cholent”
in “Shabes, Shabes.”

It’s my poylish dialekt.

blaab gezint ‘n shtark
un hob a git, gezint yor

Quite a thrill to get an email from the guy whose music you
listen to near daily, I must say. And, on the eve of Yom Kippur,
I echo his sentiments:

Stay healthy and strong.
And have a good, healthy year.

Amen to that.  Here’s to a year replete with Poylish dialect and
cross-cultural, cross-national, heart-filled encounters.

Goldening the Lilly or Vice Versa

Thank you Lilly Foundation.

Really I can think of no other entity that has made such a difference in a girl’s (this one’s) life. First you send me to NYU to study Hebrew and all the benefits that that entails — the library, the student I.D., the all-around access, the no-hold barred-ness of it all. The contact with people half my age. Oy veys.

Then you pay for my Yiddish, a veritable smorgasbord, an onslaught of learning and niceness and emotion. It leaves me weeping silently in class, tears (trern) streaming, bleeding my face, invisible. Perl didn’t notice, I don’t think. But several times it was just too much. How could I tell her I hate Chad Gadya — and don’t know what it means — because in lieu of pride we harbor shame and underbelly. We skulk around the table and can’t wait for it to be over and eaten and forgotten. Yiddish is different. An alternate taste. Something sweet and savory and from the ground, like these dandelions (not lillies, sorry) from Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter’s Plant Names in Yiddish.

Growth. Natural things. Sprouting. An ushering forth. Anyhow, here’s my report to the Lilly Foundation:

The Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture of New York University and YIVO provided an intensive month and a half of learning, critical thinking and investigation. Daily courses in language and literature (supplemented with films, afternoon workshops in songs, research, reading handwriting and thrice weekly conversation/ reading courses) made this a full-time experience, which meant I had to tend to freelance assignments on weekends and in the wee hours.

The brochure for the program has an image of the 1920s New York City skyline and Yiddish block letters advertising “America – Das Land Fun Vunder” (America, Land of Wonder). I hoped to recapture that feeling of New York as a place of struggle, opportunity, an ingathering of immigrants at a time when Jewish life and languages were part of the fabric of the Lower East Side. In conjunction with my Book of Knish project, I wanted to get a firm introduction to the language of the knish and the mother tongue of people who brought it to live and sustained it as a staple of Jewish immigrant life, eking out a living and building a better future.

Up Close and In Person
It was refreshing – and sometimes a bit overwhelming — to spend four-and-a-half hours in the semi-circle a classroom five days a week.  The courses were engaging, challenging and offered varied approaches to learning Yiddish through group work, partner work, songs, readings and conversations. The syllabi were well thought out and the students (almost entirely graduate students) were serious about learning.  We had to be: with two hours of homework a night and in-class follow-ups to the previous night’s work, there was little margin for slacking on one’s heym-arbet.

We had midterms, finals, weekly compositions and a book report. All of this reinforced classroom learning and helped me find a community of like-minded learners, interested in Jewish history, from religious, linguistic and cultural perspectives.

Community of Learners
It was a mekhaye (a pleasure) to be a part of this intensive program that helped me view the world through a Yiddish lens for the better part of a New York City summer. The instructors were professionals with a clear grasp of their subject matter and a die-hard work ethic.

Extra-curricular activities, including a Friday night dinner for all program participants, and a tour of Yiddish writers’ gravesites in a Queens cemetery, provided opportunities to develop friendships and initiate conversations outside of the classroom.  I gained a sturdy foundation in Yiddish reading and writing skills (as in Hebrew, spelling still remains a weak point and I would like my reading to be more fluid).

Our beginners’ class had 15 students and a great vibe. Two students were Hebrew majors from Warsaw whose research interests paralleled my own (one is focusing on the work of Janusz Korcjak, the other on Mordechai Tennenbaum, a hero of the Bialystok Ghetto), a future rabbi, a Gomorrah scholar, graduate students from Montana to Maryland; New Haven to Nashville. I enjoyed the camaraderie of smart, enthusiastic people willing to take risks.

The Real Thing
I gained a sense of Yiddish as a real language and way of life—not just a source of one-liners, complaints, curses and diminutives. And this knowledge of the language provided me with inroads into people and places that figure prominently in my research. A high point of the course was reading a beginners’ version of the Yiddish Forward called Vayter (ahead) by Abraham Cahan, the founder and first editor of the Yiddish daily – about his impressions of a visit to Israel in the 1920s.

Our conversation and reading teacher, Perl (Paula) Teitelbaum, a native speaker of Yiddish and gifted instructor fluent in five other languages, was particularly inventive and thoughtful in her methods of imbuing us with Yiddish skills. For example, when we learned words for family members, she provided finger puppets, so we could have the option of discussing family structures different from our own. She used Cuisenaire rods to introduce the dative, accusative and nominative cases, which provided tactile experience and opportunities for repetition and for fun. To introduce songs, she first handed out a sketch of the action in the song for us to discuss and distill (in Yiddish, of course) and once we were comfortable with the ideas, she introduced the words and music.

Her approach was not only helpful on the academic front; it gave me insight into the processes (and patience) involved in processing language and absorbing new information – very useful as I distill hundreds of pages of notes as part of my book project. Another perk of being part of a university community: I have had access to NYU’s extensive collection of Yiddish music and sound recordings, which has helped me keep the language in my ears and I write the knish book.

Oy Vey, What a Workload
The promotional materials for the course were not clear about the time commitment necessary – and the preliminary schedule (attached with this report, along with course syllabi) was predominantly in Yiddish and not forthcoming about what was optional.

Occasionally, grammar lessons relied on materials better suited for younger students (i.e. learning words for objects in a dorm room). I would have liked more contact with native Yiddish speakers (two of our three teachers learned Yiddish as part of their doctoral studies), more exposure to the history of New York’s Yiddish theaters and more discussion of the future of the language.

A Shaynem Dank
Thank you for your generous support. This course stretched me and introduced me to new words and ways of thinking — about religion, writing and human interaction. The course was a huge boon to my research and to my work. I grew, as a writer, as a human being and came in contact with people of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. And, special bonus: at the graduation ceremony I was able to present, in Yiddish, a short illustrated talk about my travels in Eastern Europe and my search for the knish.

Consider the Knish: The Final Stretch

I’ve sent my presentation off to Adult Ed for Tuesday night’s shindig, and in a very rare email message from my mother’s account, Mickey the Mustardeur (aka my dad) reports that his latest homemade batch is ready to go. It’s five-star (his term, echoed by friends who have tried it) and several alarm, à la chili.  It’s going to be spicy, kiddies.

And I can only hope the same for my talk and slide show, which will obviously include a special post-Passover State of the Knish address. I can’t reveal any of that before the fact, of course, but I will let you in on some of my planning for the talk. I started out with this schematic, handily posted in my living room, which covers the bulk of my knish research over, oh, say, the last five years.

It morphed quite a bit and now focuses on six of the original ideas on the post its, but that’s the joy and the rigor of editing.

Now to practice the delivery. And yes, there will be homebaked knishes on hand.

A Few Words About the Pesadik Knish

First off, Pesadik is not a bad word.

It comes from Yiddish and means Pesach-y or Passover-like. JewFAQ describes “dik” as a Yiddish adjective suffix, which translates as: set aside for, suitable for, in the mood for, “-ish”). Pesach means burnt offering. I hope that does not describe your knishes, with or without leavening agents. Check out this line-up of flour-free knishes. What better way to ring in Spring and this season of liberation?

Broccoli knishes
Bring on the matzoh meal and mashed potatoes

Mini Matzah Meal Knishes
from Penina W. Freedenberg in Rockville, MD

Sweet Potato Passover Knishes
from Megan Telpner of Toronto, who makes luscious pockets of pure love

And some live action courtesy of sabasenders:

More on the knish as agent of liberation in days to come.

A Knishmaker’s Work Continues

No way I want anyone at the Consider the Knish talk to go hungry. A big knish order calls for some elbow grease, kneading and plain old handiwork. No one in my family made knishes when I was growing up. They were something you bought on the street. Cheap, easy food.

But yesterday, whcn I covered my kitchen table in seventy some odd circles of dough topped with pyramids of potato and onion, they were anything but easy. I channeled the ancestors: Nana, who changes all the dishes for Passover; Gramma, who made immeasurable batches of apple sauce pinked and sweet stuffed cabbage; and the ones I never met, who sustained generations. Wow, it is not easy to manufacture a lot of edibles. After the first half dozen came out of the oven, I cracked open a beer. Three mounds of dough loomed and I had to run out for onions to make a new round of innards. A knish without onions is like the Jewish people without tsuris (troubles). *  I sliced the onions and welled up. Not an emotional thing, but an hommage to women of every background who urge food into shape, put it on the table and wait until everyone has been served to eat.

My kitchen still has the scent of fried onions. I handed off a few beers to a friend who came over to sample knishes (he ate four, with some of my dad’s homemade mustard, so I guess they’re OK) and am sweeping out crumbs, getting rid of bread and heading out to a seder.

It’s not so kosher to stash the knishes in the freezer for Passover, but that’s where they are. And, as Barry Levenson, the founder of the Mustard Museum, intoned, eating a knish is a holy act, one that could even cause a person, i.e., him, to bend the rules of the holiday. He’s of Ashkenzi descnet, but come Pesach, he flips into Sephardic mode, which permits the ingestion of mustard during the holiday. Who can blame the guy?

* I just made that up, but I’m sure someone else said it before.

Hot, Hot, Hot!

The week before Passover is all about getting rid of bread products — taking a good, hard look at the extra floury stuff in one’s life, and getting rid of it.

I bought more flour and had ten friends help me urge it into knishes. Here’a a preview.

You can sample one post-Passover, the night right after the holiday ends, I’ll be giving a talk as part of the Adult Ed lecture series, Homemade and Homespun edition.