Posted: September 3rd, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Insides, vegn schreibn | Comments Off
All that great writing I did yesterday? The three or four installments of 1,000 words?
The transcripts of our family time in Knyszyn which made me giggle chuckle and offered good insights and poignant, potent morsels?
Gone.
Well, I still have the audio. As for the written pages: I forgot to back them up. Or forgot to copy it to my hard disk. I didn’t backup my backup and I spaced it. I was busy with my music, which I did backup. And the rest? The pages about my first trip to Poland? Gone. About knish-infused love affairs? Also gone.
The beauty is, well, I’m not that upset. The groove is more important than the output right now. Don’t get me wrong, the output is also important. but I can catch up. More important is having begun the dredging.
Of course I do prefer to have the fruits of my labor available to sink mine teeth into, but for now, I’ll content myself with the fact that there were fruits. And I’ll remember to preserve them each day — in more than one way:
1. On my hard drive.
2. Emailing them to myself.
3. On my mobile.me/nyu accounts.
Oy vey. Better to learn this early on.
Posted: September 1st, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Whiffs and Sniffs, Yiddish | Comments Off
A smell, a feeling lingers. I’m still wrapped up in Yidish-Wokh.
At the Oyzere Pavillion, the lake house, a slice of magic, nature.
Shabbes Morning
Here, said Perl, you can see what G-d has created. If shul were like that always, I would find myself there more often. I need to soak up the vistas and spend a few minutes each day watching bees swarm the tall purple flowers.
That Afternoon
I am walking there for Mina-Lifshe’s Songs of Travel and Courtship [my guess at the word I didn't understand] when a car pulls up. “You’re Eve Sicular,” I say to the driver, because she is. I can’t tell you how I know her. Years on the Jewish culture circuit. She’s a performer. I’m an audience member. After a while these things become second nature. It’s nice to see a friendly face and to blurt out something in English.
After Shabbes, Music
After Havdolah (we sniff besomim, spices, from an industrial sized plastic container of cumin, red cover pulled back), after Shane Baker’s monologue, I am one of the first to populate the night.
Music wafts from the lake with thin streams of white Christmas lights. I want to run there. A full beckoning. I want to be the first to be swaddled in these sounds, in an experience that revives something I never lived, that gives not just lip service, but mouth to mouth resuscitation to an American Jewish tradition: the summer retreat, an act of pride and flocking with similar people.
I linger, I listen. I walk in the opposite direction to change my shoes, to eat the last granola bar. I am hungry. I arrive when the hootennany is underway. Not divided so much by young and old but more by older and younger, I hem and haw on one side and then the other and near the back, with breaks for cookies and water. I am worried about the lemonade after it swelled its way back up my esophogus.
Step Lively
The lake house shimmers and glistens and jump-jitters with shoes. smiles, the antithesis of my catskills experience. where Velvel of Rio teaches me the steps of tango — [samba would take five months he says] and passes off my tentative ayn tsvay drey fir finif (cross) zeks zeben, repeat (huh?) to a youngrabbi from the Five Towns and a guy from the Upper West Side.
It has the warmth of a junior high school dance, the night is soft and I feel safe. I linger after the encore to chat with the man who showed me our page numbers in prayer to talk about Yiddish. He has arranged an auditorship for himself in Yiddish at Harvard. I go on, in detail about the Yiddish program in NYC, in English, forgive me.
The young people, Pripitchik chorus alums (all under 25 if I’m not mistaken) break into some of their hits — Micky Mazl, which could give Annette Funicello a run for her money. I am a member of a makeshift club of maidele and yingele. And I am tired. Zise haloymes, I tell Perl when she heads off to schluffville.
I get there a little later — in bed before all my bunkmates and up before them.
So different from
Posted: August 31st, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Insides, Yiddish | Comments Off
This great art by my pal Erica Harris.
I miss Yiddish. Not just the everyday camaraderie of the classroom and not the drudge and glut of homework, but the language in my ear, to me, around me. The focus, the surrounding. I wish I had that invisible weapon — not weapon — treasure. I wish I had that intimacy, that secret, that well of words and welling, swelling of feelings that goes with it. I want the word order down pat, inserted in me, implanted.
There was no way I could have grown up with Yiddish. Nana didn’t speak ti to my mom. My mom understood it, mostly, but not to speak.
So I got the Queens English. The mama-loshen of Flushing, New York, spoken in the shadow of the Whitestone and Triboro bridges, spoken in the environs of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mrs. Chu’s Chinese Laundry and Bowne Park.
And for that dor l’dor continuity, that souvenir — real or perceived — from Eastern Europe, we used the knish. A placeholder, a lump of what was not. Something Nana never served. She nixed the knish in favor of a Hebrew name for me, on a pink-bordered certificate that says I should grow up to be a boon to my family and the Jewish people.
She wasn’t big on prepared foods, Nana wasn’t, said Cindy, my cousin, who cooks amazing expansive meals in a suburban cul-de-sac house where she and her husband now live on weekends.
Yiddish Deficiency Disorder.
The cure? For me, right now, listen to Yiddish CDs, every one I can find at the NYU library. Today Wolf Krakowski’s jazzy bongo-studded infusion of Shabbes song with backup singers that says this is what we should have in the gantze velt:
Shabbes.
Yuntif.
Tchulent (aka cholent, that hearty 24-hour cook stew. None for me, thanks, too glompy.)
Freiheit
Freyleich
Lichtig
Rachmones (mercy)
I want this Yiddish world, this insulated place, where everyone wishes a girl A Gut Shabbes, where the identity is de facto. I loved this in Israel, going for a walk on Saturday — everyone said Shabbat Shalom.
I am shy about Yiddish speaking. For all my outward baltherings and easy overtures toward strangers, it is difficult to insert myself squarely in that discomfort zone. That muttering, murmurring, squelching of the end of words to make der and di and do indestinguishable — it requires some twists of the tongue.
Posted: August 26th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Homemade | Comments Off
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.
Posted: August 24th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: bike, Brooklyn, place | Tags: french | Comments Off
Mon pannier neuf. (My new saddlebag).
I have new panniers for my red bike. The fancy metal baskets on the dearly departed Silver Wing departed with that splatter-painted steed from Cadman Plaza in March, so I opted for something a bit more sporty and waterproof. My ancient panniers were ripped to shreds (tserisene, in Yiddish) with lazy, disobedient zippers and zero waterproof-i-tude. So, welcome Ortliebs. Makes me think of a French rhyme.
Un deux, trois,
nous irons au bois
quatre, cinq, six
cueillir de cerises
sept, huit, neuf
dans mon panier neuf
dix, onze, douze
elles seront toutes rouges.
My panniers are, of course, bleus, with silver splotches for reflectivity. Ortlieb brand: German. Using my powers of Yiddish, I can discern:
ort= place
lieb= love
ortlieb= place-love or love of place…
I do love place. Being. Sitting. Observing. Taking part in a locale, seeping into it by eavesdropping.
Aller-Retour
This project is in no small part about place, finding the place I am from, la terre, the ground where my forebears walked and shlepped and hunkered down and happened to have landed and stayed and strived. The project is about finding place, uncovering it, making peace with what is there, and with what is not there and pinpointing, amid the whirlwind, places that make me feel welcome. Places that embrace the awkward past, the uncomfortable present, the uncertain future and still, onward, last and lilt onward. I want to map, this places, to trace them and showcase them, to match them to documents and objects and stories and to move forward on my own power, essentials in tow.
Are you trying to get yourself killed?
a truck driver asked me on Ashland Place after BAM, en route to the passthrough to the Manhattan Bridge approach ramp. “No,” I answered, “Are you trying to kill me?”
I was in the bike lane. I was going in the right direction, not being reckless, just moving forward — and making more headway than he was. He opened the door of his cab to ask me this question.
Vulnerability makes people nervous. And being on a bike is an act of vulnerability, of faith and risk taking and hope. It’s how I urge on the messiah. How I pray. Not walking, or rather marching, with my feet as Abraham Joshua Heschel intoned, but pedaling, returning to the same revolutions of the wheel, putting my feet, my heart, my soul into the practice of revolution, turning, movement.
Posted: August 23rd, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: greenery, Yiddish | Tags: biking, Bronx, Nana, upstate, Yiddish | Comments Off
The l'chaim platz (the red pavilion) at Yidish-Wokh, Camp Kutz in Warwick, NY
I’m just back from Yugntruf‘s Yidish-Wokh, or in my case, Yidish Sof-Wokh (weekend, one “d” in Yiddish, according to official transliteration guidelines). All that shlepping around with 10 pounds of Yiddish books and Weinreich’s dictionary paid off — I took my luggage-laden bike to Yidish-Wokh in Warwick, NY. Not a particularly direct route, but I think slow travel correlates to the trip back in time — and into the future — that is Yiddish.
One of my favorite moments was lying on a hammock before Shabbat — or rather Shabbes, this is Yiddishland after all — observing drops of sap clinging to the branch of one of the pine trees that was also supporting me.
Amazing staying power, the sap. I lay there until Ruchelle, an Israeli woman I met in the pool, invited me to drink a l’chaim with some other folks in a lakeside gazebo. Does it get better? I felt like I was inserted into a small corner of The Four Seasons Lodge, a beautiful, celebratory, heart-wrenching film about a group of Holocaust survivors who summer in the Catskills. We were a bit south of there — and without the extra-kitschy entertainment showcased in the film — but I was pleased to be in Jewish space and Jewish time, near trees and a lake, and part of a procession from a lakeside Shabbes service.
People of the Mame-loshen
I liked the slowness, the multi-generationality, the ingathering. One of my favorite people on hand was Velvel of Rio, who sang Brazilian songs before sunset on Friday. This, I thought, is what I am missing. This, I thought, is a piece of the other world I so want to immerse myself in. This is my vision of community. Elders, kinder, people of all ages, many wearing t-shirts with Yiddish print: “Maidele” for the girls, “Yingele” for boys and “Yiddish” for denizens of all genders and sizes.
For me, there was a lot of listening and hemming and hawing and hanging around the edges. I’ll estimate my Yiddish vocabulary at about 500 – 1000 words, many of which don’t exactly flow together. But amid the stop-start conversations, a certain ease infiltrated and a sense of being in the right place, near the willows and within earshot of my Nana’s language.
I hate the fact I have to work so hard to regrow this language, to put it in my mouth, where it is clunky and strange and I must cluck and buck and heave to make a sentence. It is about embracing the awkwardness, coming to terms with the realness, the distance between my nana’s life and my own, owning up to the fact that my life is luckier and cushier (and more solitary and detached from Jewish tradition) than she could have imagined from her kitchen in Morris Avenue or from the pew in Beth Shraga synagogue, where she sat to say Yizkor, to pray for the ones she, we, had lost.
This all filters in at Yiddish-Wokh. Nana went to a senior camp for adults — a chance to be away, to be in nature, to be with people away from fire escapes and fire hydrants, and in Yiddish. She died when I was 13 and recognized me less and less the years before then. But in this Yiddish place, I can access a corner of her world, I have her ear and and inroads to her heart.
The Road to Yidish-Wokh
I am not a joiner, but I like the outdoors and I’m curious about community. And I think a good way to meet people is to be around them in a low-pressure, high-contact environment, a place where humans can bump up against each other and get familiar with each other.
I am not a group person. I have been known to reneg on group activities at the last minute from panic and lack of preparedness. But after a summer of intensive Yiddish, I want to know where to speak it. I want to eavesdrop on Yiddish conversations or at least be party to chats outside the classroom. And I want to interact with native speakers. Older people. The real thing.
After our graduation, I tell Perl — one of the best teachers I’ve had in anything, ever — that I’m having separation anxiety. She says I should come to Yiddish Week, “one of these years.” When I tell her I’m thinking about this year — two weeks hence — she convinces me to call that afternoon. I do.
And I register. It’s a small miracle. Perl (Paula Teitelbaum) is such a graceful, calming presence and so supportive, that I’m happy to be in her presence, even in a large group. But still, I’m scared. How will I communicate with my micro-vocabulary? I will be surrounded by my dream interlocutors with so few words at my disposal. Oy gevalt.
Too late. I’ve signed up. Perl is such a graceful calming presence, II Plus it will be a good chance to bike in the country. And I won’t have to speak to anyone while I’m in the saddle. And I want to see what it’s like to be at an all Yiddish gathering, to be an outsider.
My Own Personal Old Country
I get there in a round-about way, which seems most fitting. Bike over the Brooklyn Bridge to World Financial Center. Ferry to Hoboken and train to Harriman, NY, which seems to offer the least hilly route to Warwick. I plot the route down to each turn and plan to have lunch at Mama’s Boy pizza, in the Bellvale post office. I find the addresses of business along the remote parts of the route and copy down the contact info, just in case. I bring duct tape to secure my old, broken-zippered saddlebags and write “Emergency information inside” on the silver tape. (I’m not worried, it’s just a rural road, a place I’ve never been, a 20 year old bike, paniers with bleeding zippers and, oh yeah, the first solo bike trip I’ve done beyond the subway in, say 10 years). I send my itinerary to my mom and to the conference organizers, just in case. I pack four granola bars and two extra bottles of water. I buy a package of chewy, tart, sugar-embedded life savers and save two purple ones for the final climb. The duct tape is gone when I reach Mama’s Boy.
The climb up Brady Mountain has me in the granny gear. I stay in the second lowest gear until I can’t handle it and use the lowest gear for relief for a few revolutions. I upshift quick to give myself the option to downshift. Just when I think the mountain is done, there is more uphill, I resolve not to get off the red Univega. I remember the lessons of other climbs: hang on, pedal, go slow and steady, hold on. I drink water, take my time in the shade and take the hill.
By the middle of the last climb, I am panting, cursing and muttering the word ‘tree’ in English and Yiddish (boim). If only, if only I can make it to that tree, a bit of shade, a smattering of protection, proof I have made progress. My sides ache, as if squeezed, seized by a girdle. Nana is the only person I knew who wore a girdle. My face is magenta and hot — I feel it — and my lips are salty. My hands are stapled to this metal pedal thing in an ongoing process of cantilever. (I mean can-ti-lever. Yes I can, I must.)
I don’t stop at the first tree, there is a still a slight incline. After the turn onto Bowen Road (the location of my destination, hurrah!) and stand next to a stone wall, heaving, smiling at cows and admiring the vista. There’s another uphill before I arrive, but I don’t know about that yet.
I make it to the waist-high roll-away fence of UJR Kutz Camp and have to press a yellow button for entrance. I’m disappointed — and relieved — when the voice that answers speaks in English. (For this I have busted my gut up the mountain?) “I’m here for Yiddish-Wokh, ” I say. Ikh bin gekumen tsu Yidish-Wokh, I want to say, Sholem Aleikhem.
Nu, What Brings You Here?
Yudis welcomed me in Yiddish, asks about the bike ride, gives me a green folder and Rivka to show me to Solovey drei, Nightingale three. Waser Genitung (water aerobics) is already underway so I unpack and jump into the pool afterwards. As soon as I surface, two women are at my side.
What’s your name?
Where are you from?
What do you do?
What kind of articles do you write?
Can you make a living from that?
Why are you studying Yiddish?
Are you a native New Yorker?
Do you speak Hebrew? (Kol minei, Hebrew and Yiddish for “all sorts,” re: the articles I write, is an advanced word for a beginner).
Where did you live in Israel?
Who were your teachers in the summer program?
I dodged floating rings and parents steering kicking kinderlach squeeling in Yiddish. Four lengths of swimming was enough. I congratulated myself for arriving — and for meeting a member of the renowned Yiddish-speaking Schaecter family. It felt like family — which made me feel welcome and made me want to run away. Out of the water, I stayed on the edges. Several times Perl during my 44 hours on the premises my beloved teacher from the YIVO Zumer Program, roused me from my outsiderness. “Leye, come join us” (but in Yiddish). Leye (or rather Leye Hene) is the Hebrew, or Yiddish name, Nana gave me at Beth Shraga.
The Bronx synagogue is a church now, but the name — my Yiddish one — is in circulation.
Posted: April 22nd, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Poland | Comments Off
After we discovered that my great aunt Jean was born, not in Bialystok, but in nearby Knyszyn, our indefatigable tour guide, Tomasz Wisniewski dug up this knish memento. In German. My pal Brian Zumhagen, radio personality and Germanophone took mercy on me and did a quick oral translation, which I promptly forgot. So this spring when I ran into fellow Sigrun Sapphire at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the conversation veered toward translations, I mentioned the mysterious Knyszyn card, asked if I could contract her for the job and said I’d only send her the file if she would promise to invoice me.
I’m not sure which I like more, her invoice or the translation of the card. They’re both about payment — or lack thereof, which supports my theory of knish or Knyszyn as witness to lack and loss. Thanks Sigrun!
And for the record, I treated to her what was supposed to be a knish lunch at Press 161 (they use square knishes as the bread part of sandwiches, imagine) but we’ve decided that only a homemade exemplar will do. Fair enough.
Note from Rabbi Ch. J. Mischkinski to Rabbi Risger
To Rabbi Dr. Risger,
Braunschweig
I am in receipt of your letter dated February 19 of this year, and I would like to thank you for your efforts. But, unfortunately, Zernach Witkowski has not yet paid the debt he owed to his brother. Therefore would you please intervene to get Witkowski to send his brother the outstanding sum as he promised, if not in full then at least in part, since Aron Witkowski is going through dire straits at the moment. I would like to thank you now for your kind support.
Respectfully,
Rabbi Ch. J. Mischkinski
Rabbi of the town of Knyschyn
Ch. J. Mischkinski
(Braunschweig, often Brunswick in English, is a town in northern Germany.)
The Invoice
Posted: April 16th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: performance | Comments Off
Regards from my pal Liz’s porch, Madison, Wisconsin.
Spreading the gospel of the knish as trees break into mustard, I mean, blossom.
Posted: April 16th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Whiffs and Sniffs | Tags: about the knish hunter, Madison, museums, mustard, yellow | Comments Off
The National Mustard Museum. Middleton, Wisconsin
Just back from Madison, Wisc., and emerging from a mustard-induced haze.
Just when I thought I may be overdoing it with knish costume, I made a pilgrimage to the National Mustard Headquarters in Middleton, Wisc.
Barry Levenson’s yellow emporium recently migrated from the hamlet of Mt. Horeb, Wisc. to Middleton, right next to Madison and 20 miles from the original Dijon outpost in the Midwest. To commemorate the exile, Levenson enlisted the track teams — and mascots, a cardinal and a Viking — of both schools to transport “the Last Mustard” on foot, escorted by a yellow school bus.
What’s the connection to knishes? Well, mustard and knishes are mutually dependent. What’s a mustard without a vehicle? And what’s a knish without some spice?
Levenson has created an emporium, complete with an educational branch, Poupon U. (I kid you not) and has a cousin who lives three blocks from me in Brooklyn. Just another example of ingathering.
Mustard Pirate after the relay.
Most people at the Mustard Museum had no clue what a knish was. Levenson’s cousin suggested I head to Hillel, the Jewish organization on campus, for more name and sight recognition. But it’s good to remember what it’s like to be an outsider. Even the bedazzled Dutchess of Mustard could not identify her sister knish, but did appreciate my yellow nail polish and remembered tasting a potato pocket at a synagogue sponsored tasting day in Madison.
It’s not uncommon to use food to introduce culture, but what are we transmitting?
What can we hand over along with recipes and foods?
What are we really trying to share?
Thoughts — and more questions — welcomed.
Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off
Tuesday Night Live. These photos and your humble knish hunter take to the stage in a few hours. Bring it on, Brooklyn! Lots of surprises — and stories — in store. And I can wait to hear about other homemade bits o’ magic.
