In honor of Israeli Independence Day, some reflections on my search for an ancestral food in the Jewish homeland.
Israel, on my first visit in 1994, was teeming pitas, tomato-and-cucumber breakfasts and fresh-squeezed Jerusalem juices. (How did they pull milk from plump shriveled dates?)
At my cousins' house, Cohava shuttled cutlets and salads of cucumbers, beets and zucchini to the porch and introduced each dish in French, easier for me to understand than Hebrew. Her husband asked me questions about each branch of the family tree. Yiddishized words got untangled and enunciated. Family was not mishpoche, but mish-pa-CHA. Even coziness sounded gruff.
Outside the suburbs of Haifa, at Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, I worked behind the scenes in the dining hall. The Egyptian-Jewish cook thumped smoke flavoring from industrial containers to a plastic vat of eggplant innards. More smoke flavor. More. More. Babganush, I later learned, was called hatzilim or eggplants in Hebrew, which sounded like haloutzim or pioneers. Each time I went back to Israel, the food and the people became less foreign. I learned words for soft cheese, pastries and drinks. Café hafouch, upside-down coffee, seemed to make the most sense: a foamy latte with a definitive band of white.
Still, I could not find a cornerstone of my culinary upbringing. The knish seemed to be as absent from Israel as the Yiddish language. Janna Gur, editor of the Israeli food magazine Al HaShulchan (On the Table), confirmed some of my suspicions in an e-mail:
"Indeed knishes are quite rare here. Your best bet would be Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim Quarter in Jerusalem, time capsules of the Eastern European Shtetl. There are quite a few delis that sell Ashkenazi classics, including knishes."
Bella Sherman, 87, arrived in Israel in 1948, and started working at Café Batya, an Ashkenazi-style restaurant that predated the founding of the Jewish state. She remembered that Batya's husband hid weapons from the Haganah (the Jewish paramilitary organization during the pre-statehood times of the British Mandate of Palestine) in cauldrons in the kitchen. Bella worked there for seven and a half years and remembered the knish recipe:
"The dough has to be elastic, if the flour is too dry, you add some water to it," she told me. "You knead the dough, make it as thin as a table-cloth, that's what we call it too, "a table cloth of dough" (mapat batzek in Hebrew) then you put the meat, not at the center but all around, then use a glass to press around it... the size depends on what you fill it with."
Guidelines and traditions that gave way to improvisation. And so my relationship with Israel: different forms, shapes, aftertastes and emotions that run the gamut from hot to cold to lukewarm. But, always, a gut feeling.
Follow Laura Silver on Twitter: www.twitter.com/knishme
Leonard Fein: My Battered Zionism: Liberal Zionists Speak Out
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/mapstellstory.html
Scroll down and you will see images of the British soldiers forcing the Palestinians out from their homes in Jaffa in the 30s.
And then scroll even further down to see Jewish refugees resettling in ethnically-cleansed Jaffa in 1948.
And finally here's a link to the Wiki for "Jaffa oranges", "Israel's primary citrus export of the State of Israel following its establishment in 1948"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_orange
And to you young men, don;t be timid about wanting to marry a girl who cooks like mama. But my wife is taken!
"Plan Dalet, or Plan D, (Hebrew: ×Ş×•×›× ×™×Ş ד'‎, Tokhnit dalet) was a plan worked out by the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary group and the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, in Palestine in autumn 1947 to spring 1948. "Plan Dalet" called for the conquest and securing of Arab towns and villages. According to the academic Ilan Pappe, its purpose was to conquer as much of Palestine and to expel as many Palestinians as possible.
During this time, and independently of Haganah or the framework of Plan Dalet, irregular troops from Irgun and Lehi formations massacred a number of Arabs at Deir Yassin, an event which, though publicly deplored and criticized by the principal Jewish authorities, had a deep impact on the morale of the Palestinian population."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet
stop it, you're killing me, ROFLMAO.
By the way you DID read the article?
Do you know what a knish is?
Hint: It's not a Palestinian.