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Jan. 29th, 2009 11:43 amI made matzoh ball soup (from a box, because it was late and I was lazy) the other night.
Hot soup was a delicious and tasty meal for a cold Tuesday night, but I think the actual reason that I had a craving for matzoh ball soup on that particular night was because I had just finished reading Jo Walton's Half a Crown, the conclusion to her series of books set in an AU fascist-leaning post-WWII England. The book includes a scene of a Jewish family celebrating a Passover seder through the eyes of a young British debutante: "It isn't that they sacrifice babies," she says, "and they're clean enough to put us all to shame. But their customs are very peculiar, and all their prayers are in Hebrew, and they wear robes and have strange rituals in their houses in the evening. I'm not surprised that people get nervous about them and wonder what they're up to. I felt nervous myself."
As far as I'm concerned it's the best-done scene in the book.
(One year when I was fourteen or fifteen we went to celebrate Passover with my great-grandmother, who lived in Nottingham at that time but was born in Czechoslovakia at the turn of the nineteenth century. Over and over again she warned us not to let the neighbors see us carrying the matzoh and other seder implements to her house - just in case.)
I don't know. I grew up, as I think I have said here before, in an area that was packed with Jews of all varieties, Orthodox and Conservative and reform and secular; my high school was around sixty percent Jewish, and we got all the Jewish holidays off, and the Saturday morning organic chemistry classes didn't factor into our transcript grade-wise because it wouldn't be fair to the kids who couldn't attend for religious reasons. Every year, the local Borders puts up an enormous cheesy tinsel menorah on the side of the building.
And more and more, I realize how incredibly privileged I have been and how much it has affected my life and my sense of self to grow up where I did. I can't remember ever feeling strange or different for being Jewish when I was growing up, and it's hard to think of myself as othered at all, even now. But as I get older, I learn some of the things I missed - the woman who said "that's what happens when Jews stand under the Christmas tree" when my baby brother was hit by a falling bough; the au pair who wondered in all innocence, when I came home from a winter vacation with a burn from standing too close to the radiator, whether Jews branded their children. (I am writing seriously about these stories now, but in the interests of full disclosure you should really know that when my brother and I talk about them, we're invariably cracking up; it feels so absurd to us that it becomes hilarious.)
And I think, every so often, it's good to be reminded that just because I don't often think of myself as othered, as standing out, as being different - the people who hear me talking about going home for Yom Kippur, or making matzoh ball soup for myself for dinner, won't necessarily agree.
- and after that long digression, my thoughts about the book itself! ( Under a spoiler-cut, because everything I want to say I think is massively spoilery for either the book itself or the earlier ones. )
Hot soup was a delicious and tasty meal for a cold Tuesday night, but I think the actual reason that I had a craving for matzoh ball soup on that particular night was because I had just finished reading Jo Walton's Half a Crown, the conclusion to her series of books set in an AU fascist-leaning post-WWII England. The book includes a scene of a Jewish family celebrating a Passover seder through the eyes of a young British debutante: "It isn't that they sacrifice babies," she says, "and they're clean enough to put us all to shame. But their customs are very peculiar, and all their prayers are in Hebrew, and they wear robes and have strange rituals in their houses in the evening. I'm not surprised that people get nervous about them and wonder what they're up to. I felt nervous myself."
As far as I'm concerned it's the best-done scene in the book.
(One year when I was fourteen or fifteen we went to celebrate Passover with my great-grandmother, who lived in Nottingham at that time but was born in Czechoslovakia at the turn of the nineteenth century. Over and over again she warned us not to let the neighbors see us carrying the matzoh and other seder implements to her house - just in case.)
I don't know. I grew up, as I think I have said here before, in an area that was packed with Jews of all varieties, Orthodox and Conservative and reform and secular; my high school was around sixty percent Jewish, and we got all the Jewish holidays off, and the Saturday morning organic chemistry classes didn't factor into our transcript grade-wise because it wouldn't be fair to the kids who couldn't attend for religious reasons. Every year, the local Borders puts up an enormous cheesy tinsel menorah on the side of the building.
And more and more, I realize how incredibly privileged I have been and how much it has affected my life and my sense of self to grow up where I did. I can't remember ever feeling strange or different for being Jewish when I was growing up, and it's hard to think of myself as othered at all, even now. But as I get older, I learn some of the things I missed - the woman who said "that's what happens when Jews stand under the Christmas tree" when my baby brother was hit by a falling bough; the au pair who wondered in all innocence, when I came home from a winter vacation with a burn from standing too close to the radiator, whether Jews branded their children. (I am writing seriously about these stories now, but in the interests of full disclosure you should really know that when my brother and I talk about them, we're invariably cracking up; it feels so absurd to us that it becomes hilarious.)
And I think, every so often, it's good to be reminded that just because I don't often think of myself as othered, as standing out, as being different - the people who hear me talking about going home for Yom Kippur, or making matzoh ball soup for myself for dinner, won't necessarily agree.
- and after that long digression, my thoughts about the book itself! ( Under a spoiler-cut, because everything I want to say I think is massively spoilery for either the book itself or the earlier ones. )
