Nostalgia and Food Friday

Usually I end my Friday posts with some music videos. Today I start my post with one.

My parents used to sing this song often on long car trips. my earliest childhood was filled with many car trips to visit my ailing grandparents.

I am not exactly sure why this has been my earworm for the past while but I decide to look it up. The melody is an old russian military march, the words

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר לֶחָבֵר פָּרַבֶּלוּם

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר לֶחָבֵר תַּת-מִקְלָע

בְּעַד אַחִים טְבוּחִים בַּגֶּטוֹ,

שֶׁלֹּא הִגִּיעוּ לִגְבוּלָהּ –

נִתֵּן –

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר...

בְּעַד סְפינַת גּוֹלִים נוֹדֶדֶת

שֶׁלֹּא הִגִּיעָה לְאַרְצָהּ –

נִתֵּן –

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר...

A rough translation is

It's time to give the floor to our friend Parabellum

the right to speak to our friend the sub machine gun

on behalf of our brothers slaughtered in the ghettos that didn't get to arrive at our borders

on behalf of the ship bobbing on the ocean that hasn't been allowed to dock on it's shores

The song was written and first performed as a piece of political sarcasm in 1943 in reaction to the British White Paper that essentially shut down Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Shoah. There were strict quotas set and the British authorities didn't even allow that quota to be filled.

A Parabelum was a commonly used German gun. German forces were in North Africa, not far from Palestine, boats filled with Jews escaping the concentration camps were not allowed to dock in Palestine.

This song became one of the marching songs of the Palmach

So that's your history lesson for today.

So now back to food as it is Friday. tonight's main dish, chicken has been pulled out of the freezer. I had made it during the cooking rush of Rosh HaShanah. I am so happy to have it on hand during this short Friday. we will be having a green salad and pasta cooked in chicken juices from a previous week.

My husband is usually agnostic about food, so when he asks me to make something I will. this morning he wondered if I would bake a dessert. It is cool and autumnal, so I made up a cake for the season.

I faked a spiced sweet potato and granny smith apple cake. It smells really good so I am hopeful. the downside of faking a cake as opposed to actually using a recipe is that you can't exactly be sure of the result. If you go into the adventure of faking a cake with wide parameters of what would be acceptable then you will be fine. I plan to cut the cake into squares.I was even brave and made a streusel topping. It's a first for me. Several weeks ago my sister described how she made such a toppings so I more or less followed her directions.

It is time to shift your brain again to a different topic

There have been wildfires for the past week or so in both New York and New Jersey. I open my living room windows each morning so our apartment doesn't smell stuffy. This morning I let in a whole lot of wood smoke.

I know that I should feel terrible about all of the woodlands that are burning. But the smell reminds of ob the best smell of the fall, that of burning leaves. I also remember walking home from the Quincy Center Station on chilly evenings and smelling the fires neighbors had set up in their fireplaces. it seemed like a promise of warmth and family. I actually do hope for a good rain to put out the fires but until then I love this reminder of crisp New England autumns.

Shabbat Shalom!

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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