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Nonfiction

Instructions for Eating Granny Ora’s Kibbeh

By Moshe Sakal
Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen

I. Exile

Let’s see. I grew up in Tel Aviv, in a neighborhood where almost everyone was Ashkenazi. I remember a literature teacher at school who claimed that mothers in fiction control their children through food. And indeed, my childhood friend’s Polish-Jewish mother used to say: “If they want to eat—they’ll eat. If they don’t want to eat—they’ll also eat.” Another neighborhood mother would fling open the window and yell in a terrifying voice: “Shaulik, come home! Your omelet is on the table!”

But I had to make do without a Polish mother. Sometimes I wanted one—the kind of mother who would run after me with a sweater and an umbrella, chase me down the street with calf’s foot jelly or tzimmes or gefilte fish, who wouldn’t let me leave the table until I emptied my plate, who would cover the new living room furniture with plastic sheeting, and who would say to my brother’s new Indian girlfriend: “Why do you wear black? You’re black as it is.” I wanted that kind of mother, but I didn’t have one.

My mother was born in Tel Aviv, where her parents had immigrated from Egypt. In Cairo, the family had wholly rejected their Egyptian surroundings, existing in their own little world in that Middle Eastern city. Their mother tongue was French, not Arabic, and they viewed themselves as European. They were well-off tradespeople who lived in sizeable houses and employed local servants in both their city and country homes. They’d been born and raised in Egypt but they lived their lives there in exile. In denial. And so when they arrived in Israel, penniless (having left virtually all their belongings behind), they did not cook any Egyptian dishes: not molokhiya (a thick soup of cooked leaves from the plant known as “Jew’s mallow”), not taamiya (falafel made of fava beans), not a single one of the dishes I tasted in that dizzying city when I visited a few years ago on a belated roots journey, months before the revolution. No. They maintained their total estrangement.

There was, though, one crack in the wall between the Cairo life and the Israeli life of that side of my family: dessert. Each of the aunts had her own uniquely Egyptian confection. Grandma Judith baked konafa, Aunt Léoni was in charge of the riz au lait, Aunt Yvonne provided the basboussa, and Aunt Camille prepared orange knafeh with roasted pistachios. It was their fetish. Their little deviancy.

I can’t say what Grandma Judith ate during her sixty-five years in Israel after arriving from Cairo. What I mean is, I do not remember a single main dish she ever served at lunch or dinner. In the mornings it was toast with cottage cheese and mayonnaise, or a homemade spread of raw tahini mixed with honey. Every evening she took a spoonful of prune-spread to ward off constipation. And she was addicted to the plain cookies known as petit beurre (literally: “little butter”), which despite their name were in fact one hundred percent dairy-free in their Israeli iteration. In other words: butter cookies without butter. And that, perhaps, defines Grandma’s Tel Aviv existence in a nutshell.

 

II. Just a Hard-boiled Egg and a Glass of Water

The Syrian side of my family was a whole different story. My father’s parents were born and raised in Damascus, pure locals who had no desire to leave their homeland. Their wealth came from a few butcher shops owned by my Granny Ora’s family. Granny used to tell me about her grandfather, who at age seventy was widowed and remarried a twenty-year-old woman: “When I die,” he promised her, “you will get a thousand gold coins.” But he lived to be a hundred, and to his very last day he rode a horse and managed the family business.

Granny Ora told me about the slaughterhouses. She told me about the poor young men employed as “sheep inflaters,” whose job was to pierce a hole in the slaughtered sheep’s leg and then inflate it, which made it easier to strip the wool. Ora herself stopped eating animals as a young girl, at a time when vegetarianism was practically unheard of. When she went to a restaurant with Grandfather, she would order “just a hard-boiled egg and a glass of water.”

When I think about it now, perhaps her forbearance had nothing to do with the vegetarianism. Perhaps those stories I always heard about Granny Ora, and how even when she sat on the Champs-Élysées with Grandfather years later she ordered “an egg and a glass of water,” are related more to her experience as an immigrant in Israel’s early years of statehood. In retrospect, she expressed all the anger and frustration over the alienation she felt in her adopted homeland through avoidance: of food, of human society, of life itself.

Nevertheless, Granny Ora was a wonderful Syrian cook. She made us kousa mahshi—zucchini stuffed with rice and meat; medias—eggplant with yogurt sauce; riz wa’hamoud—rice and potatoes in a tart gravy, served cold with celery; ma’ude—a casserole of meat and potatoes cooked for a whole day and night, like a Syrian cholent; and of course, kibbeh.

Today I think back on her fried kibbeh as a festive dish, but the truth is that it was considered simple food, something you ate on late Saturday mornings after coming home from synagogue. Here are the instructions for eating Granny Ora’s kibbeh: first, lop off the tip and scoop out the filling (ground meat and pine nuts) into a dish. Next, fill the emptied out kibbeh with tahini, vegetable salad, and said meat and pine nuts. Only then, take a bite.

Granny worshipped fried foods. She did bake and steam things, too, but her oft-repeated motto, a sort of eternal truth that she liked to proclaim with a sly smile, was: “Fried? How could it not be delicious!”

For dessert she made us crunchy ma’amul cookies filled with walnuts or dates, and halawat nesha—a starchy pudding topped with crushed nuts and cinnamon. In her old age, she had a live-in Filipina caregiver who prepared food under her watchful eye. The result was a peculiar combination of Filipino and Israeli cuisines, with a touch of the Damascene.

Granny died only two years ago, well into her late eighties. At first it seemed that all the Syrian dishes she used to cook for us had followed her to the grave. And not that the family hadn’t tried to learn them—quite the opposite. But Granny had completely confounded her daughters and daughters-in-law and granddaughters with her methods. Or perhaps it wasn’t the methods—for with these she was actually quite generous and fairly clear—but the quantities. Granny was reluctant to say how much of each ingredient went into a dish. When the relatives pressured, pleaded and even threatened, she would just flash her knowing smile and say dismissively: “What’s the problem? You put a little of this, a little of that, a little of this.”

But there was a flaw in Granny’s plan: her late-age child, my father, had spent his childhood perched on the kitchen counter while she cooked, and he saw everything. Dad revealed the secrets to Mom, and now at our holiday dinners we have a Syrian feast on the table, with dishes prepared by my parents in somewhat scaled-back magnitude. So something of the Syrian glory remains after all, despite Granny Ora’s best intentions.

 

III. One Hundred Hamburgers

Growing up in Tel Aviv, my mother fed us what might be termed “Israeli cuisine.” But what is that? All and nothing. Both an amalgamation and a negation of everything, much like Israeli society itself. It contains testimony, it contains aromas and memories from other places and times, yet it is not all these things. It is an ingathering of exiles, a merging of East and West, a diffusion and mutual influence between diverse cultures and locales—and also not. Israeli cuisine is a mystery, a black hole, a utopia. A no-place.

We ate rice, pasta, chicken. We loved schnitzel. Sometimes we were allowed to get hamburgers at the local Burgeranch (a homegrown version of American fast-food burger joints) and later at McDonald’s, which opened its first Israeli branch when I was a teenager. At age twelve I won an outlandish prize for correctly answering a magazine’s trivia quiz: one hundred free hamburger vouchers for Burgeranch. At my local branch they seemed unaware of my big win, but after the bureaucracies were sorted out, I spent the next few months eating my way through the prize—sometimes with friends or family, sometimes alone. The employees soon got to know me, and we came to an arrangement whereby I could trade in two vouchers for fries and a “Bomba” (Israel’s answer to the Big Mac), or three vouchers for two burgers and a soft-serve ice cream, and so forth.

That was the summer when the stomachaches began. I was tormented with pain. My parents took me to the doctor, who sent me to specialists. What didn’t they put me through? They gave me inhalation and exhalation tests, made me swallow disgusting liquids so they could examine the organisms inside me. They shoved tubes into me and numbed me with sedatives. Those doctors dug deeper and deeper into a body that had only just begun to grow into a man’s. Finally, they decreed: there’s nothing wrong. But my stomach still hurt—it hurt badly. Mom took me to a renowned professor of gastroenterology, who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome. “What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?” he asked me at our consultation, and I told him: “I drink a glass of chocolate milk.” “Well,” he said, “don’t.”

I was declared lactose intolerant. No one had heard of lactose intolerance in those days in Israel, and since there were hardly any vegans around either (I had heard distant rumors of their existence, like a bizarre cult), it was difficult for me to adopt the doctor’s dietary recommendations.

Mom was busy with a career shift at the time. She was retraining as an insurance agent, which was considered a serious, stable occupation, and she left home early every morning and was gone all day. I was the oldest child. I had a sister and a brother a few years younger than me, and another brother who was just a tot. My parents hired a nanny whom we all called Mocha. Mocha was Yemenite, and she was a colorful character. She took pity on our tender digestive systems—we Syrian-Egyptians who had grown up in an Ashkenazi neighborhood—and did not cook Yemenite food for us. She tried once, and my lips burned for a whole day. No. Mocha served us “Israeli” food: pasta, schnitzel, chicken or beef burgers, and of course ptitim—toasted grain-shaped pasta that is a long-standing comfort food for Israeli kids, though now served by gourmet chefs in the West as “Israeli couscous.” Mocha chopped vegetables into tiny dice for salad. And she was fanatical about our lunches. By the time my little brother was a teenager, Mocha had been released from all her household duties except cooking. And she then began to supervise our meals even more sternly. All of us children had to come straight home from school and sit down for lunch, while Mocha, wearing an apron, prodded us to eat more and more salad. She reacted with horror if I tried to add cottage cheese to my meal: she kept kosher, and got angry when I failed to observe the required number of hours that must pass between eating meat and dairy.

One day I informed Mocha that I would be having lunch at a friend’s house. I was eighteen. When I came home, Mocha threw a jealous fit. She wanted to know exactly what they’d served, interrogating me on the details of each and every dish. “And salad? Did they have salad?” she asked suspiciously. When I confessed they hadn’t, she grinned. I never dared miss lunch again.

But there was something else. In those days of spiraling self-hatred, I often sat at the dinner table for hours without taking a single bite. I would stare at my plate piled high with food the way one might glare at an adversary. I thought I was too thin, I hated my body, my wrists were spindly, my Adam’s apple—testament to my masculinity—stuck out like a turkey’s neck. But though I hated my thinness, I refused to eat. I had shed my happy childhood and left its slough behind me. My youth was difficult, with little comfort or love from outside. And I ate practically nothing.

 

IV. Salon International de l’Agriculture

At twenty-two, I left Tel Aviv for Paris. I lived with a friend from school in the attic of a four-hundred-year-old building in the Marais—historically the Jewish quarter, and more recently the gay quarter. (Shortly after I arrived, my mother asked me on the phone if I was “in touch with the community.” To which I answered, “Absolutely. But I’m not sure it’s the community you’re talking about.”) At first I bought meat at the kosher butcheries, but I soon stopped. My roommate was an Israeli of Austrian origin, and everything he made was full of butter and cream. My stomach ached. I ate little but plain rice for a long time. I couldn’t adapt.

I went back to Israel, and a year later I returned to Paris for a six-year stint. This time I avoided meat because of mad cow disease. One of my university lecturers—a man who wore a wig, rode a heavy motorcycle to campus, and before the exams displayed the books he’d written on his desk and offered them for sale to us students—died of mad cow disease. Or so rumor would have it.

I slowly became acquainted with the diversity of Parisian cuisine. One can certainly find fault with the French republican spirit, and it’s hard to deny that, despite all the multiculturalism, there is ultimately only one dominant voice in French society. Nevertheless, the country offers an abundance of a kind I had never known in Israel. An abundance of cultures, and of food. In Paris I ate Japanese food, Indian food, Vietnamese food, and of course French food from every region in the country. One of my favorite things to do with my partner, a Tel Avivi poet and translator whom I met in Paris, was to go to the Salon International de l’Agriculture every year. There we ogled the beasts, including roosters that looked like punks from the ’80s, and the other glories offered by the rural Frenchmen who come to the City of Light once a year to hawk their wares. Even the president of France visits the Salon every year for a photo-op, grinning while holding a sheep. After seeing the animals, we would visit the stalls around the fair and dine our hearts out on the plethora of dishes from all over France.

We always celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, at a former Israel friend’s place. Her mother—another insurance agent—arrived in Paris every year with a supply of dead carp in her carry-on luggage. She marched straight through security with the fish, looking perfectly innocent. In Paris she removed the carp from her bag and prepared magnificent gefilte fish, to the joy of us exiled Israelis.

After another prolonged bout of severe abdominal pain, I began to acknowledge that it might be caused by my habit of eating too quickly. I went to see a behavioral therapist who specialized in eating disorders. She took out a pen and paper and wrote down my life story, dwelling at length on my relationship with my parents, my childhood—the longing for a Polish mother who would force-feed me the finest Ashkenazi delicacies—and especially my long adolescence, which I had spent gazing at plates full of food I would not eat. At some point she burst out: “What is it with you Jews and all this guilt?!”

When the session was over, I stood in the doorway and asked softly: “What about the fast eating? Do you have any advice?” “Use chopsticks!” she snapped, and slammed the door behind me.

 

V. The Grand Feast

After six years, we came back to Israel and left the bittersweet days of exile behind us. We returned to laden tables at jam-packed family dinners. My parents’ aunts and uncles had now been replaced by my own, and by brothers- and sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews. The family was growing horizontally. Customs and foods that were once our lot had disappeared with hardly a thought. My mother still prepared the Syrian delicacies she had learned from my father, who had learned them from his mother, and so the eradication of generations of diaspora had been only partly successful. Yet something certainly had been forgotten.

In “The Good Years,” a story by Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon, the protagonist travels to Jerusalem to visit a friend, who holds a grand feast in his honor. During the feast, the host’s father arrives. The diners all stand in deference, and the father sits down in a corner and proceeds to eat nothing but plain bread, olives, and onions, which he washes down with a jug of water. The puzzled guest asks his host why they are all dining on fine food and good wine, while the father is given only bread, olives, onions and water. The father himself explains to the guest that he seems to hold a common misperception whereby dining on delicacies is an exalted act, whereas in fact it is a punishment. Agnon is speaking to a question that has troubled the minds of many writers, in both their lives and their work: How should one treat one’s parents? What is the appropriate way to follow the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother”?

Confucius wrote the following about this imperative: “The filial piety of nowadays means the support of one’s parents. But dogs and horses likewise are able to do something in the way of support; without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support from the other?” In other words, are we obliged to merely ensure that our parents do not starve, just as we would for our pets? Or should there be something more? If I have to provide my parents with food one day, I wonder, what sort of food will it be exactly? And what story will it tell? Perhaps I should come at this from a different angle: the next section in this essay should be about the food I will prepare for my future children. Yes. It’ll be Mediterranean cuisine with slight touches of French. It will include contemporary dishes, of course, like quinoa casserole and rice noodles with tofu. At home we will always have organic granola bars, and in between meals we will snack on almonds and walnuts. My future child will not be lactose-intolerant; the three generations between Damascus and Tel Aviv will have toughened up his or her gut and made it supremely resistant. At age twelve, my son or daughter will rebel by running off to the nearest McDonald’s. At thirteen, he or she will become a vegetarian. My child will have a difficult adolescence, but a peaceful young adulthood. At eighteen he or she will silently scrutinize my face with a knowing smile—not unlike Granny Ora’s—and think silently: “Look how he’s softened over the years.”

In my future child’s diary, this is what it will say:

“My father was born and raised in Israel, to a family originally from Cairo and Damascus. In his youth he was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, shortly after he answered a trivia quiz and won a hundred hamburgers. He spent a few exiled years in Paris, where he consulted with an eating disorder therapist who told him to use chopsticks. Since coming back to Israel, he has watched in trepidation as the family produces new generations, and wondered what his responsibilities will be. Dad cooks quinoa with vegetables for me, and a few Syrian dishes whose secrets he learned from his father, who learned them from his mother. My father was a pretty tough man during my childhood, but he’s softened in recent years. The irritable bowel troubles him less now, too, perhaps because he is aging. For his fifty-fifth birthday, I decided to sign Dad up for an Ashkenazi cooking course, where he will learn how to cook calf’s foot jelly, tzimmes, and of course—gefilte fish!”

 

© Moshe Sakal. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2017 by Jessica Cohen. All rights reserved.

English Hebrew (Original)

I. Exile

Let’s see. I grew up in Tel Aviv, in a neighborhood where almost everyone was Ashkenazi. I remember a literature teacher at school who claimed that mothers in fiction control their children through food. And indeed, my childhood friend’s Polish-Jewish mother used to say: “If they want to eat—they’ll eat. If they don’t want to eat—they’ll also eat.” Another neighborhood mother would fling open the window and yell in a terrifying voice: “Shaulik, come home! Your omelet is on the table!”

But I had to make do without a Polish mother. Sometimes I wanted one—the kind of mother who would run after me with a sweater and an umbrella, chase me down the street with calf’s foot jelly or tzimmes or gefilte fish, who wouldn’t let me leave the table until I emptied my plate, who would cover the new living room furniture with plastic sheeting, and who would say to my brother’s new Indian girlfriend: “Why do you wear black? You’re black as it is.” I wanted that kind of mother, but I didn’t have one.

My mother was born in Tel Aviv, where her parents had immigrated from Egypt. In Cairo, the family had wholly rejected their Egyptian surroundings, existing in their own little world in that Middle Eastern city. Their mother tongue was French, not Arabic, and they viewed themselves as European. They were well-off tradespeople who lived in sizeable houses and employed local servants in both their city and country homes. They’d been born and raised in Egypt but they lived their lives there in exile. In denial. And so when they arrived in Israel, penniless (having left virtually all their belongings behind), they did not cook any Egyptian dishes: not molokhiya (a thick soup of cooked leaves from the plant known as “Jew’s mallow”), not taamiya (falafel made of fava beans), not a single one of the dishes I tasted in that dizzying city when I visited a few years ago on a belated roots journey, months before the revolution. No. They maintained their total estrangement.

There was, though, one crack in the wall between the Cairo life and the Israeli life of that side of my family: dessert. Each of the aunts had her own uniquely Egyptian confection. Grandma Judith baked konafa, Aunt Léoni was in charge of the riz au lait, Aunt Yvonne provided the basboussa, and Aunt Camille prepared orange knafeh with roasted pistachios. It was their fetish. Their little deviancy.

I can’t say what Grandma Judith ate during her sixty-five years in Israel after arriving from Cairo. What I mean is, I do not remember a single main dish she ever served at lunch or dinner. In the mornings it was toast with cottage cheese and mayonnaise, or a homemade spread of raw tahini mixed with honey. Every evening she took a spoonful of prune-spread to ward off constipation. And she was addicted to the plain cookies known as petit beurre (literally: “little butter”), which despite their name were in fact one hundred percent dairy-free in their Israeli iteration. In other words: butter cookies without butter. And that, perhaps, defines Grandma’s Tel Aviv existence in a nutshell.

 

II. Just a Hard-boiled Egg and a Glass of Water

The Syrian side of my family was a whole different story. My father’s parents were born and raised in Damascus, pure locals who had no desire to leave their homeland. Their wealth came from a few butcher shops owned by my Granny Ora’s family. Granny used to tell me about her grandfather, who at age seventy was widowed and remarried a twenty-year-old woman: “When I die,” he promised her, “you will get a thousand gold coins.” But he lived to be a hundred, and to his very last day he rode a horse and managed the family business.

Granny Ora told me about the slaughterhouses. She told me about the poor young men employed as “sheep inflaters,” whose job was to pierce a hole in the slaughtered sheep’s leg and then inflate it, which made it easier to strip the wool. Ora herself stopped eating animals as a young girl, at a time when vegetarianism was practically unheard of. When she went to a restaurant with Grandfather, she would order “just a hard-boiled egg and a glass of water.”

When I think about it now, perhaps her forbearance had nothing to do with the vegetarianism. Perhaps those stories I always heard about Granny Ora, and how even when she sat on the Champs-Élysées with Grandfather years later she ordered “an egg and a glass of water,” are related more to her experience as an immigrant in Israel’s early years of statehood. In retrospect, she expressed all the anger and frustration over the alienation she felt in her adopted homeland through avoidance: of food, of human society, of life itself.

Nevertheless, Granny Ora was a wonderful Syrian cook. She made us kousa mahshi—zucchini stuffed with rice and meat; medias—eggplant with yogurt sauce; riz wa’hamoud—rice and potatoes in a tart gravy, served cold with celery; ma’ude—a casserole of meat and potatoes cooked for a whole day and night, like a Syrian cholent; and of course, kibbeh.

Today I think back on her fried kibbeh as a festive dish, but the truth is that it was considered simple food, something you ate on late Saturday mornings after coming home from synagogue. Here are the instructions for eating Granny Ora’s kibbeh: first, lop off the tip and scoop out the filling (ground meat and pine nuts) into a dish. Next, fill the emptied out kibbeh with tahini, vegetable salad, and said meat and pine nuts. Only then, take a bite.

Granny worshipped fried foods. She did bake and steam things, too, but her oft-repeated motto, a sort of eternal truth that she liked to proclaim with a sly smile, was: “Fried? How could it not be delicious!”

For dessert she made us crunchy ma’amul cookies filled with walnuts or dates, and halawat nesha—a starchy pudding topped with crushed nuts and cinnamon. In her old age, she had a live-in Filipina caregiver who prepared food under her watchful eye. The result was a peculiar combination of Filipino and Israeli cuisines, with a touch of the Damascene.

Granny died only two years ago, well into her late eighties. At first it seemed that all the Syrian dishes she used to cook for us had followed her to the grave. And not that the family hadn’t tried to learn them—quite the opposite. But Granny had completely confounded her daughters and daughters-in-law and granddaughters with her methods. Or perhaps it wasn’t the methods—for with these she was actually quite generous and fairly clear—but the quantities. Granny was reluctant to say how much of each ingredient went into a dish. When the relatives pressured, pleaded and even threatened, she would just flash her knowing smile and say dismissively: “What’s the problem? You put a little of this, a little of that, a little of this.”

But there was a flaw in Granny’s plan: her late-age child, my father, had spent his childhood perched on the kitchen counter while she cooked, and he saw everything. Dad revealed the secrets to Mom, and now at our holiday dinners we have a Syrian feast on the table, with dishes prepared by my parents in somewhat scaled-back magnitude. So something of the Syrian glory remains after all, despite Granny Ora’s best intentions.

 

III. One Hundred Hamburgers

Growing up in Tel Aviv, my mother fed us what might be termed “Israeli cuisine.” But what is that? All and nothing. Both an amalgamation and a negation of everything, much like Israeli society itself. It contains testimony, it contains aromas and memories from other places and times, yet it is not all these things. It is an ingathering of exiles, a merging of East and West, a diffusion and mutual influence between diverse cultures and locales—and also not. Israeli cuisine is a mystery, a black hole, a utopia. A no-place.

We ate rice, pasta, chicken. We loved schnitzel. Sometimes we were allowed to get hamburgers at the local Burgeranch (a homegrown version of American fast-food burger joints) and later at McDonald’s, which opened its first Israeli branch when I was a teenager. At age twelve I won an outlandish prize for correctly answering a magazine’s trivia quiz: one hundred free hamburger vouchers for Burgeranch. At my local branch they seemed unaware of my big win, but after the bureaucracies were sorted out, I spent the next few months eating my way through the prize—sometimes with friends or family, sometimes alone. The employees soon got to know me, and we came to an arrangement whereby I could trade in two vouchers for fries and a “Bomba” (Israel’s answer to the Big Mac), or three vouchers for two burgers and a soft-serve ice cream, and so forth.

That was the summer when the stomachaches began. I was tormented with pain. My parents took me to the doctor, who sent me to specialists. What didn’t they put me through? They gave me inhalation and exhalation tests, made me swallow disgusting liquids so they could examine the organisms inside me. They shoved tubes into me and numbed me with sedatives. Those doctors dug deeper and deeper into a body that had only just begun to grow into a man’s. Finally, they decreed: there’s nothing wrong. But my stomach still hurt—it hurt badly. Mom took me to a renowned professor of gastroenterology, who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome. “What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?” he asked me at our consultation, and I told him: “I drink a glass of chocolate milk.” “Well,” he said, “don’t.”

I was declared lactose intolerant. No one had heard of lactose intolerance in those days in Israel, and since there were hardly any vegans around either (I had heard distant rumors of their existence, like a bizarre cult), it was difficult for me to adopt the doctor’s dietary recommendations.

Mom was busy with a career shift at the time. She was retraining as an insurance agent, which was considered a serious, stable occupation, and she left home early every morning and was gone all day. I was the oldest child. I had a sister and a brother a few years younger than me, and another brother who was just a tot. My parents hired a nanny whom we all called Mocha. Mocha was Yemenite, and she was a colorful character. She took pity on our tender digestive systems—we Syrian-Egyptians who had grown up in an Ashkenazi neighborhood—and did not cook Yemenite food for us. She tried once, and my lips burned for a whole day. No. Mocha served us “Israeli” food: pasta, schnitzel, chicken or beef burgers, and of course ptitim—toasted grain-shaped pasta that is a long-standing comfort food for Israeli kids, though now served by gourmet chefs in the West as “Israeli couscous.” Mocha chopped vegetables into tiny dice for salad. And she was fanatical about our lunches. By the time my little brother was a teenager, Mocha had been released from all her household duties except cooking. And she then began to supervise our meals even more sternly. All of us children had to come straight home from school and sit down for lunch, while Mocha, wearing an apron, prodded us to eat more and more salad. She reacted with horror if I tried to add cottage cheese to my meal: she kept kosher, and got angry when I failed to observe the required number of hours that must pass between eating meat and dairy.

One day I informed Mocha that I would be having lunch at a friend’s house. I was eighteen. When I came home, Mocha threw a jealous fit. She wanted to know exactly what they’d served, interrogating me on the details of each and every dish. “And salad? Did they have salad?” she asked suspiciously. When I confessed they hadn’t, she grinned. I never dared miss lunch again.

But there was something else. In those days of spiraling self-hatred, I often sat at the dinner table for hours without taking a single bite. I would stare at my plate piled high with food the way one might glare at an adversary. I thought I was too thin, I hated my body, my wrists were spindly, my Adam’s apple—testament to my masculinity—stuck out like a turkey’s neck. But though I hated my thinness, I refused to eat. I had shed my happy childhood and left its slough behind me. My youth was difficult, with little comfort or love from outside. And I ate practically nothing.

 

IV. Salon International de l’Agriculture

At twenty-two, I left Tel Aviv for Paris. I lived with a friend from school in the attic of a four-hundred-year-old building in the Marais—historically the Jewish quarter, and more recently the gay quarter. (Shortly after I arrived, my mother asked me on the phone if I was “in touch with the community.” To which I answered, “Absolutely. But I’m not sure it’s the community you’re talking about.”) At first I bought meat at the kosher butcheries, but I soon stopped. My roommate was an Israeli of Austrian origin, and everything he made was full of butter and cream. My stomach ached. I ate little but plain rice for a long time. I couldn’t adapt.

I went back to Israel, and a year later I returned to Paris for a six-year stint. This time I avoided meat because of mad cow disease. One of my university lecturers—a man who wore a wig, rode a heavy motorcycle to campus, and before the exams displayed the books he’d written on his desk and offered them for sale to us students—died of mad cow disease. Or so rumor would have it.

I slowly became acquainted with the diversity of Parisian cuisine. One can certainly find fault with the French republican spirit, and it’s hard to deny that, despite all the multiculturalism, there is ultimately only one dominant voice in French society. Nevertheless, the country offers an abundance of a kind I had never known in Israel. An abundance of cultures, and of food. In Paris I ate Japanese food, Indian food, Vietnamese food, and of course French food from every region in the country. One of my favorite things to do with my partner, a Tel Avivi poet and translator whom I met in Paris, was to go to the Salon International de l’Agriculture every year. There we ogled the beasts, including roosters that looked like punks from the ’80s, and the other glories offered by the rural Frenchmen who come to the City of Light once a year to hawk their wares. Even the president of France visits the Salon every year for a photo-op, grinning while holding a sheep. After seeing the animals, we would visit the stalls around the fair and dine our hearts out on the plethora of dishes from all over France.

We always celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, at a former Israel friend’s place. Her mother—another insurance agent—arrived in Paris every year with a supply of dead carp in her carry-on luggage. She marched straight through security with the fish, looking perfectly innocent. In Paris she removed the carp from her bag and prepared magnificent gefilte fish, to the joy of us exiled Israelis.

After another prolonged bout of severe abdominal pain, I began to acknowledge that it might be caused by my habit of eating too quickly. I went to see a behavioral therapist who specialized in eating disorders. She took out a pen and paper and wrote down my life story, dwelling at length on my relationship with my parents, my childhood—the longing for a Polish mother who would force-feed me the finest Ashkenazi delicacies—and especially my long adolescence, which I had spent gazing at plates full of food I would not eat. At some point she burst out: “What is it with you Jews and all this guilt?!”

When the session was over, I stood in the doorway and asked softly: “What about the fast eating? Do you have any advice?” “Use chopsticks!” she snapped, and slammed the door behind me.

 

V. The Grand Feast

After six years, we came back to Israel and left the bittersweet days of exile behind us. We returned to laden tables at jam-packed family dinners. My parents’ aunts and uncles had now been replaced by my own, and by brothers- and sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews. The family was growing horizontally. Customs and foods that were once our lot had disappeared with hardly a thought. My mother still prepared the Syrian delicacies she had learned from my father, who had learned them from his mother, and so the eradication of generations of diaspora had been only partly successful. Yet something certainly had been forgotten.

In “The Good Years,” a story by Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon, the protagonist travels to Jerusalem to visit a friend, who holds a grand feast in his honor. During the feast, the host’s father arrives. The diners all stand in deference, and the father sits down in a corner and proceeds to eat nothing but plain bread, olives, and onions, which he washes down with a jug of water. The puzzled guest asks his host why they are all dining on fine food and good wine, while the father is given only bread, olives, onions and water. The father himself explains to the guest that he seems to hold a common misperception whereby dining on delicacies is an exalted act, whereas in fact it is a punishment. Agnon is speaking to a question that has troubled the minds of many writers, in both their lives and their work: How should one treat one’s parents? What is the appropriate way to follow the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother”?

Confucius wrote the following about this imperative: “The filial piety of nowadays means the support of one’s parents. But dogs and horses likewise are able to do something in the way of support; without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support from the other?” In other words, are we obliged to merely ensure that our parents do not starve, just as we would for our pets? Or should there be something more? If I have to provide my parents with food one day, I wonder, what sort of food will it be exactly? And what story will it tell? Perhaps I should come at this from a different angle: the next section in this essay should be about the food I will prepare for my future children. Yes. It’ll be Mediterranean cuisine with slight touches of French. It will include contemporary dishes, of course, like quinoa casserole and rice noodles with tofu. At home we will always have organic granola bars, and in between meals we will snack on almonds and walnuts. My future child will not be lactose-intolerant; the three generations between Damascus and Tel Aviv will have toughened up his or her gut and made it supremely resistant. At age twelve, my son or daughter will rebel by running off to the nearest McDonald’s. At thirteen, he or she will become a vegetarian. My child will have a difficult adolescence, but a peaceful young adulthood. At eighteen he or she will silently scrutinize my face with a knowing smile—not unlike Granny Ora’s—and think silently: “Look how he’s softened over the years.”

In my future child’s diary, this is what it will say:

“My father was born and raised in Israel, to a family originally from Cairo and Damascus. In his youth he was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, shortly after he answered a trivia quiz and won a hundred hamburgers. He spent a few exiled years in Paris, where he consulted with an eating disorder therapist who told him to use chopsticks. Since coming back to Israel, he has watched in trepidation as the family produces new generations, and wondered what his responsibilities will be. Dad cooks quinoa with vegetables for me, and a few Syrian dishes whose secrets he learned from his father, who learned them from his mother. My father was a pretty tough man during my childhood, but he’s softened in recent years. The irritable bowel troubles him less now, too, perhaps because he is aging. For his fifty-fifth birthday, I decided to sign Dad up for an Ashkenazi cooking course, where he will learn how to cook calf’s foot jelly, tzimmes, and of course—gefilte fish!”

 

© Moshe Sakal. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2017 by Jessica Cohen. All rights reserved.

מאת משה סקאל

 

  1. < >בואו נראה. גדלתי בתל-אביב, בשכונה שכמעט כל תושביה היו אשכנזים. אני זוכר מורה בבית הספר שטען באוזנינו שהאמהוֹת בספרוּת שולטות בילדיהן באמצעות האוכל. ובאמת, אמו הפולנייה של חבר ילדוּת שלי נהגה לומר: “ירצו – יאכלו. לא ירצו – יאכלו”. אמא אחרת היתה פותחת את החלון וצועקת לחלל השכונה בקול אימתני: “שאוליק, בוא הביתה! החביתה על השולחן!”. 

    רק לי לא היתה אמא פולנייה. דווקא רציתי לפעמים שתהיה לי אמא כזאת, שתרדוף אחרי ברחוב עם סוודר ומטרייה, שתרוץ אחרי ברחובות עם רגל קרושה, עם צימעס ועם גפילטע פיש, אמא כזאת שלא תתן לי לקום מהשולחן לפני שאגמור לאכול מהצלחת, שתפרוש ניילונים על הספות החדשות בסלון, שתגיד לחבֵרה החדשה ההודית של אחי: “למה את לובשת שחור? גם ככה את שחורה”. רציתי, לא היתה לי.

    אמי ילידת תל-אביב. הוריה היגרו לישראל ממצרים. הצד הקהירי של משפחתי התנכר לחלוטין למרחב המצרי שבו גדל. דודותיה ודודיה של אמי חיו בקהיר בינם לבינם. שפת אמם היתה צרפתית ולא ערבית, והם היו אירופים בעיני עצמם. הם היו סוחרים אמידים, התגוררו בבתי מידות, ובבתי העיר והכפר שלהם שימשו אותם משרתים, בני המקום. הם נולדו במקום שבו חיו בגלות מוחלטת. בהכחשה. וכך, כשהגיעו לישראל – מרוששים וחסרי כל (הם השאירו את כל רכושם במצרים), הם לא הכינו דבר מהמטבח המצרי: לא מלוחייה, לא טעמייה, לא אף אחת מהמנות שטעמתי בעיר המסחררת הזאת כשביקרתי בה רק לפני כמה שנים בטיול שורשים מאוחר, חודשים ספורים לפני המהפיכה. לא. הם שמרו על הניכור הגמור.

    ובעצם, היה סדק אחד בחומה הזאת שחצצה בין חייהם הקהיריים לבין חייהם בישראל: הקינוחים. לכל דודה היה קינוח משלה, על טהרת המטבח המצרי: סבתא ז’ודית הייתה אופה כּוֹנָפָה, דודה ליאוני הייתה אחראית על ה-riz au lait, דודה איבון – על הבַּסְבּוּסָה, ודודה קאמי היתה מכינה כְּנאפֶה כתומה עם פיסטוקים קלויים. זה היה הפֶטיש שלהן, הסטייה הקטנה.

    אני אפילו לא יודע מה סבתא ז’ודית אכלה בשישים וחמש שנותיה בישראל, מאז שהגיעה אליה מקהיר. כלומר, לא זכורות לי מנות עיקריות כלשהן של ארוחות צהריים וערב. בבקרים היתה סבתא אוכלת צנימים עם קוטג’ ומיונז. היא רקחה לעצמה ממרח מטחינה גולמית ומדבש. כל ערב לקחה כפית של ממרח שזיפים – סגולה נגד עצירוּת. והיא היתה מכורה לביסקוויטים שלהם קראה בצרפתית “פתי בר” (מילולית: “חמאה קטנה”), ושלמרות שמָם הם היו פרוֶוה במאת האחוזים, כלומר הם היו ביסקוויטים של חמאה – ללא חמאה. וזה אולי כל סיפור חייה של סבתא בתל-אביב על רגל אחת.

    1. רק ביצה קשה וכוס מים

    הצד הסורי של משפחתי היה עניין אחר לגמרי. הוריו של אבי נולדו וחיו בדמשק, והיו באמת ובתמים בני המקום ולא רצו לעזוב את מולדתם. הם היו אמידים בזכות כמה אטליזים שניהלה משפחתה של סבתא. סבתא נהגה לספר לי על סבהּ, שבגיל שבעים התאלמן ונשא לאישה בחורה בת עשרים. “כשאני אמות”, הבטיח לה, “תקבלי 1,000 מטבעות זהב”. הוא חי עד גיל מאה. ועד יום מותו רכב על סוס וניהל את רשת האטליזים המשפחתית.

    סבתא אורה סיפרה לי על בתי המטבחיים. על הבחורים העניים שעבדו בתור “מנפחי כבשים” – כאלה שניקבו חור ברגלו של הכבש השחוט וניפחו אותו, כדי שקל יותר יהיה לפשוט את הצמר מעליו. סבתא עצמה הפסיקה לאכול בעלי חיים כבר בימי נעוריה, בתקופה שבה זה מאוד לא היה מקובל. היא היתה יושבת במסעדות עם סבא ומזמינה רק “ביצה קשה וכוס מים”.

    אבל כשאני חושב על זה עכשיו, אולי זה בכלל לא קשור לעניין הצמחונות. אולי הדבר הזה, הסיפורים שתמיד שמעתי על סבתא, שאפילו כשישבה עם סבא בשאנז אליזה בפריז, שנים אחר-כך, והזמינה “ביצה קשה וכוס מים”, קשורים לחוויית ההגירה שלה לישראל בשנת 1949, שנה לאחר קום המדינה. בדיעבד, את כל הכעס שלה, את כל התסכול מהניכור שבו חייתה במולדתה המאמצת, היא הביאה לידי ביטוי באמצעות הימנעות: הימנעות מאוכל, הימנעות מחברת בני האדם, הימנעות מהחיים עצמם.

    כך או כך, סבתא אורה הפליאה במטעמי המטבח הסורי. היא היתה מכינה לנו כּוּסָה מַחשִי – קישוא ממולא באורז ובבשר; מֶדיאָס – חצילים ביוגורט; ריז וח’מוד – אורז ותפוחי אדמה חמצמצים, המוגשים קרים, עם סלרי; מַאוּדֶה – קדירה של בשר ותפוחי אדמה, המבושלת במשך יממה ויותר, מעין גרסה סוּרית של טשולנט; וכמובן – קוּבֶּה.  

    את הקובה המטוגן של סבתא אני זוכר היום כמאכל מפואר, אבל האמת היא שמדובר היה במנה שנחשבה לפשוטה דווקא, כזאת שאוכלים ביום שבת לקראת הצהריים, כשחוזרים מבית הכנסת. להלן ההוראות לאכילת הקובה של סבתא אורה: יש לקטום את ראשו של הקובה ולרוקן לצלחת את תוכנו (בשר טחון וצנוברים). לאחר מכן יש למלא את הקובה המרוקן בתערובת טחינה, סלט ירקות, בשר וצנוברים, ורק אחר כך אפשר לנגוס.

    סבתא העריצה אוכל מטוגן. היא אמנם בישלה ואידתה מנות טעימות להפליא, אבל היה לה משפט קבוע, ססמא שאף פעם לא הכזיבה, מעין אמת נצחית שאותה היא הכריזה תמיד בחיוך ערמומי: “מטוגן, איך לא ייצא טעים!”.

    לקינוח היא הכינה לנו מעמול פריך, ממולא באגוזים או בתמרים, וגם חלוואת נֵשָה – מקפא של עמילן ועליו אגוזים מרוסקים וקינמון. בשנותיה האחרונות של סבתא התגוררה אצלה מטפלת פיליפינית, שהכינה לה אוכל תחת עינה הפקוחה תמיד: זה היה מין שילוב מוזר של מטבח פיליפיני וישראלי, עם נגיעות דמשקאיות קלות. 

    סבתא מתה רק לפני שנתיים, בגיל מופלג. תחילה היה נדמה שכּל המטעמים הסוריים שהיתה מכינה לנו, ירדו יחד איתה לקבר. ולא שבני המשפחה לא ניסו ללמוד ממנה איך לבשל, ההפך הוא הנכון. אבל את בנותיה וכלותיה ונכדותיה היא בלבלה לגמרי עם דרך ההכנה. ואולי בעצם לא עם דרך ההכנה עצמה – דווקא בעניין הזה היא היתה נדיבה ודי ברורה. הבעיה היתה עם הכמויות: סבתא מיאנה להגיד מה הכמויות הדרושות לכל תבשיל. כשבנותיה, כלותיה ונכדותיה לחצו עליה שתגלה מה המינון, כשהן ביקשו, התחננו, איימו, סבתא רק חייכה את חיוכה הערמומי והפטירה: “מה הבעיה? צריך לשים קצת מזה, וקצת מזה, וקצת מזה”.

    רק דבר אחד השתבש בתכנית המחיקה המתוחכמת של סבתא: בן הזקונים שלה, אבי, ישב בילדותו על השַיש בזמן שאמו בישלה, וראה הכל. אבא גילה את הדברים שראה לאמי, וככה, בשנתיים האחרונות, בארוחות החג המשפחתיות, מופיעות פתאום על השולחן מנות סוריות מעשה ידי הורי: מדיאס. מאודה. ריז וח’מוד. חלוואת נשה. בזעיר אנפין. וכך השתבשה תכניתה של סבתא. לא כל ההוד וההדר הסוריים ירדו לטמיון – אחרי ככלות הכל, משהו מכל זה נשאר.

    1. מאה המבורגרים

    בילדותי בתל-אביב הכינה לנו אמא מאכלים שאפשר לשייך אותם למטבח ה”ישראלי”. מהו המטבח הישראלי? הכל ולא-כלום. מעין מטבח שהוא שילוב של הכל ושלילה של הכל. כמו החברה הישראלית עצמה.  יש בו עדוּת, יש בו ריחות וזכרונות ממקומות ומזמנים אחרים, וגם אין בו דבר מכל אלה. יש בו קיבוץ גלויות, שילוב של מזרח ומערב, פעפוע והשפעה הדדית של תרבויות ושל מקומות, וגם לא. המטבח ה”ישראלי” הוא תעלומה, חור שחור, אוטופיה – מקום שהוא לא-מקום.

    היינו אוכלים אורז, פסטה, עוף. אהבנו שניצל. לפעמים הרשו לנו לאכול המבורגר בסניף ה”בורגר ראנץ’” ואחר כך בסניפי מקדולנדס שפתח את שעריו לראשונה בישראל כשהייתי נער. בגיל שתים-עשרה מילאתי שאלון טריוויה בעיתון, וזכיתי בפרס מופרך: מאה המבורגרים.

    בקיץ ההוא התחילו כאבי הבטן. התעניתי בכאבים. הורי לקחו אותי לרופא, והוא שלח אותי לבדיקות. מה עשיתי ומה לא עשיתי: בדיקות שאיפה ונשיפה, נתנו לי לבלוע חומרים מגעילים ובדקו את האורגניזם, איך הוא מגיב. דחפו לי צינורות, ערפלו את הכרתי בחומרי טשטוש. הרופאים הפכו והפכו בגוף הזה, שרק התחיל לצמח ולהפוך לגבר. בסוף פסקו: הכל כשורה.

    אבל הבטן כאבה, ועוד איך. אמא לקחה אותי למומחה גדול, פרופסור לגסטרולוגיה, והוא פסק שאני סובל ממעי רגיז. אחרי שתיקה קלה שאל אותי הגסטרולוג: “מה אתה עושה דבר ראשון כשאתה קם בבוקר?”. עניתי: “אני שותה כוס שוקו”. “ובכן”, פסק הרופא, “אל תשתה”.

    הכריזו עלי כעל רגיש ללקטוז. בימים ההם בישראל לא שמעו על רגישים ללקטוז. ומאחר שגם טבעונים כמעט לא היו בנמצא, ורק שמעתי עליהם כעל שמועה רחוקה כעל כת של תמהונים, קשה היה לי להסתגל לפסיקתו של הגסטרולוג.

    באותה תקופה עשתה אמא הסבה מקצועית והפכה לסוכנת ביטוח. סוכן ביטוח נחשב אז לעיסוק רציני ויציב. אמא יצאה מהבית מוקדם בבוקר וחזרה בלילה. אני הייתי הבכור. מלבדי היו אחות ואח צעירים ממני בכמה שנים, ואח אחד נוסף – בן הזקונים, שהיה עוד זאטוט ממש. הורי שכרו את שירותיה של מטפלת שכינוייה בפי כולם היה מוקה. מוקה היתה תימניה, מלאת פלפל. ועל קיבתנו הרכה – קיבתם של סורים-מצריים שגדלו בשכונה של אשכנזים – היא חסה, ולא בישלה לנו אוכל תימני. פעם אחת היא ניסתה, ובמשך יממה תמימה בערו שפתי מהמאכל החריף. לא. מוקה בישלה עבורנו אוכל “ישראלי”. פסטה, פתיתים, שניצל, קציצות עוף ובקר. היא היתה קוצצת סלט ירקות דק-דק. והיא היתה קנאית לארוחות הצהריים שלנו. עם הזמן, הזאטוט, בן הזקונים, גדל והיתה לילד ואז לנער רך. מוקה נושלה מכל עיסוקיה בביתנו למעט הבישול. כעת היא הקפידה על הארוחה הקפדה יתירה. כל הילדים צריכים היו לחזור הביתה בצהריים ולשבת לשולחן. מוקה, לבושה בסינר, היתה מגישה לנו את המנות, מדרבנת אותנו שנאכל עוד סלט קצוץ, ונחרדה כשהייתי מנסה להוסיף גבינת קוטג’ לארוחה. היא השגיחה על כשרות, וכעסה כשלא שמרתי על השעות שיש לספור בין אכילת בשר לחלב.

    פעם אחת הודעתי למוקה שאוכל את ארוחת הצהריים אצל חבר מבית הספר. הייתי כבר בן שמונה-עשרה. כשחזרתי הביתה, מוקה עשתה לי סצינת קנאה. היא ביקשה לדעת מה בדיוק הגישו, עברה אתי מנה-מנה באופן מדוקדק. “וסלט, הגישו?” שאלה בחשדנות. כשהשבתי בשלילה, היא חייכה. יותר לא העזתי להיעדר מארוחות הצהריים שלה.

    אבל היה עוד איזה דבר. בימים ההם, ימים של שנאה עצמית ללא מוצא, הייתי יושב שעות מול הצלחת ולא נוגס באוכל. הייתי מתבונן בצלחת הגדושה במטעמים כמו שמסתכלים על אוייב. לדעתי הייתי רזה מדי, שנאתי את גופי, פרקי הידיים שלי היו דקים, עצם הגרוגרת – עדות לגברותי – בולטת כגרון של תרנגול הודו. שנאתי את רזוני, אבל מיאנתי לאכול. הִשלתי מאחורַי ילדות מאושרת, כמו שנחש משיל את קשקשיו. נעורַי היו קשים, ללא נחמה או אהבה מן החוץ. ולא אכלתי כמעט דבר.

    1. Le Salon de l‘Agriculture

    בגיל 22 עזבתי את תל-אביב ועברתי להתגורר בפריז. גרתי עם חבר מבית הספר בעליית גג של בניין בן 400 שנה ברובע המארה – הרובע היהודי והרובע של הקהילה הגאה. תחילה עוד הייתי קונה את הבשר בחנויות הכשרות של הרובע, אחר-כך חדלתי. השותף שלי היה ממוצא אוסטרי, ובכל מנה שהכין היו הרבה חמאה ושמנת. הבטן שלי כאבה. אכלתי אורז בלי כלום, תקופה ארוכה. לא הסתגלתי.

    חזרתי לישראל, וכעבור שנה נוספת שבתי לפריז, הפעם לשש שנים. שוב נמנעתי מאכילת בשר, והפעם בגלל הפרה המשוגעת. אחד המרצים שלי באוניברסיטה – איש שחבש פאה, הגיע בכל יום רכוב על אופנוע כבד ולפני הבחינות פרש על השולחן את הספרים פרי עטו, שאותם הציע לנו למכירה – מת מהפרה המשוגעת. כך לפחות גרסה השמועה.

    עם הזמן התוודעתי למטבח המגוון בפריז. אפשר להגיד הרבה ביקורת על הרוח הרפובליקאית הצרפתית, על כך שלמרות כל הרב-תרבותיות, בסופו של דבר שולט קול אחד בחברה הצרפתית. ועדיין, יש שם שפע עצום, שאותו לא הכרתי מימי בישראל. שפע של תרבויות, שפע של מאכלים. בפריז אכלתי מהמטבח היפני, ההודי, הוויאטנאמי. אכלתי אוכל צרפתי, כמובן, מכל אזורי צרפת, ואחד התחביבים שלי ושל בן זוגי התל-אביבי שאותו הכרתי בפריז, היה ללכת בכל שנה ל-Salon de l‘Agriculture, שם צפינו באינספור סוגים של בהמות, תרנגולים – שאחדים מהם נראו כמו זמרי פאנק של שנות השמונים, ושאר התפארת של כפרי צרפת, שפעם בשנה מגיעים אל עיר האורות ופורשים בה את מרכולתם. אפילו נשיאי צרפת נוהגים להגיע בכל שנה לסלון ולהצטלם מחייכים, אוחזים כבשה בין ידיהם. לשם הלכנו גם אנחנו בכל שנה, ולאחר שצפינו בבעלי החיים, נעמדנו בדוכנים המקיפים את היריד וסעדנו את לבנו במטעמים שהגיעו מכל צרפת.

    את ראש השנה היהודי חגגנו בכל שנה בבית חברה ישראלית שגם היא עקרה לפריז. אמהּ – סוכנת ביטוח אף היא – נהגה להגיע בכל שנה לפריז עם קרפיונים שחוטים בתיק היד שלה. כך היא חלפה על פני מכונות השיקוף, בפנים תמימים. בפריז היא הוציאה את הקרפיונים מהתיק והכינה גפילטע פיש לתפארת, לשמחתם של הישראלים הגולים.

    בתקופה ההיא שוב כאבה לי הבטן. הפעם ברור היה שאני אוכל מהר מדי. נרשמתי לטיפול אצל מטפלת התנהגותית שמתמחה בבעיות אכילה. המטפלת לקחה עט ונייר ורשמה מפּי את כל סיפור חיי. היא התעכבה על יחסי עם הורי, על ימי ילדותי – על הכמיהה לאמא פולנייה שתרדוף אחרי עם רגל קרושה, עם צימעס ועם גפילטע פיש – ובמיוחד רצתה לדעת על ימי הנעורים הארוכים, שבהם רבצתי מול צלחת גדושה באוכל ומיאנתי לאכול. בשלב כלשהו התפרצה עלי: “מה יש לכם אתם, היהודים, עם כל רגשי האשמה האלה??”

    כשהסתיים הטיפול ונעמדנו בדלת, שאלתי אותה בעדינות: “ומה עם האכילה המהירה, יש לך עצה?”. המטפלת השיבה: “תאכל עם צ’ופ סטיקס!”. וטרקה את הדלת.

    1. הסעודה הגדולה

    כעבור שש שנים שבנו לישראל. ימי הגלות המתוקה והמרירה היו מאחורינו. שבנו אל הארוחות המשפחתיות המלאות אדם, שֶמנות אינספור גודשות על שולחנותיהן. את מקום הדודות והדודים של הורי, החליפו עכשיו דודות ודודים שלי, גיסים ואחיינים. המשפחה צמחה לרוחב. מנהגים ומאכלים שהיו פעם מנת חלקנו, נעלמו מאתנו מבלי שאפילו הרגשנו. אמי המשיכה להכין את מטעמי המטבח הסורי שלמדה מאבי, שלמד אותו בתורו מאמו. פעולת המחיקה של הגולה ושל הדורות, לא לגמרי צלחה. אבל משהו בכל זאת נשכח.

    בסיפור “השנים הטובות” עולה גיבורו של הסופר ש”י עגנון – חתן פרס נובל – לירושלים ומתארח אצל ידיד, שם הוא מתכבד בסעודה גדולה. בעת הסעודה מגיע למקום אביו של המארח. הנוכחים קמים מפני האב, וזה מתיישב במקום צנוע וסועד את לבו בלחם גס, בזיתים ובבצלים ושותה קיתון של מים. המסַפר שואל בהשתוממות את מארחו, מדוע בעוד שכולם אכלו מעדנים ושתו יין טוב, לאב הם נתנו לחם גס, זיתים ובצלים ומים בלבד. ואז פושט האב את שתי ידיו ואומר למסַפר שאף הוא טועה בטעות הרווחת שלפיה אכילת מעדנים היא דבר נעלה, והרי היא דווקא עונש.

    עגנון מתייחס כאן לאחת השאלות המרכזיות שטרדה, בין השאר, את מוחותיהם של סופרים רבים בחייהם וביצירתם: מה האופן שבו ראוי לנהוג בהורים; במה מתבטא הציווי “כבד את אביך ואת אמך”?

    קונפוציוס הסיני כתב על חובת כיבוד הורים כך:

    “המכבד את הוריו בימינו איננו אלא זה שיכול לכלכלם. אבל הכלבים והסוסים, הלוא גם להם יש מי שבכוחו לכלכל אותם; ואם אין כאן יראת כבוד, מה אפוא מבדיל ביניהם?”

    כלומר, האם עלינו רק לדאוג לכך שהורינו לא יגוועו ברעב, ממש כפי שאנו דואגים לבעלי החיים שלנו, או שאולי צריך להיות כאן משהו נוסף?

    ואם אצטרך להכין אוכל להורי, אני תוהה, יום אחד – איזה אוכל בדיוק זה יהיה, ומה הסיפור שיספר האוכל הזה שאכין עבורם? אולי אני בכלל צריך לחשוב אחרת. הפרק הבא שאכתוב כאן צריך להיות הפרק של האוכל שאכין לילדי העתידי. כן. זה יהיה מטבח ים-תיכוני, עם נגיעות צרפתיות קלות. יהיו בו כמובן גם מנות ברוח התקופה, כמו קדירת קינואה או אטריות אורז עם טופו. בבית יהיו תמיד חטיפי מוזלי אורגניים, ובין הארוחות ינשנשו שקדים ואגוזים. ילדי העתידי לא יהיה רגיש ללקטוז – שלושת הדורות בין דמשק ותל-אביב יחשלו את קיבתו ויעשו אותה עמידה ללא חת. בגיל 12 הוא/היא ימרוד בי ויברח לסניף המקדונל’ס הקרוב לביתנו. בגיל 13 הוא/היא יהפוך לצמחוני. נעוריו יהיו קשים, אבל בחרותו – שקטה ורוגעת. בגיל 18 הוא יבחן את פנַי בשתיקה, בחיוך ערמומי – הדומה לחיוכהּ של סבתא אורה הדמשקאית – ויחשוב לעצמו: “איך הוא התרכך עם השנים”.

    ביומנו יכתוב כך:

    “אבי נולד וגדל בישראל למשפחת ממוצא קהירי-דמשקאי. בנעוריו התגלה שיש לו מעי רגיז, זמן קצר אחרי שמילא שאלון טריוויה וזכה במאה המבורגרים. הוא גלה לפריז, שם טופל אצל מטפלת בבעיות אכילה ששלחה אותו לאכול עם צ’ופ סטיקס. מאז חזרתו לישראל הוא צופה בבעתה בחילופי הדורות במשפחתו ותוהה מה תהיה אחריתו. אבא מכין לי תבשילי קינואה וירקות, וגם כמה מאכלים דמשקאיים שאת סודותיהם למד מאביו, שלמד אותם בתורו מאמו. עוד אני יכול/ה לומר שאבי היה איש די קשה בילדותי, אבל בשנים האחרונות הוא התרכך. גם המעי הרגיז מעיק עליו פחות לאחרונה, אולי בזכות גילו המתקדם. לרגל יום הולדתו החמישים וחמש החלטתי לרשום אותו לקורס בישול של המטבח האשכנזי. בקורס אבא ילמד להכין רגל קרושה, צימעס, וכמובן – גפילטע פיש!”.

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