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Simmering Tongue

My brain fires

directly

into my belly.

The memory

pressing me.

Into

my mother’s[1]

affectionate

delight

in having been able

to make

us

perfect

kneydlekh.[2]

Matzo meal on the doorstep.

A sister’s[3]

care.

From Ottawa to St. John’s.

The cookbook’s photographer[4]

has made the lowly matzo ball

into

an object of beauty

suspended

on

a spoon.

Startling me.

My bobe’s[5]

travelling hamantaschen.[6]

Arriving

in Edmonton.

Cardboard boxes

patiently

filled.

in NDG.[7]

Shabes[8]

when we shared a city.

The jars of chicken soup

and sauerkraut,

Bobe’s[9] kreplekh.[10]

Tightly wrapped

on my lap

in the subway

downtown

to U of T.[11]

The kreplach

and the Yiddish[12]

that my Mama

didn’t leave behind.

Words

simmering

still.

Pungent Shadows

Scraggly broccoli florets

hanging.

Stumps upward.

Picked over twice

by the two of them.

Pesto spaghettini long gone.

He pulled other spines from the fridge.

Carving gently

shaving the brown pebbly veneer

hiding cauliflower flesh.

Plant carcasses laid gently to heat.

Pungent onion sinews

squashed garlic hoofs

bubbling froth.

Tang veiling the panes.

Shadows hosting

the radio news. Cast.

Steadying autumn.

Memory Cloaks

Song barrage

 stoking

caffeine high.

Floppy pages   pushing

thoughts  around.

Like

salty-sweet

 crumbs.

Humid haunts

hillside.

Tangle   weeds

with

memory-cloaks

 laid

cautiously

 on muddy

pathways.

Puddles trickle down.

Hiding

 the safest

stones

of

all.

Footing

for

 imaginary

 journeys.

Prose Statement

This set of three autoethnographic[i] poems traces interpenetrations of food and language that mediate experiences of loss and continuity. “Simmering Tongue” mourns and honours my late mother and late grandmother as it reflects on how cooking and ingredients carry personal memories and broader cultural and linguistic heritages through histories of migration.[ii] The second poem in the series evokes the kitchen spaces where familial vegetarianism emerged. One of the aspects of Yiddish, and more broadly Jewish, cuisine that became a mainstream metaphor in North American popular culture in the second half of the 20th century were the emotional as well as nutritional benefits of chicken soup. In “Pungent Shadows,” I evoke the lesser-known practices associated with the vegetarian versions of Jewish traditions of broths and stews – including the frugal “picking over” of nutritional remnants.[iii] “Memory Cloaks” refers to café and walking spaces frequented by intellectuals and artists in cities where I have lived or sojourned in North America and Europe.[iv] In this third poem, I specifically evoke St. John’s – with its many warm cafés and hilly, often damp, walking paths – as a backdrop for the imaginary.

Newly-available materials relevant to Yiddish food studies have helped me think about my Ashkenazic food heritage differently. An example that unexpectedly ties together these three poems is Fania Lewando’s 1938 vegetarian cookbook, recently translated from Yiddish into English by Eve Jochnowitz.[v] As her great-nephew Efraim Sicher explains, this new version of the book “is a matzeva (memorial) to Fania Lewando, hy’d, a woman who devoted her life to promoting Jewish vegetarian cuisine” during the period of anti-Semitism leading up to the Holocaust.[vi] She ran a restaurant and cooking school in Vilna, a major Jewish cultural centre before the Nazi invasion. We know that her restaurant was “a salon for Vilna’s artists and writers” with comments in its guest book by “many luminaries, including the artist Marc Chagall and the Yiddish poet and playwright Itzik Manger.”[vii] This beautiful cookbook invites us to reproduce what she served her customers. Like other surviving works of Yiddish literature from this period, it helps us to appreciate the vibrancy of Jewish cosmopolitan modernist culture and its secular sanctuaries in early 20th century Europe.[viii]