Memory and Hot Dogs Answering to a ‘Higher Authority’

It’s been decades since Orthodox Jewish authorities have considered Hebrew National hotdogs appropriately kosher and, as a result, I haven’t had them in my house for at least the last 25 years.  A recent lawsuit – which was thrown out because the court said it couldn’t rule on religious matters – claimed that non-kosher meat was used to make the frankfurters. Those accusations went even farther than past concerns that some of the finer points of the kosher laws weren’t being followed by the manufacturers.

That’s unfortunate for two reasons. The first is that, at least in my memory, the all beef hotdogs were very tasty with a satisfying and juicy crunch when you bit into them. Secondly, the hotdogs played an important role in my childhood, being one of the most identifiable and readily available Jewish foods in the 1960s and 1970s. That the manufacturer answered to a “higher authority” was a point of pride, especially in my small Southern town where no one knew from bialys and kishka.

Hebrew National hotdogs were the centerpiece of many cookouts and parties when I was young. I especially liked them charred off the grill and then wrapped in a soft bun. That truly was the taste of summer for me.

Yet, I also strongly identify them with another event in my memory – in the nation’s collective memory. The association is so strong, in fact, that whenever I smell boiling hotdogs, I see a very specific and disturbing scene – Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.

Children like me were traumatized after Kennedy was shot; after all, it hadn’t been that long since we were instructed to “duck and cover” in case of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember walking home from school with my friends and scoping out the ditches along Fourth Street, strategizing what we would do if we saw a missile heading our way. At some level, we all feared President Kennedy’s death was the work of the Soviets and that we are heading into the third world war. Having a second murder occur before our eyes was almost too much to bear.

Like so many Americans of a certain age, I have vivid and very specific memories of the day Kennedy was shot and the days following. In my memory, there are a series of scenes, like a movie preview:

·         It’s early afternoon Nov. 22, 1963, and I’m sitting in a desk in the front row next to the window in my 4^th grade classroom at Orange Street Elementary School. I see my 3^rd grade teacher Mrs. Anderson tapping on the window; when I turn to look, she asks me to call my teacher Mrs. Nichols over. I overhear the two of the talking and realize what has occurred: Someone has shot President Kennedy. Mrs. Nichols turns on the television to watch Walter Cronkite announce that the president was dead.

·         I’m in the car with my mother a few hours later, and we are driving up to the high school to pick up my sisters. Linda is waiting out front and gets into the car, but we’re looking for our oldest sister Susan. After a minute, she comes out clutching her books and sobbing. When she gets in the car, she tells us that some of the other kids were cheering because Kennedy was dead and calling him a “N-----lover.”

·         My entire family is sitting in front of the television on Saturday – which never happens. My parents have closed their clothing store, and we are watching news coverage of the assassination. Kennedy’s body has been returned to Washington, and we see heartbreaking vignettes of his family.

·         Midday Sunday, we’re still so engrossed in the news that my mother decides we’ll eat hotdogs in the living room in front of the television set. I’m setting the old card table with paper plates and watching television. Suddenly, a man shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, who is being escorted by police. I scream, and my parents come running from the kitchen.

This was before children routinely saw violent acts such as close-range shootings. To the degree that anyone got killed in the movies and television shoes we watched, it was a bad guy in a black hat falling off of a horse never to be seen again or a similar bad guy clutching his chest and falling in a cartoonish shoot out death scene.

Furthermore, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was horribly real. There was a loud shot and blood and chaos. I wanted to avert my eyes but couldn’t. It was even worse than the horrible scenes of civil rights protesters being beaten or chased by snarling dogs or the merciless beatings of protesters by the Chicago police, which I watched five years later.

When we heard the identity of the shooter, Jack Ruby, we were concerned and then had those worries confirmed: He was Jewish. It was uncomfortable to have one of our own kind in the spotlight for a violent act. To comfort ourselves, we said to each other, “Thank goodness, he killed the assassin, not the President.”

(My husband Marc tells me that his mother, who had immigrated to the United States less than 10 years before after hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust, was petrified from the moment she heard Kennedy was shot. She insisted they leave a doctor’s appointment and was convinced revolution would occur any moment. Marc, who was just 7-years-old, wasn’t all that aware of what was going on.)

As terrible as the Oswald shooting is in some ways, it also is poignant. How I wish I could have screamed and had my parents come running when I watched the plane hit the second tower on 9-11-2001. As an adult, I still crave that sense of safety, of everything being right with the world, that comes from having your own mother and father comfort you after seeing something disturbing, of having your sisters nearby and a warm meal on the table.

Strangely, I do have some recollection even after we watched the endless discussion and replay of the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting that afternoon. Eventually, we went to the kitchen, and my mother pulled the slightly-desiccated Hebrew National hotdogs out of the pot and put them in a bowl. One sister brought the massive can of Charles’ chips, with the other grabbing the buns. My father opened a jar of dill pickles, while I pulled out the mustard and ketchup and put them on the card table.

What else was there to do at that point?

Maybe it the end of our innocence, maybe it was the beginning of a downward spiral for a nation. The commentary on all of that was still years in the future.

We just did what families do to cope with crisis. We sat down together and ate a late lunch. It may have been simple, but it was one of the most memorable meals of my life.

Marcel Proust may have had his madeleines, but for me, this November 50 years later, remembrance is about Hebrew National hotdogs.

The Ghosts of Passover Past

 

Getting ready for Passover this year, Marc and I juggled our time between work and preparing for the holiday. That meant cleaning and organizing and some heavy cooking.

But we didn’t do it alone. I don’t just mean that the two of us worked together; that’s a given. I prepared the pantry for the Passover groceries; Marc cleaned out the refrigerator. Once the kitchen was kosher for Passover, I prepped and brined the half-sour pickles, while he made the orange marmalade. While I baked Passover-appropriate brownies, he assembled the homemade cranberry sauce.

Yet, even when Marc was out running errands or trying to get in a few minutes at his office, I was not alone. Something about the holiday—and preparing for it—makes the presence of loved ones, now of blessed memory, so tangible. Sometimes I feel their presence so strongly, the memories are so vivid, I can almost touch them, feel them, smell them.  For lack of a better description, you might call them my Ghosts of Passovers Past.

We start visiting just after the festival of Purim when I pull out my special Passover notebook. Many of my favorite recipes are written in my mother’s distinctive cursive handwriting with her precious notes in the margins. As I read them, I hear in her voice: “You can use orange marmalade if you want” (I’ll have a lot of that) or “Be careful how much sour salt you put in.”

Some of the recipes, which perfectly capture the mid-century zeitgeist, would never grace my table. But reading the recipe for “Busy Day Fish Bake,” which uses—ugh—gefilte fish from the jar, gives me insights and empathy for what she had to juggle this time of year. Yet, she took enough time away from the family clothing store during Passover to pick up my sisters and me from school before lunch each day, bring us home to a hot meal, and then  drop us back off. What a treat , even if lunch was a casserole of gefilte fish and Passover potato latke mix!  

As I employed my trusty Magic Eraser cleaning pad on the baseboards, I thought of how she and our beloved housekeeper, Earlene,  scrubbed the kitchen in my childhood home until it shone like a new penny.  Earlene, who was considerably shorter than my mother, would wipe down the bottom cabinets—I can still smell the Pine Sol and hear the cloth squeaking across the mauve paint – while my taller mother would stretch to reach the top ones. (Remembering that, I wished, just for a second, that my floors were made of knee-friendly vinyl like those from my childhood instead of solid Cyprus wood)

When I closed my eyes, I could see my mother, her face pink from exertion, pushing an errant strand of damp hair behind the yellow pencil stub resting behind her ear. (She always had one there when she worked at the store but also kept one handy at Passover, in case she needed to add something to her grocery list – usually scribbled on the back of a paper sack or notebook paper I had discarded.)

Earlene, who was a beautiful, full-throated soprano, often would sing to break up the monotony of the task. Appropriately, one of her favorites at Passover was “Go Down, Moses.” When I walked in, she sometimes would begin singing, “A tisket, a tasket…” because she knew “Little Yellow Basket” was one of my favorites. Even as a toddler, I loved singing along, “No, no, no,” which was very apt for a 2-year-old.

Preparing for Passover this year, I laughed a little at myself, quietly singing the song in my can’t-carry-a-tune-in-a-bucket range as I sponged down cabinets.

When the house was clean and I begin to haul out the cookware, I thought again of the past. Gazing at  my mother’s  old frying pan, passed down to me, I pondered why her Passover hamburgers –often cooked in this very pan--were so delectable. She would mix the ground beef with egg and matzoh meal, then season it with whatever she had handy—which could range from paprika to onions to the super-sweet Passover ketchup.  She then fried the burgers until they almost doubled in size. That, with mashed potatoes, is the ultimate Passover comfort meal for me.

Digging further into my Passover cookware and utensils, which have been tucked away and out-of-sight for nearly a year, I pull out a few items previously owned by my Bubbie, bringing on another cascade of memories. I recall how the mahogany table, supplemented by the kitchen table and whatever flat surface was available, stretched nearly the full length of her living room and dining room combined. My grandfather sat proudly at the head of that table, filled with dear relatives--he and so many of them now gone.

Memories flash through my head:  the sweet wine in the burgundy colored glasses; the Haggadot with photos of upside cows, which gave my cousin Holly and me the giggles; the flutter in my stomach when I was asked to read with a table-full of adults looking on, and, finally, the food. After what seemed like an interminable first part of the seder –it usually takes less than an hour, in actuality—nothing tasted better than the hardboiled eggs dipped in saltwater, followed by a mound of gefilte fish drenched in beet red horseradish.

Then there was always a few minutes of escape from the house, as steamy as the bowls of chicken soup served after the gefilte fish. I would sit on the front porch steps with my cousins, enjoying the cool breeze and sucking in the fragrance of early spring blooms in south Georgia. Between the heavy meal and the fresh air, I was a teenager before I could keep my eyes open until the end of the seder .

Also hard to forget were the hour-long rides home in the early morning hours, the Pontiac slicing through the intense darkness of the pine forest-lined two lane blacktop. My sisters and I dozed in the backseat, huddled like baby birds in a vinyl nest, while my mother spoke quietly to my father, making sure he stayed awake for the drive. Usually, preparing for the holiday was stressful for my parents: My father resented the price-gouging by the Passover manufacturers , and my mother was trying to buy enough to feed a family of five for more than a week, while still placating her husband. Maybe it was the wine or the family closeness, but the storm had always passed by the time we were driving home after the seder, and I felt very safe listening to their gentle conversation.

More memories bubbled up a few hours before the seder, when I was mixing the matzoh balls. I could see my  late mother-in-law, Erika, standing in an earlier iteration of this kitchen, stirring together the matzoh meal and oil, then tossing in ginger, her secret ingredient. She would already be dressed for the seder , wearing a necklace , earrings and an apron to protect herself from any greasy splashes. The kitchen would be redolent with the smell of ginger powder mixed with Erika’s cologne.

It’s not really surprising to have these strong memories at Passover, which is all about symbolic food and erasing the barriers between past and present. In some ways, the entire holiday creates a time warp, where the past is now and the present then.

The Haggadah is very clear that the story of the flight from Egypt should be told as if you were actually there. You taste the bitterness of the herbs, feel the mortar-like texture of haroset, partake of the saltiness of tears in the dipping water, all to both empathize with your ancestors and experience the Exodus yourself.

I often talk to my young guests about another way Passover is outside of time. If a Jew from the 15^th or 17^th centuries  dropped into our suburban community the night of the seders, I tell them, nearly everything would be beyond their comprehension – the streets, the houses, the cars. But if they walked into our house, they not only would know exactly what we were doing but would be able to join in.

Even in a very pragmatic way, however, Passover pulls you into the past. Because dishware and utensils last quite a while when they are used only eight days a year, a Passover tool I pull out of a drawer is most likely 20-years-old but also could be 50- or even 80-years-old, passed down from generation to generation. The colander with the star-shaped perforations has been around for Passover my entire life, and even before. The same is true in Marc’s experience; for him, the holiday always has been associated with the red handled utensils, now so chipped that only a few blotches of paint remain.

So, of course, as time folds over on itself, the important people that you’ve lost become somehow more accessible. Maybe it is because I’m older and moving inexorably closer to where they are, but the memories of the departed grow more vivid each year, not less so.

Passover is also very much about the present: My godchildren around the table during the seder, looking and sounding like men and behaving like the mensches they’ve become; the friends with whom we have shared the holiday for a decade or more, looking older yet even more precious to us;  the fun supper we shared with our beloved nieces and great-niece, who now says our names in her soft, sweet voice.

And even about the future: We’ve already begun to discuss plans for next year’s holiday and how to make it even more family-oriented, including those who are still very much alive and those who are only still alive in our memories.