Bubbie’s Ḥalushkas

What is the meaning of food in our culture?

Bubbie’s lunch invitation just after Passover emphasizing explicitly just us was uncharacteristic.

Bubbie, my mom, was the consummate Polish woman of mystery. That Friday afternoon she wore her colorful babushka hair covering. Resplendent in the gold, dangly, Star of David earrings I gave her to commemorate my medical school graduation, a gold necklace with silhouettes of her four grandchildren, and a gold charm bracelet crowded with life mementos, she kissed me as I entered her kitchen.

Rachala Zacharacsjz blessed the world a few days after World War I ended. At our lunch she wore her Hadassah cooking apron with chickens pictured running around a barn yard with Dinner! at the top and a foreboding ax graphic. She was dramatic. Bubbie, the u pronounced as in up, was what we all, by then, called her at eighty-six.

Living alone in her post-war clapboard bungalow north of Los Angeles since my father died a decade before, she was in physical decline, and she’d stopped her daily walking the three miles around her lake because of pain.

She lighted a match and melted the bottoms of the Shabbat candles, inserting them into the precious silver candlesticks her family had salvaged from their shtetl, then the ghetto in Lodz, an area ravaged by the Nazis. A lifelong smoker who prevaricated to everyone about quitting, the cancer munched her body but not her spirit. Still, irrepressibly, Pall Mall smoke plumed into the chicken soup steam wafting over her stove. Cooking was her forte and food defined her; it defined us.

“Everything you like, Kussi. Chalah. Brisket, white fish — you can have both.” At...