The Goodness of Our Fathers

Hadas Benayoun grinds spices. Every morning, the palms of her hands are a new color – bloody paprika, or the marigold splendor of turmeric – and the colors are starting to stay, every day a little stronger, so that one morning she will wake up and her skin will be the rich multilayered brown of the whole spice cabinet mixed together. She walks in a cloud of smells that announces her presence before her. She is twenty-five and unmarried, and she lives at home.

She never intended to become good at what she does. She certainly never intended to make anything public, and in fact she hid her spice blends for many years in a box on top of the pantry, gathering dust with the heart-shaped cookie cutters and her mother’s old sifter for flour. But after a while she began to tire of unremarkable food, bare of all the scents that floated in her head, and she snuck bits and pieces in: a dash of Chinese five-spice powder here, a dollop of harissa there, until her father’s guests and her brothers’ friends started to notice and the word spread through the little yishuv in the Galilee where they lived.

Soon, the girls with whom she had gone to school were at the door every Friday morning, asking for a packet of this or that for the Shabbat stew they would make for their families. “My husband loves your spices,” they would say, reflexively adjusting, as if for emphasis, the elaborate headscarves that marked them...