When I asked my father what he missed most about my mother these days, he said, predictably, “Her cooking, very much.” I asked him what he thought about when he saw her in the kitchen, and he said,
“She’s not able to do anything anymore. She is sitting there, watching somebody else peel the potatoes, and I can only think she must be terribly hurt inside.”
Not long ago, I drove to Somerville, New Jersey. I was born there, in the house where my mother grew up. In the forties and fifties it was the nicest home on the block, but now most of the original dark-brown shingles are gone, replaced by shingles painted three or four different colors and some not painted at all. Quite a few aren’t even shingles, just scraps of wood hammered over holes.
Both my parents were born on New York’s Lower East Side, and they carried out their courtship in Somerville, over a table in the back of my grandmother’s store. They met in the thirties, the time of the Great F O R K I T O V E R
2 1
Depression. Although the people of that era are now extravagantly referred to as the Greatest Generation, I think of my mother and father as members of the Quietest Generation. They and their parents had endured too much poverty, death, and hunger for their lives to be colorfully anecdotal. They were children of the oppressed, of parents who lived in the meager shtetls of Europe, the Jewish ghettos famous for all manner of deficiencies, among them food. A few years back, I managed to coerce my parents into providing an outline of their lives, a few stark facts.
My father told me he grew up so poor he and his brothers got jobs in food markets in order to bring home groceries, never mind asking for cash. My mother said, “We weren’t poor,” which she certainly wasn’t in comparison to my father.
“My mother had a store,” she said, “and we took things off the shelf to eat. She had a kitchen in the back, and we ate in the store.” I asked my father, jokingly, if he married my mother for her food, and he said, “It’s no joke. After I graduated from Montclair State, I got my first job, and I was still kosher. My father, who was in wholesale dry goods, had two or three customers in Somerville who kept kosher, and he solicited them to see if he could find somewhere for me to eat.
One agreed, for fifty cents a dinner. After two years, they threw me out because I didn’t pay enough attention to their daughter. Then, where did I turn to get a kosher meal? Ida’s mother.” At the time, he was living in a boardinghouse run by a kindly Irish lady, Mrs. Flaherty, who tried unsuccessfully to get him to eat bacon for breakfast. Dinner at the Flaherty’s was not an option. He and my mother worked at the same school, and he asked her if he could eat with her family for the same fifty cents. The money, my mother proudly told me, went into a little can used by Jewish families to collect contributions for the poor. Every home had one of them, a pushke, a can with a slot in the top for coins. When I was a child, ours seemed sacred to me. I might once or twice have lifted a nickel from my sister’s piggy bank, driven by an addiction to Raisinets, but on my life I would not have stolen from that holy tin can.
2 2
A L A N R I C H M A N
I asked my father if he enjoyed my grandmother’s food, and he replied diplomatically, “It was very good.” Actually, she wasn’t much of a cook, but she was a lovely grandmother who had a habit of bringing me a football whenever she visited.
“I was happy to find somewhere to eat,” my father added.
“And I was happy to find a boyfriend,” said my mother. “There was nobody in Somerville, and then he came along, a Jewish boy.” He was quite a catch, a young man who had a master’s degree, played baseball, kept kosher, and said his morning prayers.
My sister and I grew up outside Philadelphia in a sprawling, low-rise, postwar apartment complex. She’s a few years older, and my first food memory is of crying uncontrollably when she came home from first grade and announced that hot dogs had been served in the cafeteria. I haven’t felt so cheated since. Her favorite food was the fried clams at Howard Johnson’s, the highway restaurant chain whose business would ultimately be usurped by McDonald’s, which prevailed, in my opinion, by staying out of the clam business. I was bewitched by the hamburgers seared on a flat metal grill at the Drexelbrook Swimming Club, which we didn’t belong to but I could look down upon from the yard behind our building. I was never fortunate enough to eat one of those burgers, but when the winds drifted upward, carrying their bouquet, my craving was nearly unbearable.
I remember that Dick Clark, not yet a national phenomenon, lived in our apartment complex, a factoid I’ve dined out on for decades. My father recently informed me that I was wrong and that the celebrity was Ed McMahon. Possibly neither of us is correct, for the memories of young boys and old men are equally unreliable. I vividly recall a childhood craving for another savory foodstuff denied me, the Taylor Pork Roll sandwich sold on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. My father may have tolerated non-kosher, but he never moderated his prohibition against pig.
He was an executive with Gimbel Brothers, and on Wednesdays, when the Philadelphia department stores remained open late, he didn’t come home for dinner. On those nights, my mother would often broil F O
