By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
I can always tell Passover is approaching because of the spike in ostensibly related emails cascading into my inbox.
Example: A few days ago, the good people over at Manischewitz sent me a press release extolling their newest line of Pesach delights, including – bless their unleavened hearts – frozen matzoh balls.
Iced matzoh balls? Holy chametz-less chutzpah. I’m jumping with oy. I’m all for culinary convenience, but this is carrying things more than a little too far. A sacred boundary has been violated.
This puts me in the mind of recalling an incident, almost 30 years ago, that pitted my mother against my then-fiancée, Polly, in deadly combat. “Andrew likes his matzoh balls firm,” mom (about 5’3) instructed Polly (close to 5’10), to which – following one or two seconds of decidedly pregnant pause – my intended replied: “Andrew will like his matzoh balls any way I make them.”
I was smart enough to remain more or less neutral, though I eventually figured the better part of valor was to side with the woman I intended to marry, matzoh-ball-density be damned. And as though to prove that marriage can have a salutatory effect, I ended up shifting allegiances from firm to fluffy.
But I digress. My main purpose here, drawing on the deep recesses of my addled memory, is to recount the annual ritual of my family’s Pesach observance. Steeped in the lore of parental ancestry, possessing – depending on whether it was First or Second Night – manic energy or creeping lassitude – potentially inducing PPTSD – Post-Pesach Traumatic Syndrome.
Like many American families, Passover was the most tangible means of affirming that we were really, truly, incontrovertibly Jewish. It didn’t matter that we never attended Shabbat services, seldom uttered any phrases that resembled Hebrew and flouted pretty much every regulation pertaining to kashrut. Every Passover we attended two seders without fail. That was sufficient.
It went like this: The First Night was invariably spent at my Aunt Edith’s home in Howard Beach, Queens. Second Night meant crossing the George Washington Bridge making our way to my Uncle Henry’s home in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
They could not have been more different from each other, or from our home life in an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. Edith was my father’s younger sister, a sweet, come here and give your Aunt Edith a hug! kind of woman married to a man so reticent that, to this day, I can’t seem to remember his name.
But if Male Spouse was quiet, the seder was anything but. Picture 20 or so talk-crazy Jews – including my father’s older siblings, Marion and Sidney — arrayed at two long tables snaking through the top-floor dining/living room of Edith’s two-family home. This was a very long, very noisy affair, with abundant brisket and even more laughter.
The short trip across the Hudson River for Seder Two was a ritual unto itself. I confess to growing up with one pervasive prejudice displayed by my father: an utter disdain for New Jersey drivers. Spotting a vehicle with Jersey plates, he’d first scoff at “The Garden State” motto, before instructing me to always give said drivers the widest of berths.
Second Night was, shall we say, rather more sedate than its predecessor. It was also, by comparison, miniscule: comprising me, my younger sister Suzy and our parents sitting at a non-descript table next to my mother’s older brother Henry, my Aunt Eileen, and their three sons: David, Howard and Ralph, with whom I had little in common besides genetics. This seder was short, quiet and low-energy.
Upon returning to our West 86th Street apartment, invariably my father would take me aside and – out of earshot from my mother – say something along the lines of, “C’mon, you call that a seder?”
Small miracle: As far as I can recall, the matzoh balls were fresh.
Andrew Adler is Managing Editor of Community.