Sabbath Meals

On disgust and authenticity

Well, doesn't this just figure? In the comments to this post, I learned that I have a faithful reader I don't know, who has read every post I've put up over a period of some months...and who finally came out of lurkdom to attack me. Signing the first comment "pretty disgusted" is one of those sure ways to tip someone off that you disagree with them.

What I was saying is you imposed the antisemitic overtones on the Snapes character out of outsize identification with fiction and insufficient connection to reality...[snip]I believe I've read every single post on this blog; I've been reading it for months. I like your blog well enough. But it's a self-conscious attempt to solidify ethnic/religious identity, and you habitually associate Judaism and Jewish values with all things the smart set consider "progressive". So when you free-associate to fictional characters who in some vague way remind you of overtly antisemitic fictional characters in past works, and consider yourself to have been "sensitive" (as a Jew) and to have detected some pernicious new fictional example of antisemitism, forgive me for pointing out that this demonstrates authentic Jewish identity and sensitivity to antisemitism in about the same way and to the same degree that Afro-Americans whose families have been living in the US for a few centuries and celebrate Kwanza demonstrate authentic connection to their African roots and sensitivity to oppression.

To me, this seems like a bit of an overreaction. (Ironic, as the whole point is to accuse me of overreaction. Hmm.) Of course, all criticism sends me into spirals of self-doubt, but as my husband pointed out, I really didn't make any huge claims about Rowling or her characterization of Snape. So a Jewish blogger finds it interesting to explore the resonances of 19th century literary anti-Semitism in the most popular book in the Western world, is that so unexpected? No more unexpected, I guess, than the way the word "anti-Semitism" draws negative comments to a blog.

Fortunately, this Kwanzaa example is great for illuminating  the assumptions on which Pretty Disgusted's disgust is grounded. I can't speak for people celebrating Kwanzaa, but okay, let's look at the parallels. I disagree that it is inauthentic for any cultural minority in the United States to invent a new ritual or practice based on their current values and beliefs. The implication of this whole line of thinking is that either 1) you can't be culturally authentic if you aren't personally, currently suffering violent oppression, or 2) the cultural identities that groups forge in diaspora are inherently invalid.

I guess I should put it this way: Is the point of Kwanzaa to make African-Americans into Africans? (According to this site it's Kwanzaa with two As when you are discussing the African-American observance.) Is the point of my Jewish observance to turn my America into the shtetl, or Budapest, or Riga, or Jerusalem, or some other lost landscape? You can light candles on Kwanzaa with full awareness that Kwanzaa was invented by an academic in the 1960s. What's so inauthentic about that? Are you going to go to the house of this hypothetical family and tell them, "Kwanzaa is dumb, that's not properly grammatical Kiswahili, and also, I don't like your drapes"?

I've always liked Jenna Weissman Joselit's  book The Wonders of America. In it she describes all the cultural innovations of Jewish life in the United States. Should we stop those dorky candlelighting ceremonies at bar mitzvah receptions? (My husband says "Yes!") Or the moving stone-setting ceremonies that many families conduct after a year of mourning? Are those inauthentic? No, they are as authentic as Chicago pizza, or fortune cookies, or Kwanzaa. That is, they aren't from the old country, they are the products of our current experience and what historians sometimes call "memory." What we think is a vestige of immemorial antiquity is often quite recent, but that doesn't make it less authentic. We can only live our own experience, not return to a mythic past.

I guess it's not surprising that I am more invested in this question than in reading Harry Potter. I don't live to read Harry Potter. It's not even my favorite children's/young adult book. I think I'm with this confirmed  Harry Potter fan who prefers The Once and Future King. She writes:

Isn't that--isn't that perfect? isn't it lovely and painful and doesn't it tell you everything about wart and everything about merlyn and everything that really good children's literature should do? i STILL don't understand the vast, vast majority of white's allusions. i never will. but that's the glee of the porpoise, that's the beautiful thing, that's what makes really good books really good books, that they leave you leaping joyfully along in their wake. every time i re-read Sword, I get another complicated joke, catch another terribly sad foreshadowing, realize another beautiful, subtle nuance in Wart or Kay or Ector or Merlyn or even (goofy, wonderful, wonderful) Pellinore. every time i re-read the HP books, i might catch another clue as to, you know, why i should have caught on earlier about Crouch; but the people are static and strange to me. rowling...i just don't think she taps into that joy, that love of the unfamiliar, even the incomprehensible, which is so unique to children.

It's not that Rowling is somehow defying political correctness in her characterizations and that's making everyone read the books. If anything I would say she's selectively politically correct. Perhaps my interlocutor will be just as annoyed by this essay exploring Rowling's tokenism with black characters. Nu. It's still a good example of what I mean by selective p.c. I would attribute Harry Potter's popularity to three factors:

1. the books realize a fully-envisioned alternative universe through the vehicle of word-play
2. Rowling's use of visual imagery is cinematic, which is perfect for her audience
3. very effective marketing

I would even say that that effective marketing and relatively weak characterization has opened up the field for speculation and interactivity, which enhances the books tremendously for me. Nothing pleases me more than to be able to talk about  a book I enjoyed with so many different people at so many different ages.

Well, this was stimulating. I can't believe I have a blog post that includes both Jenna Weissman Joselit and The Once and Future King. I must say I prefer people to stimulate me by saying nice things rather than attacking me, but still. At least they aren't complaining about my kugel.

Shabbat meals 8/26-8/27/05

I made:

Chickpeas in coconut milk curry from Vegetarian Thai Cooking  By Vatcharin Bhumichitr
Thai-style fried rice
potato salad with mustard-raspberry vinegar dressing and basil
steamed cauliflower
gazpacho

(we also had delicious black plums, cookies and non-dairy frozen desserts)

This was a successful week in the kitchen! I made almost all of the dishes in about an hour and a half, with no sweating or cursing. I have made the chickpea dish many times; it's not a typical Thai dish, since as Mr. Bhumchitr explains, whole beans aren't a usual part of Thai cuisine. He collected the recipe from a Buddhist monastery. It calls for a paste of coriander roots, garlic and black pepper, and then for additional curry powder. This time I had made the master curry powder recipe from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. I also had both fresh August garden tomatoes and fabulous basil. Then I decided to improvise a fried rice based on all the recipes I had around--I fried sliced shallots and scallions, then added grated carrot and pineapple chunks, then the rice, sugar, soy sauce. If it had been authentic I would have used chili peppers, but I was worried that my son might accidentally smear chili in his eyes.

We didn't make the gazpacho until Saturday morning. My little guy got me up and we went into the kitchen, and he helped me, sorta, as I grated and chopped cucumber, tomatoes, scallion, cilantro. We added a bit of oil and vinegar and some tomato juice, salt and pepper. The tomatoes were a combination of some organic heirloom ones I got on sale at Whole Foods and a windfall of garden tomatoes. Every imaginable huge and texture of tomato: red, yellow, red with orange stripes, orange, green with stripes. It was a beautiful gazpacho. My son ate his at lunch saying "pretty, pretty!"  We had it again with some friends at Seudah Shlishit.

Oh it made me happy to have them over on the spur of the moment, we picked them up on our walk, took them to the playground with us, and then kind of lured them home. I used to have people over for summer suppers on Shabbat all the time. We would study, or I would read stories to one of the children, and then we would eat, and sing songs, and say Havdalah. I really love that and we haven't been doing it much. This time we talked about community issues. We didn't dwell too much on the anti-Semitic fliers, but instead talked about ways that people where we live have been trying to make inter-community contacts. We also talked about parenting--our friends are expecting--and how intimidating it can be to make friends with other moms.

I just want to tell you that my 2 1/2 year old has picked up a bunch of prayer vocabulary. We have explicitly been reciting the Shma to him at night before he goes to sleep, and I knew that he knew what a siddur was. But lately he has pointed to the siddur and said "shma!" and also "kedushah!" (It is amazingly moving to have your child say "kedushah!" which means "holiness!" He was saying it because it's the name of a prayer, as is "Shma". I think that's why, it might also have been because I refer to the siddur as a "sefer kedushah.")  I don't want to give you the idea that he is some kind of genius, though. Tonight he had my copy of the Alfred Kotlach name book. He saw that the book had Hebrew and English and said "Siddur! Shma! Hebrew!" So yes, he knows which is Hebrew and which is English, but no, he doesn't actually recognize the Shma on the page. It's amazing what he can pick up without trying.

In case you haven't seen this...

...it's Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince as The Wasteland. Between my misspent youth reading Eliot and my misspent adulthood reading Rowling, I was completely undone.

No comment

They could see he was no ordinary penguin.

Severus Snape's Jewishness and the Fabulous Feminism of Fanfiction

If you have not read The Half Blood Prince through to the end, this post will have some spoilers. Also, if you are frum, this post does not pass basic standards for modesty, I'm linking to some sexy stuff so...if that would damage your good opinion of me or constitute a waste of time for you, don't read this. (Also, also, I am not a literary critic, I've totally forgotten how to even talk about reading.)

I know that the canon of English literature is full of anti-Semitic stereotyping. I have a variety of ways to respond to this. I have engaged The Merchant of Venice with Jewish teachers in secular classrooms who provided us with apologetic readings of Shylock. I have winced at Dickens, at Trollope, at Thackeray, at Henry James. I have read redemptive literary criticism of T. S. Eliot which didn't really redeem anything.

It has finally dawned on me that I am annoyed by J.K. Rowling's characterization of Severus Snape.

In Snape, Rowling has created a angry villain who has a hooked nose, greasy dark hair, sallow skin and glittering dark eyes, an inscrutable, sneering, untrustworthy double agent -- who hisses. I don't think Rowling was intentionally trading in anti-Semitic stereotyping. Does that sound funny after my litany of stereotypical adjectives? But I don't! I think those are general negative physical characteristics in Western culture, and that a person could use them without intending anything racist. It's just kind of pervasive. After all, Rowling does have at least two very minor characters among the student who actually have Jewish names (Anthony Goldstein  in Ravenclaw house, Harry's acquaintance in the DA club, and possibly also Rose Zeller). At least one reader has pointed out that this is part of a concerted effort on JKR's part to show the diversity of present-day Britain.  (Though hello, do you see a single Muslim name here? Are there no Pakistani immigrant wizards at Hogwarts?) Her intentions aside, Rowling's Snape does bum me out. What's with the languid movements and the hairy eyebrows and the general ickiness of her Snape? In the Half Blood Prince he's practically Judas ferchrissakes. (Or you could read it that way. At least you could at the end of book six, book seven might turn the whole thing on its head.)

This is only one of the many reasons that I have become infatuated with the incredible profusion of Harry Potter fan fiction. The internet is full of young women (and even some women my age) who are writing erotic stories about Severus Snape. Rowling may have written Snape to be unattractive, but there are a lot of fangirls out there who think a lanky, sneering, dark haired, sardonic, goth-looking man (with, thanks to the movies, Alan Rickman's incredible voice) is the most attractive thing ever.

I love reading erotic stories (this is the not tznius part) and in particular I enjoy the slash, which are stories about male/male character relationships. When I was the same age as most of the fangirls (late teens early 20s) I also loved gay male porn, but I thought I was a pervert, exploitative, sick, and on top of that, a bad feminist for liking it. These young women have formed a lightly teasing, silly and mutually supportive community of women who like to read and write about gay male sex. They even have a whole erotic vocabulary that I lacked. Like, I knew the word "angst" at 16 (as in "existential nausea") but did I know what "angsty" meant? No, because it didn't mean that in 1982 or whenever. Also "guh", I never had access to the word "guh."

Let me natter on a bit about the mutually supportive thing before I come back to Severus Snape. Much of the fan fiction is really truly crap, but I have found a lot of stories with literary merit. (Because I have been reading obsessively, frankly.) Sometimes these are very clever stories by young women who are just finishing high school or in college, or just after, and I figure "Oh, she's just getting started, this is going to be the beginning of a lot of good work for her." But I look at some of these stories and think, "Wow, she's my age and such a good writer, how can she waste her time creating these wonderful freebies for me out of someone else's characters?"  I found a good answer here:

I've always been a writer.

Really. My first story, about an elf and a lost bear cub, was written when I was seven. My first attempt at a novel was written when I was sixteen. My first published work (The Thieves of Tharbad game supplement from Iron Crown Enterprises) came out when I was twenty-six, and one of my other game modules, The Scarlet Pimpernel, was in production when Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service in the early 1990s,* which means that there's probably a government file on me somewhere (and if they really want to spy on a divorced fortysomething, I hope they let me know so I can invite them in for tea and polite conversation).

Regardless…I stopped writing fiction about ten years ago for a variety of reasons: job loss, a relationship gone south, all the usual melodramatic, soul-sapping things that can happen on one's journey through life. I began writing fan fiction as a way to prime the creative pump, discovered LJ and the joys of Potterfic, and, well, people seem to like what I write.

(Well they should, because she is in fangirl parlance, "teh awesome." You know that I use the word parlance in everyday speech and that if I wrote fan fiction I would NOT have any trouble with the Snape diction issue, whereas I have to put "teh" in scare quotes.)

All these writers have created a giant creative writing workshop in which they support one another in discovering the elements of fiction, with a particular emphasis on characterization. They create writing assignments: whole websites devoted to one-hundred word pieces, or challenges based on a particular aspect of character. (Okay, sometimes a silly or smutty challenge, but still.)  Unlike any college writing workshop I attended, the feedback somehow manages to be remarkably positive. Perhaps I am having one of those mistaken maternalist-feminist moments because I only read comments on stories that were actually good? In any case writers have "betas" who are essentially editors, who help with consistency and grammar and general readability.  It's also incredibly cool that the internet is working this way, as my friend ASL said it would: providing a conduit through which the supposedly passive audience talks back to the providers of mass culture. The supposedly passive, almost entirely female audience made up of smart, somewhat isolated girls who like books.

Now to Snape: I am definitely in the camp of those who find him an attractive and multilayered character. Hey, I've had a thing for many a dark haired, bushy-eyebrowed, olive-skinned, big-nosed man. Even some who shared Snape's mean mouthiness and deep insecurity. It's true that I'm married now and my husband's nose and eyebrows are teh sexy and his personality is closer to the polite and solicitous Remus Lupin than to Snape's, but still.

I have seen many attempts to deal with Snape's ethnicity in the fan fic, since Rowling herself doesn't deal with it. One author decided Snape was Welsh. Another thought he must have a Bengali grandmother. (Snape makes Lupin Indian food, Balabusta is intrigued.)  But several fan fiction writers have made Snape Jewish. I can't go back and link them all, oh my gosh, it's been weeks of cramming my head full of narishkeit. In one story I recall that the author had Snape reading the Mishnah while he waits, in BED, for Voldemort. Eww and eww and yucky feh. Another created a bizarre stereotypical Hanukah vacation for Snape during his years as a student at Hogwarts. The most positive and I think redemptive use of Snape's Jewishness is in these stories by ElliD, in which Snape is the son of a German Jewish refugee. She also has a longer sequence of stories in which Snape and Lupin have an affair with a backstory and every Hogwarts teacher has both religious and ethnic background.

In sum, and I have to stop writing this and go to bed already, Snape is a problem. He's less of a problem than he would be if Rowling had made him Jewish, but still, the more I think about it, the more I worry. Fan fiction provides a solution to some of this. It does even better at providing a solution to the problem of mass culture in general. It's a way for the readers to write back and engage the overwhelming popularity of these books.

Sabbath meals 8/19/05 etc.

What I made for Friday night dinner:

deconstructed peach/melon soup
sweet and sour lentils
plain rice noodles
Asian eggplant
amaranth greens with garlic
cucumber salad with sushi dressing from Moosewood New Basics

It has been three weeks since I blogged any cooking. I did make meals in that time, but I have been feeling unmotivated to cook and disinclined to write about it. I'm not as into my food as I have been, perhaps because of the heat. Even though it's August and we are finally getting the lovely tomatoes, eggplants, herbs, and fruit, I can barely get interested. Friday's cooking was particularly challenging. Only two burners on our stove are working. My mother-in-law was on her way. I tried to make my tapioca dessert and the tapioca balls somehow were both not cooking and were also sticking to the pot horribly. I got my friend's recipe for sweet and sour lentils and realized part way through that I only had some of what I needed to make it. I carried on and it was quite good in spite of everything.

I usually make a peach-cantelope soup: I peel the peaches and the melon, and purée them together, maybe add a splash of orange juice. I opened the melon, which I thought would have orange flesh. It was green. So I puréed the melon with half a Tazo mint tea bag, and then did the peaches separately. When it was time for the soup, I poured out the melon part and then drizzled in the peach purée. It was good, but the peaches were a bit tart.

It was my first time making amaranth greens. They were okay. The Asian eggplant I made with these special sweet long skinny pale purple eggplants and it was brilliant as usual. I had good farmer's market eggplants and greens and cucumbers.

We were invited out for a splendid meal at a friend's house on Saturday. Among the many delicacies was tomatillo guacamole, black bean and corn salad, homemade salsa cruda, polenta and a truly magnificent dessert. We had individual key lime pies. Oh gosh. The meringues had little peaks on them. I am really not immune to food, just to the food that I make! We were hanging out with good friends and I had some profound realizations. Like, for example, I have been feeling horrible guilt that I haven't spoken with this close friend of mine who moved away since she turned 40. I started to get hung up on how I had to get a present or a card because I hadn't done so, and it's an important birthday... my perfectionism was starting to hang me up. So today I phoned her.

I think I am a bit, just, uh, kinda depressed actually. What am I doing with my life, you know, that kind of stuff. In general I'm pretty cheerful but I am starting to feel that horrible inertia. I don't know how to describe "horrible inertia without total incapacitation, slight negative affect and a bit of sleeplessness, plus the same general feeling of anxiety as always." Not-exactly-depression-but-slightly-under-the -weather emotionally? Plus mosquito bites.  I mean, I have been out of a job for months and I find that way stressful, plus the white racists in our neighborhood have a freaking HOTLINE NUMBER on the bottom of their anti-Semitic fliers. I mean that is hilarious in a very sick way. "Quick! I need to phone a racist anti-Semite RIGHT NOW! Where's the HOTLINE!"  Plus we have a visit with my mom coming up.

Well I have more to say about this subject but I'll come back to it later.

Sorry, RSS subscribers

For the two or three friends who have this blog on their RSS readers, I apologize. I am updating my categories and that is going to make it look like I am posting again and again. I do have a few new posts in mind to write as well. Anyway, sorry to get your hopes up that I am about to drop more pearls of wisdom. Love you buckets.

More reasons to love the Chocolate Lady

I found this link on the Chocolate Lady's blog roll.

Kibbeh

Rhen, a commenter from Israel, asked me for kubeh recipes. Kubeh, or kibbeh, is the name of the little meatballs, often torpedo shaped, that are made with a bulghur wheat crust and cuminy meat filling. They are a Syrian and Lebanese specialty.  I am about as Ashkenazi as they come, so I don't have any special kibbeh insights! Nevertheless I am going to try to be as helpful as possible, because...I don't know. Once when I was in Israel, maybe a dozen years ago, I watched the children's TV program Zehu Zeh, and they did this extended schtick about creatures from outer space who crave kibbeh. (Or perhaps they pronounced it "kubeh.") It was sort of like the extended "egg salad so good you could plotz" device in the movie What's Up Tiger Lily but, you know, no Yiddish.

Anyway, this is a perfect opportunity for me to recommend a new cookbook.

Jennifer Felicia Abadi. A Fistful of Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes from Grandma Fritzie's Kitchen. Boston, MA: Harvard Common Press, 2002.

Jennifer Abadi is my age, a New Yorker, and she wrote the book with her aging grandmother. The
grandmother died right before the book came out. It was really apposite for me to read this after my grandma's death this year. The book was a present from a friend of my parents who was thinning her cookbook collection and who also passed away shortly after she gave me the book. She was young, in her 60s, and I knew her pretty much my whole life.

The book also made me think of  Walter Zenner, a sociologist who mainly studied the Syrian Jewish community in New York. He passed away in 2003. He was a professor at SUNY Albany and was friendly with my in-laws. I had learned a lot of the stuff about Syrian Jews in the book from a talk Walter gave at the Association for Jewish Studies at a session celebrating his life's work. It is really cool to read the same things he observed as a social scientist, in the voice of a 30-something Jewish woman who is an insider.

Maybe the Woody Allen movie title I should have cited was Love and Death. Food is nostalgic and it is almost always associated with loss. Okay okay, kibbeh is not one of those foods for me! It's just weird the the cookbooks can also be associated with loss!

Jennifer Abadi has a classic kibbeh recipe that she got from her familiy--she has a beef filling, a turkey filling and a vegetarian potato-spinach filling. I am not going to give you her recipe, because I think there is too much detail, it violates her copyright, and anyway you will like the book. She gives an alternate recipe for a kibbeh pie, which might be a good bet.

Claudia Roden also has a kibbeh recipe and many details in her Book of Jewish Food. The Syrian Jews call them kibbeh, the Iraqi and Kurdish Jews say kubba and the Egyptians call them kobeba. Claudia Roden says they are all about skill. It's not easy to mold the shells with your fingers and to stuff them without having them fall apart. If you are in Israel, you shouldn't be asking me, an Ashkenazi Jew in the States, for kibbeh advice. You should find your closest Syrian Jewish grandma and bring along a video camera and make a video for her family of people making kibbeh. I did find one of Claudia Roden's kibbeh recipes posted online on an Islamic website. You should also check out the kibbeh recipes on this page of Middle Eastern Jewish recipes of the Jewish-food.org site. I am sorry that I don't know enough about kubeh/kibbeh/kobeba to know which one to recommend. My guess is the Aleppo one since the Syrians think their food is the best. Like Hungarians -- right, DK?

(Hey, coolbeans, did you see that there is a zucchini SOUP recipe? Is that crazy or what? It sounds pretty good, though! Good for your zucchini collection. I'm sure it's still a live issue!)

 

Wow!

I did some great cooking for Shabbat this week, but have been too obsessed with reading Harry Potter novels, and bizarrely, Harry Potter fan fiction, to blog it. (Since when do I like fan fiction? But suddenly, I'm really into it. Perhaps there is a jinx called fanis fictionis.) Also, crazed anti-Semites are leafletting my neighborhood with anti-Semitic propaganda, which is distractingly icky. Plus I am working on a grant proposal in a flailing about kind of way.

Nevertheless, I am happy to be a Jew at this moment, at whatever it is o'clock in the morning, because I just got an email from this amazingly cool blogger. I can't believe that there is someone out there reading Yiddish books on the names of vegetables and blogging about schav. Plus she sent me her Yiddish-inflected vegetarian Pesach survival guide. I am in lurve.