Five days ago my mom and I got together to make meringues, a sweet tribute to the life my great aunt Miriam who passed away last week. They were her signature dessert. Mixing egg whites and sugar, we traded favorite stories about my wild and wonderful gypsy aunt. About her wild dances and hanukkah song, her ENORMOUS jewelry. It was a good day. I think Miriam would have loved it.
My cousin Margy wrote "Making Hanukkah a Major Production," the piece here below, about our aunt almost 22 years ago. Even though I was five when she wrote it, it's pretty much exactly how I remember her. We decided to post it here so that our family and friends would have a chance to read it.
December 06, 1990|MARGY
ROCHLIN | Rochlin is a frequent contributor to the Food Section.
One afternoon in 1941, my Aunt Miriam immigrated to the United States,
escaping the Nazi invasion of her temporary home in Rotterdam, Holland, by a
single day. She arrived at Ellis Island, at the age of 20, with her mother and
brother--her father had already relocated from their home in Berlin to New York
City. But it was only Aunt Miriam who was detained and then roughly interrogated
for seven long days. (The problem had something to do with her not qualifying
for political asylum because of her age.) When things were finally straightened
out, though, and her mother came to fetch her, Aunt Miriam wasn't as happy to
leave as she might have been.
During the week, she had taken up with a handsome Lithuanian man and the
night of her release coincided with the Passover dance. "What can I say?" she
explained when I recently asked her about the experience. "I was very busy while
I was there. I was a good dancer and not the quietest violet."
I retell this anecdote so that you don't underestimate how much my Aunt
Miriam loves the Jewish holidays. I can't remember the first time our family
attended one of her Hanukkah parties. But one of my earliest recollections is of
my brothers and sisters and I huddled on the dark doorstep of Aunt Miriam's and
Uncle Sidney's Los Feliz home and the look of extreme excitement on Aunt
Miriam's face when she'd fling open the door.
She'd be wearing a bright Bedouin wedding dress of embroidered silk and her
wrists would be rattling with silver slave bracelets. Inside, there would be 40
or so guests, people speaking so many foreign languages that it sounded like a
cocktail party at a Trilateral Commission. At this point, a stranger to her home
might have wondered if something theatrical was about to happen. And, of course,
it was.
Her dramatic flair might have been inherited from her father, an Orthodox
rabbi who also wrote secular plays on subjects such as the unfortunate romantic
denouement of Anne Boleyn. From the time Aunt Miriam was very young, her
creative expression helped reshape the traditional format of her family's
religious celebrations. Consider her younger brother Bernie's Bar Mitzvah: Aunt
Miriam co-wrote and performed a bloody-but-tragic operetta based on a fictional
character she invented named Mondi the Convict.
It only makes sense that Hanukkah would represent to her some kind of
free-floating proscenium upon which to stage her alternative theater projects. I
could tell you about the Super-8 movies she has scripted and produced, short
films with serpentine plot lines and titles like "The Case of the Missing
Hanukkah Gelt." There was also the year that she thumb-tacked a white bedsheet
on the archway between the living room and the dining room and had her husband,
children and grandchildren act out, in back-lit silhouette, the saga of the
Maccabees re-interpreted as a Western adventure complete with prop 10-gallon
hats and blazing six-guns. Aunt Miriam narrated the action in rhyming verse
while the theme song from "Bonanza" blared in the background. At some point,
usually toward the end of the evening, she performed an improvised modern dance
to Israeli folk music.
After the entertainment came the food. The interesting thing about what
you'll find to eat at a Hanukkah party is that the menu is different from house
to house. I've eaten Polish latkes, which are more like flapjacks and
made without any potatoes at all. In "The Jewish Festival Cookbook," the authors
talk about Portuguese cheese latkes , which are sprinkled with olive oil
to symbolize the ancient miracle of lights. Once, while attending a Hanukkah
function hosted by Israelis, out came a plate of freshly made jelly doughnuts, a
sight which surprised me until someone explained that hot fruit fritters are
what you serve at Hanukkah parties in the Land of Milk and Honey.
Unlike the dishes at other Jewish holidays whose ingredients are dictated by
religious dietary laws, Hanukkah food is all about custom and taste-memory,
about the way ethnicity takes over in the kitchen at holiday time. Because Aunt
Miriam is from Germany she follows her grandmother's Rhineland latke
recipe, which requires nothing more than eggs, grated potatoes, and a little
salt and pepper. Alongside the platters and platters of potato pancakes--she
makes about 200 of them--are bowls of sour cream and homemade applesauce. The
cranberry sauce is her domesticated version of preiselbeeren sauce, a
puree made from tiny berries that she's only seen in Germany.
Even as a child I understood that Hanukkah was one of those rare times when
dessert can be consumed at any stage of the meal and where quantity goes
unchecked. This knowledge held even more significance at Aunt Miriam's house:
Sweets are where she truly excels. Her brownies are so dark with chocolate they
make your heartbeat quicken, her lattice-topped mock Linzer torte are flaky
isosceles triangles smeared with raspberry jam.
If Aunt Miriam's Hanukkah spreads are anything, they are reliable. It's
reassuring to know that every year you'll find the exact same items on the
dining room buffet table. This means that there will always be meringue kisses,
sweet cookies made from egg whites and sugar that look like huge white cosmetic
puffs, only marked with crackly brown striations where the vanilla extract
bubbled out while cooking.
Through the years, I have often met non-Jewish guests there, people for whom
my Aunt Miriam's party is their first encounter with Hanukkah. And I've often
thought about how her individualized take on the festivities might leave the
kind of indelible impression that other hosts might find hard to compete
with.
Perhaps next year these new Hanukkah initiates will go to someone else's
house and encounter a roomful of Jews quietly lighting the menorah and intoning
the ancient blessing over the candles with a good deal more piety than my
relatives could muster. Confusion will set in as they look around for the
crunchy meringue kisses. They'll check and recheck their wristwatches, hoping
that show time will begin soon. And they will leave wondering why the evening
didn't close as it had the year before at Aunt Miriam's: with a loosely formed
circle of people clapping their hands wildly, while the lady of the house danced
alone in the middle, smiling her big, happy smile and shaking it like there was
no
tomorrow.
