In Every Generation

April 15, 2020

One of my family’s idiosyncratic Passover traditions is that we eat our matzah balls in clear borscht, traditional Polish beet soup. Most Ashkenazi Jews eat them in chicken soup. I love watching the vibrant broth dye the fluffy dumplings pink. The combination is delicious, both sweet and sour, and it has always seemed like an apt representation of my family’s own culture: Ashkenazi Jewish, but also still deeply Polish, as both my parents’ families stayed in Poland longer after the war than most Jews. My dad left in the 50s, while my mom was the first of her family to move over in the mid-70s. Polish was my first language growing up and we always identified strongly with Polish as well as Jewish culture, two identities that are often presented in opposition to each other.

I have tried making borscht that tastes like my mom’s many times. The result has always been tasty but not at all right. I have had more success with chunky Ukrainian style borscht, full of cabbage and potatoes, but that beautiful clear broth that is typical of Polish borscht has eluded me. I have tried to follow my mom’s instructions, but like most family recipes, they are vague, piecemeal, leaving out ingredients and steps. She has no recipe, just years of practice. So I gave up and just let her continue to bring over her borscht for all of us to enjoy.

I have a list in my head of my mother’s recipes that I need to learn and master: her dill pickles, her gefilte fish (stuffed back into the skin of a carp like in the old country), her zurek, her pierogi, and her borscht. We talk often about having me over to shadow her in the kitchen but then we inevitably get busy in the lead up to whatever holiday and don’t get around to it. We have had a lot of loss in our family in recent years and so the impetus to preserve a piece of my mom through being able to recreate her cooking is strong. But then I never seem to find the time.

But this year my mother could not come over for our Seder, and so I had to learn to make her borscht myself, for real this time. I asked her how to do it and she texted a mysterious string of instructions. I didn’t have all her ingredients; I was even low on beets. And frankly her directions were as opaque as they always are. But I peeled, chopped, grated, and simmered as she texted me encouragement, and for the first time, my borscht tasted (almost) right. The secret, by the way, is the little hit of citric acid, something which I never would have figured out on my own) I guess it’s taken a pandemic for me to finally make a good borscht.

It’s such a minor complaint, but this is not how I imagined learning my mother’s recipes. I expected that intergenerational transmission of knowledge to occur more romantically, as a moment of bonding between mother and daughter, and not me alone in my kitchen, staring at hastily written instructions on my phone. Passover as a holiday is very much about the intergenerational transmission of knowledge; at our Seders we tell the story of Jewish liberation from slavery and we dutifully recite that “in every generation one must look upon oneself as if one had personally come out of Egypt.” Suddenly we are all in the same temporal space, young and old reliving together the dramatic flight from Egypt, learning what it means to be free.

This Passover was already bound to be a bit chaotic, even before the pandemic, because it would be our first time marking the occasion with our daughters, Margot and Astrid, five months old. Having already held a few Seders with our four year old, Miles, we are used to hurrying through narratives and rituals, rushing against the ticking time bomb of a child’s patience. But of course we did not imagine that our girls’ first Seder would be in the midst of a pandemic, my mom’s seat at our table a computer screen. Already, over the past few years our Seders had been shrinking in size; my father died almost three years ago (that year our only Seder was me bringing matzah balls to his hospital room), and my Bubby, my last grandparent, last year. It was just down to us and my mom, and then these two new babies showed up to bolster our numbers. Until a virus separated us.

As many Jewish writers and thinkers have shared over the past few weeks, Passover is fundamentally a holiday about Jewish adaptability and perseverance. These are hallmark features of the Jewish people. So making it work in these exceptional times is very much what the Seder is about. Matzah, our principal food, is literally a symbol of this. And Passover is a holiday about memory, about never forgetting what it means to have been oppressed, and to never stop being grateful for the miracle of our freedom. For centuries, Jews have held Seders in circumstances far more dangerous than the one we are living through today, repeating the same story about yearning to be free. Reflecting on this I wondered if my grief over this year’s socially distant Seder was an indication of how far removed my life has been from this story of oppression; I am so accustomed to celebrating without fear that this year comes as a shock. In reality it fits within our collective narrative very easily. This year more than any other year, I am struck by the many different contexts in which Jews have sat together to repeat the very same words, to pass down the same story, to eat the same foods, to talk and sing about plagues, miracles, slavery, and liberation. We adapt. And we just keep going. “In every generation one must look upon oneself as if one had personally come out of Egypt.”

And so this year we ate matzah balls in clear borscht, as we always do, but I prepared it myself, following my mother’s loving but confusing instructions. We were physically separate but together through the transmission of knowledge. I suspect that I will associate this borscht recipe with this particular era for the rest of my life, adding another chapter to my own family’s ever evolving Passover story. Our table was lit by laptop screens in addition to the traditional candlelight. My husband and I each bounced a baby on our knees while my son shrieked with excitement at this special dinner. I felt grief and connection at the same time. I learned about what it means to be free.

There is no real recipe. My mom calls her recipes “shit arein”, a great Yiddish expression that evokes the grandmotherly method of cooking by instinct. Do your best with the instructions below, which are my interpretation of the text my mom sent me. Don’t worry about it.

Combine in a soup pot: 4 cups of chicken or vegetable broth or if you have none, use water and add chicken wings or legs or bones; 1-2 grated carrots; 1-2 grated parsnips; some celery root; a small onion cut into large pieces; 2 garlic cloves grated or crushed; 6 medium beets grated; 2-3 bay leaves; 1-2 tsp sugar; 2 tbsp lemon juice or 2 tsp citric acid (citric acid is best); salt and pepper to taste.

Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer 30-40 minutes. Cool and strain. You can then make a great beet salad with the boiled beets, just mix with some mayo and garlic.

Anna Sheftel is an Associate Professor of Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. She loves oral history and her family.