New Year

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The Jewish New Year has come and gone and I am so far from Jewish traditions these days that I would have totally missed it if it were not for reading blogs and watching TV news.
Jennifer’s post on This time of Year set me remembering.

I do have such good childhood memories of those festivities
As I said earlier, my parents were both Jewish, my mother was a Jew from Poland/Belarus, an Ashkenazi, and my father was from Bulgaria, therefore a Sefardic Jew.
Neither of them was really interested in religion. My mother said that she used to eat kosher food at home when she was a girl, but when you consider that the food was cooked by a non-Jewish servant, her beloved Fiokla, I don’t know how kosher that would be considered by traditionalist Jews
On my father’s side, cooking Jewish Bulgarian food was usual, but neither my Aunt Fanny, my father’s sister, nor my Uncle Victor, his brother, ever kept kosher or was even mildly interested.
However, twice a year, the family gathered, once for Rosh Hashanah, and once for Pessah, and in those occasions, my mother cooked her home specialties.

I still have the fragrance of chicken soup and kneidlachs that Gitta, my mother, cooked on those two occasions, just because everyone loved it. Without kneidlachs, a festive meal would just not have been as festive. There would also be borscht, made with beetroot, the only way I can stomach beetroot.
Then would come the gefilte fisch, and finally the cheesecake that Gitta made so well.
Unfortunately, I haven’t kept any of these recipes, although I did help along, Gitta never really did the same twice in a row, and I guess in those days, I felt like she would always be around!
I don’t want to forget appetizers like gehakte leber, which along the years was in the company of more sefardic things like burriquitas, or home-made tarama.

My father would preside at the table and read some prayer written in Latin letters as he couldn’t read Hebrew letters then the dinner would start.
Sometimes, I’m sorry I didn’t carry on any of these traditions, but with a totally secular marriage, and being an absolute non-believer and a lazy cook, it couldn’t have happened.

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