Category: Family

Gefilte fish and chicken and being Jewish in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I am currently adding recipes to my Patreon page, and thought that this little piece might be of interest to everyone here.

Growing up as an Orthodox Jew (Modern Orthodox, Australian Orthodox – more interested in learning, community and food than in matters religious, unless we could argue about them – my favourite argument will always be how kangaroo can be seen as potentially kosher) in Australia is a most extraordinary thing. For one thing, it doesn’t matter how many generations your family has been in the country, too many people assume that you are a recent arrival, simply because you are Jewish. Some even try to spot an Israeli accent. In my case, this is very imaginative of them.

The classic case of this was at a New Year’s Eve party in Canberra. I was in a group of people, one of whom had recently taken out citizenship. We were talking about where our folks came from, and when, as one so often does. We were all very open about our origins, religions and background. We also had a lengthy discussion about date of arrival. Of the group, my family was the earliest arrival by at least one generation, and the new citizen’s was the most recent. My family started coming here about 150 years earlier than hers. After a bit (conversations can be very long on New Year’s Eve) we turned to weddings. The new citizen turned to me and asked intently, “What would your parents do if you married an Australian?”

A nasty reminder (well before the present thrum of hate) that Jews are somehow considered different, even in a very tolerant country was when I was nine years old, and was personally accused of killing Christ. At the time I was very bewildered, because I knew who he was and when he lived, and I also knew that I was nine years old. I could not reconcile the contradictions, so I nursed the puzzle until I had antisemitism sorted out sufficiently that I could deal with it. What I asked at the time was “Does this mean I invent time travel?”

What has this to do with cooking? Well, one thing that regular hints of prejudice does is to drive one to reconsider. I have friends who, when discriminated against, or subtly insulted, reject their past and tried to “fit in”. That is a legitimate decision, but has never been a road I have followed. Nor has it been a road my parents followed. What we do when faced with “not belonging” is to strongly reassert our complex cultural identity. That is to say we share it. And the easiest way to convince someone that to be Jewish is still to be human is to feed everyone in sight. After all, everyone eats, even if our religions are a bit different.

If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then a way to a person’s cultural appreciation follows the same route. People around me are forcibly introduced to Judaism. You know the method. It is stark and awful. Eat this chicken soup! Have a kosher chocolate! Try one of my Mum’s famous biscuits, after all, it is Passover next week!

That is the skeleton in the closet, the dread reason for me handing out food to everyone in my vicinity. It’s sort of nice to be thought a human being, and food definitely helps smooth the way. Mind you, the food can end up taking over your life. I no longer feed people to convince them I’m human. I feed people because I’ve fallen in love with feeding people. And the great thing is that many friends return the favour.

That’s the skeleton in the closet and explains why one whole tier of my Patreon contains recipes and food stories. It also explains why I was once a pro blogger. The skeleton under the bed is a different matter. As well as studying history at university, I studied some archaeology, so Mum let me have her old skeleton (not the one inside her, but the one she used before she dropped out of medicine). I called it George and I called it Yorick, depending on which head I was using. A skeleton with two skulls is very useful for understanding mandibular articulation. And, since my bedroom at this time was 5’3” by 7’, the only storage place was under the bed.

To get back to food (which neither George nor Yorick was/were, not having been kosher at any stage in his/their spotted past – the spots were some sort of mould, Mum suggested, but dissuaded me from running tests) my family demonstrates that minor prejudice can lead to the most wonderful, food-based friendships. That’s a good reason for a whole chapter on it in this book. This is the food that led to the friendships which make up the rest of the book. Isn’t there a children’s rhyme that goes something like that?

My father’s mother’s cooking was very Anglo-Australian. Mum says that her favourite desserts were blancmange, jelly, icecream or stewed fruit. Her standard Sunday dinner was soup (mostly “Jewish penicillin” ie chicken soup), a roast of lamb plus three vegetables, salad, with fruit and icecream for dessert. As you can see by the dairy product at the end, she did not keep kosher. She also followed the Anglo at the expense of the Jewish – I was brought up with Friday night dinners of the same menu (sometimes the lamb was replaced by chicken or beef, and the icecream was always replaced by a non-dairy dessert) with the leftovers for Saturday lunch. This was the natural compromise between Dad’s Anglo upbringing and Mum’s strong Continental Jewish tradition.

Mum was in tears when Dad proposed to her and said, magnanimously, that he was prepared to tolerate a kosher kitchen, as long as it was “done properly”. He was very good at keeping the rules once he started, even though he wickedly told people about an atheist friend who “knew he was Jewish because he could not bear to drink a glass of milk after his ham sandwich”.

This post would be lost without recipes. Let me share my family gelfilte fish recipe, and its very important alternate.

 

GEFILTE FISH

I have, alas, been unable to try out or even taste test this recipe. I am also told I’d be a lot nicer as a person if only I had been able to eat gefilte fish when I was young.  How I obtained it was by asking my grandmother. She explained it in detail, went away, made gefilte fish, then updated her explanation.

Ingredients

minced fish (use three different types of white fish – Grandma’s standard varieties are Murray Perch, garfish and mullet – she says to avoid anything pink. My suggestion is that if you get tuna or something then just put frills around the plate holding the pale rose gefilte fish and serve it as the Barbara Cartland variation)

eggs

fine matzah meal (made of ground-up matzo – unleavened bread – a yeast free bread that tastes like very bland dried biscuits, but is brilliant to cook with.)

 

Method

Mix minced fish with eggs and matzah meal and knead until firm. For proportions, what you want is a firm-ish mixture that holds its shape when you knead it. Start with the fish, then add eggs and matzah meal until it is a smooth, heavy paste (a damp, dumpling like consistency). Let stand a while.

Mince again, and mould into balls. Flour hands with fine matzah meal between each shaping.

In a big saucepan, place fish bones, topped by sliced onions and carrots. Add water. Bring to the boil. Add the fish balls, one at a time (use a spoon and be very gentle). Keep the broth on a slow boil until the fish is cooked through. Season to taste.

 

What does a good Aussie Jewish family do at Passover when several loud-voiced members have nasty fish allergies? Grandma makes them gefilte chicken, and everyone prods me under the table and asks “Where do you think Grandma got her three types of chicken from, eh?” My ribs were fragile the first night she served this delicacy, as almost every family member had the same idea and dug me in the ribs to emphasise their pungent wit. Gefilte chicken goes excellently with pickles and a bit of salad.

GEFILTE CHICKEN

Ingredients

take 2 chicken breasts and mince (if you don’t want this to look traditional and white, you can just use chicken mince – but the fat content may make them shrink; if you are using mince, I suggest 400 g and medium sized egg)

2 large eggs

salt

pepper

chicken stock

 

Method

Mix all dry ingredients and let stand a while. If the mixture is at all liquid add fine matzo meal to stiffen it. Make into balls using at least a tbs of mixture at a time (coat your hands with matzo meal to stop the mixture sticking).

Bring chicken stock to the boil, then lower the heat and place balls gently in the broth. Let cook gently, with the saucepan covered. Test to see when cooked (should take around 45 minutes).

Books

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I have 2 posts for you in the same day because this week is suddenly impossibly different. I wrote the prior post before the massacre and am spending my whole Chanukah dealing with consequences for myself and friends. My Baltimore nephew just checked in on me and I never would have thought that, with US shootings, it would be he who had to check in on me.

If you need to understand what happened, ask me, and I’ll post more next Monday. In the interim, I’m seeing a total lack of knowledge about Jewish Australia. Loads of generic good wishes and concern for safety, and some friends write to me directly and most put general statements on FB and don’t think that, just maybe, every single Jewish Australian is in mourning. Some people are full of theories about the role of Israel and want to share their theory without stopping to say, first, that they’re sorry that so many people were murdered and they mourn with us. Their thoughts count more than the humans caught up in this mess. This is what happened here when we heard about the Tree of Life stuff from 2018. I have a friend who goes to that shul and I was there for her then and she’s there for me now and it’s all so wrong. We should be complaining about the weather, not worried about getting safely through the week.

Even the least antisemitic non-Jewish Australians other Jews. American friends help. I wish the reasons for you understanding were not so full of hurt, but I’m grateful to every single one of you who reaches out to me.

How do we handle this? For me, books always help. I posted about this on Facebook – I thought I’d copy my post for you here. maybe books help you, too. After all, Jewish Australia is very, very different to Jewish America. For one thing, we think we’re much wittier and we like our spelling more and… Australian Rules Football. (The footie is an argument in itself – ask me why sometime)

From FB, but with more notes):

Jewish Australia is in the news for the worst possible reason and it might help some people if they know who we are. Jewish Australians may not be many, but our culture is diverse and very Australian. I thought you might like some books to understand a bit better. I’ve included one of my novels, because it’s specifically about Sydney Jews and so that you can have a novel to read if the others are too much right now. It’s safer: the protagonist merely discovered she has Jew cooties – having Jew cooties was much less scary back then.

Apple, Raymond. The Great Synagogue: A History of Sydney’s Big Shule (one of the most important synagogues in the country, and definitely the most important Modern Australian Orthodox synagogue in Sydney, often targeted by marchers who claim they’re not bigots – not yet bombed – the recently-bombed synagogues were in Melbourne)
Baker, Mark The Fiftieth Gate (Mark was an historian, just ahead of me at university. Australia has/had per capita, the biggest Holocaust survivor population outside Israel and one of these survivors was murdered on Sunday. Mark had to deal with those issues as an historian and also a child of survivors. This is that book.)
Gawenda, Michael My Life as a Jew (very recent. Michael was the editor of a major newspaper and so experienced antisemitism quite differently to most of us. He was born in a displacement camp.)
Kofman, Lee and Tamar Paluch Ruptured (a new anthology that shows the path Jewish women walked in the time after October 7.)
Polack, Gillian The Wizardry of Jewish Women (I’ve written far more Jewish things than this, but this is a novel exploring Jewish Australia from the view of someone who nearly lost all their Jewish past. What’s important about it here, is that Judith’s friends are all people from the Left who would not even talk to her now. I’m exploring this a little in short stories, which my Patreon folk have been reading. When I have enough, I’ll think about a story collection. I’m only 2 stories away from enough.)
Rutland, Suzanne The Jews in Australia (the standard history, dated but a very handy introduction)
Sackville-O’Donnell, Judith The first Fagin: the true story of Ikey Solomon (This is a fun way of discovering what’s now Tasmania’s early Jewish population. The differences between Fagin and the guy who inspired him are immense and tell a lot about antisemitism and how it warps things.)
Zable, Arnold Jewels and Ashes (And Aussie classic, all about the last days of a family in Bialystock. Arnold is one of our best story tellers and helped me understand why my grandfather wouldn’t talk about his childhood nor his lost family. His father brought him to Australia in 1917 or 1918, and 35 years later there was no family in Poland at all. Arnold was the last family connection to leave. His family was on a boat on the way here and were banned from entry because Australia had put up fences to keep jews out. Arnold’s family managed to be accepted in New Zealand and they moved here later. In the book, Feivel is the one who married my mother’s cousin. 120,000 people is not a lot, but it’s an enormous number compared with the hundreds in Australia prior to 1810 or the thousands in most of the 19th century. Older families are very interconnected, which is why I have so many links with the authors of these books. I don’t have the same links with post 1950s arrivals – we’re a complex bunch.)

If you want more, try here: Australian Jewish Writers Database | Jewish Australia It’s not updated frequently and it’s not complete, but it gives you a sense of the range of Jewish voices in Australia. You won’t hear most of those voices at Australian literary conventions. I’d love to see suggestions for other books that talk about Jewish Australia.
We’re not a big community, and we only go back to 1788, but there are lots of connections between this group or that group. Some other writers have no idea I exist, while others have known me or my family forever. Through my family, I am connected to several other writers. Some of them have met me but are unlikely to remember me. My favourite example of this is Michael Gawenda. His sister married my uncle and Michael and I sat on the same table at my cousins barmie. Arnold Zable is another example. His most famous book includes relatives of mine. And one conference of the HNSA I found myself next to one of my favourite children’s writers… who turned out to be my aunt’s best friend. Others were connected through school or university: Mark Baker was just ahead of me at university, while Raymond Apple went to Sunday school with my mother when I asked him. He was my rabbi when I lived in Sydney.
How does this play out everyday? We catch up a bit when we see each other, or we do introductions from scratch because we didn’t know each other well as it was 20 years since last time, or (and this one happened to me recently) the usual checks on “Are we related” can turn into something hurtful.
One of the reasons Jewish Australians know each other is because we have a kind of verbal code to find out connections. We talk about relatives and their experiences past and present – this also works with almost anyone with a military background and, entertainingly, with the very far left – or it used to, when they would chat with me. One New Year’s Eve I was sitting with a member of the Communist Party of Australia and we chatted happily for ages because “You’re A’s cousin!” When someone has not had a traditional upbringing, they don’t know this and much hurt can ensue. This is a more recent phenomenon, and most arises when someone from the left needs the right shibboleths said to accept that I’m an acceptable Jew to talk to.

Anyhow, if you want to read more books or want to learn specific aspects of Australian Jewishness, just ask. Books help. Questions and answers help even more.

 

The Last Ones Standing

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

My beautiful, funny, brilliant Aunt Julie died last month. She was 99 1/2, and in the last weeks of her life she was clearly ready to go. I have been, I think, mourning her loss for the last six years, as age and dementia took her ship further and further out and away from the shore where I watched. In the end it was more about relief, and managing the sorrow of the rest of my family. There will be Aunt Julie stories told for years, and she will live on with us.

But this leaves my brother and me as the last ones standing in our family. No one else in the world knew our parents the way we did (and even we are not immune to the parallax effect). We were there when my parents were at their best, we had an unparalleled series of adventures in their wake, and we had a front row seat for the slow, unhappy decline of their marriage and my mother’s health. My brother and I were there for all that. But more than knowing our parents, my brother and I grew up in the family that they created. And no one else knows the lore and culture of that family. Just us.*

I was thinking about all this because of a piece in the New York Times about sibling estrangement.  It’s about the pain of being estranged from someone you spent the first part of your life with. In the article, some of the siblings could not understand what had happened. Others viewed being estranged from a sibling as the only way they could protect themselves. The causes? Wildly various: In some cases a dispute over inheritance. In other cases behaviors that once seemed small grow greater until one sib simply cannot cope. Sometimes there is a history of abuse–by a parent or by one of the siblings–that has made it impossible to reconcile. I cannot quarrel with any of the choices these siblings make. They know what they know, and they are taking care of themselves and their families.

But you lose something when you cut a sibling out of your life. My brother and I are in as different as two humans can be, politically, philosophically, attitudinally. And yet we get along pretty well. This is deliberate. No one else was in the room where it happened, as it were (it being our childhood). There are lots of things we remember very differently (that parallax effect), but the thing is, we remember. And we can talk about them. Sometimes we will run aground on some point where one of us looks at the other in wonderment: “don’t you remember that?” or “no, that’s not the way it happened.” But it doesn’t become a fighting issue for us, because aside from valuing each other as interesting humans, we value each other as the last witnesses.

When my brother and I are gone no one will know what my mother’s voice sounded like, or the odd tuck my father would get in his jaw when he was trying not to laugh. I remember things from the vantage point of being the older one, and a girl, and to some extent his guide through the world. Clem remembers things from being the younger one (he remembers things I told him about TV shows we watched that I have no memory of; he appears to remember me being a far better Big Sister than I do).  And for every one of my “Raised in a Barn” anecdotes I’m sure he has one that I don’t recall, or that is told from his very different vantage point. Which is, in fact, great.

But we’re the last ones standing. My impulse to tell those stories probably comes, a little bit, from the fact that when we’re gone, all that lore and culture will at best be second hand stories our kids tell. If they tell them. Of course, my kids already have their own stories about the lore and culture of the family they grew up in. And someday the two of them will be the last ones standing.

__________

*My husband and I rewatched A Hard Day’s Night the other evening, and it occurred to me again that whatever sometime interpersonal issues those four guys from Liverpool might have had, no one else in the world could understand what it was like, being in the center of the huge creative and cultural maelstrom that they created. Just them. I think that even before John Lennon’s death they had begun to realize how unique that relationship was, and I believe the two remaining Beatles recognize it now.