Jane's Stories Press Foundation
HomeIsrael: Devouring the Darling Plagues
by Bonnie J. Morris
Washington, D.C.
- Delicious dark chocolate! Seder tray comes in a reusable basket—maybe like the one in which baby Moses was discovered. The kids are sure to giggle—and shiver—as they devour the darling plagues. [“Chocolate Seder Tray and Chocolate Plagues,” www.jewishsource.com]
It’s come to this: chocolate plagues. The search for nouveau kosher Passover desserts led the macaroon-weary out of Egypt and into a gourmet Promised Land. What could be a better metaphor for the entire history of Israel?
Sorrow and sweetness, food and violent diasporic upheaval—these are entwined throughout Jewish heritage. The flight from slavery is symbolized in a flattened sheet of matzah; and Jewish communal separation from Gentile culture, sparking so many misunderstandings across time, has roots in the dietary laws. We can’t eat your food. We can’t eat with you.
Jewish holiday foods are nothing less than flavors of survival. Love, guilt and matrilineality are all conflated in the image of the Jewish mother eternally overfeeding, the taste of Judaism transmuted down the motherline. But modern Israel? It’s not a land of milk and honey, but of angrily thrown stones; a cuisine summed up as falafel balls and oranges; a vacationland for zealots, a geography of war.
There is no way to deny the political heartache of modern Israel, the impossibility of finding serene perfection in bullet-strewn Jerusalem; nor is Israel the feminist utopia of old kibbutzniks’ dreams. But like so many Jewish kids before me, I went. As a young idealistic student, I went. I went before the intifada, before the expansion of illegal settlements and occupations, during the optimistic heyday of the Camp David accords and a shared Sinai of Bedouin, Arab and Jew. In those chamsin winds of hopeful change, I studied in Israel, the year I was twenty, in 1981. And I was one of a handful of openly gay students, living with my lover in the cockroach-strewn dorms of Tel Aviv University.
For a year, I shopped and cooked and ate in Israel. And in trying to recreate that younger, different year, my mind hurts, but my mouth waters. I broke bread with the Bedouin. I picked zucchini with soldier girls. I bought bags of kibbutz grapefruit for five cents. My grocery list said Eshel, Meetz Paz, Garinim. I sang along to the radio ad, “Bli Meetz Paz, ani lo zaz!” –without my grapefruit juice, I don’t go anywhere! “Zay tov—zay tov—zay OSEM!”
I sensed that Israel would be a food-oriented experience long before my plane landed at Ben-Gurion airport in 1981. En route, during that long El Al flight, I marveled at the steady stream of foil-wrapped meals served to us, one hearty kosher snack after another; and when I finally pushed away a tray half-eaten, the woman seated behind me grabbed my shoulder, leaned over and cried out “What’s the matter with you? You’re just going to leave that? Finish it! Eat it, already!”
I soon discovered that a nation forged by Jewish mothers—many of them concentration camp survivors—looked at food very differently than adult women in diet-conscious America. I never saw an ad, that year, featuring a skinny model; I landed in a society of big, tough, hearty-eating women, many of whom casually toted machine guns. Food was joy, a release from the tension of security and distrust. At the movies, pre-feature commercial ads showed off sexy new refrigerators and freezers, tantalizing the audience like a strip-tease as double doors swung open to reveal not erotic flesh but shelves packed to bursting with chocolate and banana-flavored pudding. “OHHHHHHHH,” Israeli audiences moaned. Dessert was fetish, the fridge a sanctuary of spiritual and orgasmic promise.
I found that the real “taste of Israel” was a cuisine made up of these locally-produced refrigerated products, which were intended, in the best family-values way, to be eaten at home. A full sit-down meal was seldom eaten out. Snacking, to be sure, dominated public life: Tel Aviv’s café society was all about how much coffee, cheap ice cream and cheese borekas one could stuff down while debating national politics. But dinner, you ate with your parents—or in the kibbutz dining hall. There was, as yet, no pretentious Top Chef restaurant cuisine. (As recently as 1998, world traveler Richard Sterling, writing in The Fearless Diner, classified Israel as “one of the world’s great culinary deserts,” ranked just after Chad and Arkansas.)
Hungry students eaters fell into two categories: religious and backpacker. For the ultra-Orthodox youth sent over from America to study in yeshiva dormitories, Samuel Heilman put it best:
Not only were the dormitories and physical plant of these Israeli institutions frequently austere—often in direct contrast to the living conditions in America—but the diet was Spartan. Missing were the rich culinary choices of America, and in the early days (before the junk food wave invaded Israel, putting a pizza parlor within reach of every yeshiva and credit card), it was not unusual for students to return from Israel thinner and with the typical pallor of the yeshiva boy, another external sign of their transformation and their separation from the fleshpots of America.[1]
For the rest of us, the hordes of Americans, Australians, Canadians, Brits, Norwegians and Danes with International Student I.D. cards laminated into our backpacks, less concerned with keeping kosher than with stretching our shekels to see the world, cheap eating had its challenges. For one thing, American product chauvinism was evident everywhere, most ubiquitous in the Hebrew Coca-Cola shirts dangling from old hangers in Jerusalem. There were always Sprite ads at the movies, soft drink banners flapping from cafes. To drink “local”, one had to quaff Maccabee beer, Tammuz juice or Tempo Squash.
My expectations were tutored by the two guidebooks I’d been given for the year: Arnold Sherman and Sylvia Brilliant’s Israel on $20 A Day, and the Harvard Student Agencies’ Let’s Go Europe 1982, which had supplemental chapters on Israel, Morocco, Cyprus and Tunisia. Both books reiterated a mantra of sticking with simple and local foods: pita, falafel, humus, tehina, olives, fruit, and Turkish coffee. Let’s Go pointedly cautioned against shwarma meat from the too-often flyblown spit: “The quality of meat being what it is, Israelis rely to a large extent on dairy and vegetable products, especially salads and yogurts,” advice I took to heart during what became an essentially vegetarian year.[2] But a salad, I learned, meant onion, tomato and cucumber, never leaf lettuce. Feta cheese was not Greek, but “Bulgarian.” Pointing and smiling worked very well with vendors, most of whom were genuinely friendly; later I learned how to bargain and how to drink coffee with Arab shopkeepers. I didn’t think I’d go home pale and thin.
As a college student in America, I’d lived at home, enjoying my mother’s cooking. Here at Tel Aviv University, I was in a dorm for the first time–and one without a meal plan; all students were obliged to cook and clean for themselves. Within minutes of unpacking my three suitcases for the year of study abroad, I was heading down to get groceries with the first real shekels in my hand, while two of my suitemates (who had grown up with servants, in Morocco) stormed out of the kitchenette demanding to know “Where is the maid?”
Near the campus in Ramat Aviv, close to the coastal highway (which hugged a minefield), our supermarket served an ever-hungry stream of overseas students and neighborhood housewives. The first week I shopped there, I learned the routine: bread and milk products were government-subsidized, and their prices rose on the same day Dan busfares went up; asking the cost of anything in the store led the harassed, steel-voiced cashier to throw back her head and wail Yaaaaaakoooov!, which I eventually realized was the assistant manager’s name; and buying slices of fresh or dried fish from the side counter wrung a snarled blessing, la briut (to your health!) from the woman wielding the fishknife. Gorgeous mounds of bread, onion rolls, poppy-seed rolls, challot on Fridays occupied the right-hand side of the store—and many a time I bought a fresh loaf only to consume it entirely while walking home; I’d have to turn right around and go back for more. To go with the bread, Israelis bought not peanut butter but jars of chocolate or hazelnut spread. This was before most Americans had heard of Nutella, and the aisle of chocolate spread was another reminder that I wasn’t in Kansas (actually, Maryland) any more.
Then there was the back wall of dairy. Why it was so rich, delicious, and varied in a land with so few dairy pastures, I never understood. Milk itself looked thin and was sold unrefrigerated in bottles, unappetizing to a Western eye; but the range of yogurt, pudding, sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese and fattening dessert products ran floor to ceiling, colorfully packaged, coyly named. The brand-name companies were Telma, Tnuva and Eficol; the children’s yogurt and pudding delicacies were Danny, Yowgli—and the ever-pleasurable Milky.
Milky, which still exists, offered a simple ratio of two-thirds dark chocolate pudding and one-third whipped cream top in a single-serving cup with a peel-off tinfoil lid. These bare facts don’t do the item justice. Once you opened the container you had three equally luscious options. Eat the top third, the whipped cream, first? Yeah, baby! Or: dig downward archaeologically, so that each bite was representational of both segments? Or perhaps the radical third alternative: mix and stir….
If I thought my relationship to product Milky was getting out of hand (one or two during the week, but be sure to lay in a supply of two for the Shabbat weekend), I soon met other like-minded addicts. On a trip through the Sinai desert, as we went around the campfire circle introducing ourselves and our reasons for studying in Israel, I heard two ex-yeshiva boys say they came for God but stayed for Milky. Then, in 2003, I found this excerpt in a short story by Ruth Abusch-Magder:
- Yogurt, for example, had loomed large in my childhood. It was one of the special treats we ate on trips to Israel…It was creamier, fresher, and never had to be stirred from the bottom. Best of all, Israeli yogurt came in flavors like mocha, butterscotch and even chocolate…I did not anticipate the degree to which the taste and texture of Austrian yogurt would invoke my memories of Israel. Walking through the dairy section of the supermarket in Salzburg, I was delighted to discover my favorite chocolate yogurt from Israel, the kind with the tuft of whipped cream on the top…I was transported back to the SuperSol supermarket on Tchernischovsky Street in Tel Aviv.[3]
I lived on fresh bread, fresh fruit, spinach blintzes, dairy, and smoked fish, almost never eating meat, which was not just unpredictable in quality but also burdened with religious dogma. The Tel Aviv U dorms were set up as apartment suites, with four doubles sharing one bathroom and one “kitchen”—two burners, oven, fridge. Although my own suitemates were not particularly Orthodox, other students’ ties to keeping kosher meant trouble if meat and dairy cooked together in oven or saucepot, and most suites stayed vegetarian to avoid the whole issue of separation and stove kashering. With our limited burner-top cookery options, few of us were prepared to attempt our grandmothers’ holiday dishes anyway; nor did we keep many leftovers lying around, as the jukim (flying cockroach) problem was a modern plague. “Juk! Juk! Juk!” screamed my Russian suitemate, a six-foot opera student, any time she caught sight of a winged intruder, and at the sound of her panicked contralto, the entire building would wake. But groceries had to be bought in advance for weekends, since even secular Tel Aviv shut its shops on Friday afternoon, and nothing re-opened again until Saturday night. A peaceful Shabbat afternoon at Tel Aviv University meant sitting on the balcony of my dorm room in Binyan Bet (Building B), listening to the famous Voice of Peace radio station sustained by visionary Abie Nathan (“From somewhere in the Mediterranean, we are the Voice of Peace, kol ha shalom”) and eating delicately frosted Hadar White Roses cookies or cracking sunflower seeds, studying, eating. The chocolate bars were slab-sized, all Elite: choco-croquant, milk, milk filled with raspberry, with orange, with hazelnut, with strawberry. When you went to the movies on Saturday night, once the buses started running again, you took a chocolate bar; the movies sold no popcorn and few snacks. In the heat the chocolate softened in the dark, melted down your wrists.
I had a sheet of shelf-paper from the local Elite candy store tacked up on my wall like a political poster; the ubiquitous Elite ad looked, in Hebrew, like it spelled NIFY if you read left to right and pretended it was English.
That was dorm cuisine. On weekdays, one could also wander down to the courtyard snack bar operated by a Sephardi family whose three kids sold us artik, borekas, garinim. Across the street was a café called The Cage, which specialized in shnitzel and milkshakes. The first time I ordered a milkshake there I was puzzled to be asked “Chocolate?” and then, after I nodded, “What flavor ice cream?” I soon found out that the chocolate factor was syrup, spread in lace-like patterns over the interior of a soda glass. The ice cream mix then filled up the glass and slowly, slowly the chocolate lace dissolved internally, sliding down the see-through sides to stud the creamy shake with bits of dark sweetness. I never tired of watching this magic trick.
Every other weekend, though, I headed to the takana merkazeet, the old Central Bus Station, and took off for Jerusalem or Tiberias or Eilat.
Jerusalem was forty minutes away, the bus crowded with soldiers and rabbis and schoolgirls, everyone’s religious and/or political affiliation advertised by dress: uniform, skullcap, long skirt, beard, turban. A bus deposited Old City seekers at Jaffa Gate. One deep breath and then into the walls of history, the smells and sounds surging up like surf waves to soak and slap the body. Coffee, donkey, urine, incense, cardamom. Bagele bagele bagele. Druze ovens baking, baskets of spices, almonds, henna, mint. Yes? You like? Come in, you are beautiful, best price.
Any American girl out alone was fair game, sexually targeted by Jew, Arab, vendor, soldier, rabbi (yes!), everyman. Lingering anonymously, pausing to smell, taste, sample, was an exercise in eluding hands that grabbed. Bargaining in markets brought sexual propositions. One could not dine alone. I was always moving, my eyes hidden behind sunglasses. I bought food on the run: bags of Jordan almonds, Jaffa cookies, cups of fresh-squeezed juice. I traveled with a spoon, running into markets for a grapefruit or a yogurt. When I stayed at youth hostels, where food was often stolen from communal fridges, my trick was storing yogurt in the freezer. I’d have “frozen yogurt” in the morning when I left.
From my journal, at twenty:
“On bus 25 to Tel Aviv’s beaches, I see signs advertise Tempo-Squash, Tropit, Burger Ranch, Sammy; on the beach lone popsicle salesmen lug coolers as they screech Hallo, artik, limon, tut-vanil, meesh-meesh! And the men, the men, the endless men hitting on me should I dare to buy an artik, soldiers calling I see you eat ice cream. Nice ice cream you have. How you feel when you lick ice cream? You speak English? Hebrew? I can love you in any language. Come, eat your ice cream with me.”
I turned twenty-one in Israel, and it was a Friday night, the Sabbath, and everything was closed. I couldn’t even get a bus to town. No matter; by then I was romantically involved with my roommate, and we made a candlelight meal in our dorm room, which had one of the best balconies in Building B. The palm tree rustled right where we draped our laundry—though on this night we probably tidied up in style. I remember standing at the tiny kitchen counter in a long brown dress, chopping tomatoes, my hair up, feeling like a woman, while my lover cut slices of a rum-soaked cake from a Tel Aviv bakery. When the restaurants opened, again, on Saturday night, we chose a little café by the beach, and ordered fish. It came half cooked, its eyes staring up at us balefully, representative of the quality and service available in restaurants at that time. You took your chances, dining out in Israel; no one knew from fancy. It was enough to be alive, and young and hungry; the nation was just thirty-four years old, when I turned twenty-one.
Much has changed since then; although today, in 2009/5769, food is still the daily relief, the daily pursuit and the one permitted pleasure in this war zone. But at Bar-Ilan University, associate professor Susan Sered’s research on militarism in Israeli society suggests that “Israeli girls have been found to rank highest of twenty-three European countries in dieting to lose weight…By eighth grade, 10.5% of girls report dieting under the supervision of a physician, indicating that at least some of the Israeli medical establishment actively encourages the culture of dieting.”[4] This shift toward Westernized ideals of a slim, non-maternal female appearance is a sad departure from the hefty-girl magazine ads I adored in Israel in 1981; yet in at least one instance, the agenda of diet consciousness has actually united women from opposing political camps.
In her film “A Slim Peace,” director Yael Luttwak follows 14 women brought together in a Jerusalem weight-loss clinic despite their diverging backgrounds as modern Israelis, Palestinian activists and ultra-right-wing Orthodox settlers. How the anxiety and stress of a dysfunctional, warring society leads each to seek comfort in food is barely addressed—clearly, weight is not the real problem in their individual lives, but has become the one individual issue they do have the power and agency to change, and the one “safe” topic (controlling overeating) the women can broach in a group made up of enemy-others. The film shows us that while the weight comes off, nothing else in daily society changes: only by special dispensation are the Palestinians even allowed through degrading checkpoints into Jerusalem (another health issue, heavy smoking, can be understood as a small permitted pleasure in a life of forced line-waiting.) And the right-wing settlers have no intention of finding long-term rapprochement; theirs is a Biblically-interpreted right of occupation.
What I enquired of the young filmmaker, during a special screening at the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center in 2007, was whether the women in the film used food as nationalism during sessions at the diet clinic. Did anyone insist, “I don’t care if it’s fattening—this is the food staple of my village”? Did anyone push to have low-calorie choices that were more identifiably Arab or Ashkenazi on the idealized diet? Did the Palestinian women refuse to buy made-in-Israel products with Hebrew lettering…like Milky? But no. In spite of the emphasis on articulating the meaning of inherited ethnic differences, and the film’s food subtext, the taste of one’s culture was not the most important thing. Having–and perpetuating–a culture, whether it pushed out or threatened another’s destiny, was. The one item everyone ate in common was locally grown olives. And I thought of the ancient symbol of the olive branch, the vineyard as peace symbol.
That December I bought Palestinian olive oil and zatar from a women’s cooperative, and used it to fry my latkes, during Chanukah; in my own kitchen, such a ritual site of separation, for Jews who keep kosher and Arabs eating halal, I could create an uncontested border-crossing, a culinary détente.
Food is pleasure, and so my memories of Israel retain liminal associations of eating, respites from warfare and violence. Old flavors fill my mouth whenever someone asks if I have been to Israel, if I once broke bread there. In these times, when the same “family friendly” catalogue advertising darling chocolate plagues also sells Israel Defense Forces jewelry made out of non-live steel bullets (right next to silver birds of peace!), it is difficult to write of the past in a neutral, food-sensory way. I had to drive to Koshermart in Silver Spring to find a cup of Milky, listening to the Voice of Peace on tapes from ’81.
[1] Samuel C. Heilman, Sliding to the Right. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; p. 117.
[2] Harvard Student Agencies, Let’s Go Europe 1982. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982; p. 442
[3] Ruth A. Abusch-Magder, “Making Love on the Deutsche Bahn,” in Joining the Sisterhood: Young Jewish Women Write Their Lives, ed. Tobin Belzer and Julie Pelc. New York: SUNY Press, 2003; p. 207.
[4] Susan Sered, What Makes Women Sick? Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2000; p. 151.
