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That Time of Year
The dread kicks in for me around late February. It's not just the onslaught of my spring allergies. It's also the anticipation of Passover - that unwelcome time of year when I curse my ancestor, Izzy Greenblotz. I couldn't avoid the stupid holiday even if my cousin Jake would allow me to skip my annual obligations in the factory. In my prewar apartment building's elevator, Mrs. Minsky from Penthouse A launches the annual Inquisition as she tugs on her Majorica pearls in glee." Whose matzos are you buying this year?" Every year this is the funniest question she's ever asked, and her powdered face flushes with self-satisfaction. There's no need to answer her. Greenblotz Matzo is not only the number-one-selling matzo in the United States, it's the leading brand in Canada and England, even in Venezuela and South Africa. Wherever there are Jews, there is Greenblotz.
I handle my widowed neighbor with a diplomatic smile.
Even though it's weeks too early - Passover is not until mid-April this year - she wishes me an anticipatory happy and healthy Pesach when we stop at our floor.
Soon, someone will ask the question I despise most: "How does the Greenblotz family celebrate Passover?"
Since "Greenblotz, Heather" is the only Greenblotz listed in the Manhattan phone book, when reporters from New York or Hadassah Magazine can't get through to the factory, they call my home line. I never deny that I'm from the Matzo Family, which would be too weird.
This year, when a reporter insists on specific details on our upcoming seder, I'm stuck delivering the family white lies that Jake usually spins from the factory office.
Why haven't I gotten my damn home number unlisted already?
"We have a quiet evening together," I say. "Just family."
How can I ever tell the truth?
Can you imagine the family that makes the millions of artificial trees for sale in Kmart not celebrating Christmas, or the Cadbury family not celebrating Easter with a basket of chocolate eggs? I'm too mortified to admit that come Passover I'm home alone in my apartment, chugging down a liter bottle of Diet Coke and stuffing my face with a Panini 2 from the Italian deli around the corner on Second Avenue. That's prosciutto, red peppers and Swiss cheese - a quadruple no-no as far as the traditional holiday is concerned.
My take on what's kosher has always been a little hazy, but even the most wayward Jew knows that pork is never ever kosher. When I was about training-bra age, eleven or twelve, I asked my father if pigs weren't kosher because they love mud. This made perfect sense to my preadolescent mind: dirty equals not kosher. Grandpa Reuben and Dad were padlocking the metal gate on the factory entrance;
Wilson was waiting patiently by the open limo doors in the late-winter sleet. Dad, who my mother insists is very, very smart, too smart for his own good - she claims he has an IQ of 150 - shook his head and said, "No, kid, pigs are not kosher because they don't chew their cud. Only plant-eating mammals with multichambered stomachs are kosher. Ruminants do not carry as many diseases."
"What's a ruminant?" I asked, but Grandpa Reuben interrupted.
"Some say that God didn't want us eating animals that eat other animals. Some say that God didn't want us eating the more intelligent animals. I say a bunch of people made up a bunch of rules to give a desert tribe something to believe in." Grandpa and Dad had a rare shared laugh. They forgot that my follow-up question was left hanging, and I quietly climbed into the black limo, so out of place on the (then) low-rent Lower East Side.
Secondly on the kosher affront, eating ham and cheese together is mixing meat and dairy. Such a combination is strictly forbidden to the observant, because, as Grandpa continued his religious lesson in the limo, "If you didn't watch what you ate in the desert without a Frigidaire, you got sick."
Then there's the panini bread itself, which our customers would call hametz. Bread is not allowed for the entire eight days of Passover. This custom honors the Jews that didn't have time to wait for yeast-leavened loaves to rise the day Moses rushed them the hell out of Egypt and away from the Pharaoh's rule.
Observant families prepare for Passover by burning any hametz that may still be in the house, every last crumb. It's a curious sight to see the handful of remaining religious Jews on the Lower East Side carrying their half-finished loaves and frozen waffles to a communal bonfire raging in a Grand Street metal trash can. Sometimes when I speed by in a cab, I spy a happy teen stoking the hametz fire with a broomstick, smiling broadly at the joy of tradition.
The plate my sandwich rests on is my fourth sacrilege. A properly observant Jew would have one set of plates for meat, one set for dairy, and a third Passover set to use once a year. But this is a dish from the same Mikasa "Tulip Time" dinnerware I bought at Bloomingdale's my first year out of college and I still use all year long. Somewhere in my mother's colossal apartment on Park Avenue is a set of special Passover dishes given to my parents as a wedding gift. They were by Rosenthal, hand-painted a gorgeous pastel turquoise blue with open-petal fuchsia flowers. Wasted beauty. Now the dishes are bubble-wrapped and tucked away in a closet. Or maybe Mom gave the dishes to charity, since we only took the set out once or twice for company when I was really young. For keeping up appearances.
As long as I can remember, the Greenblotz Matzo factory has been kept kosher under the supervision of Schmuel Blattfarb, a devout rabbi with a sweaty forehead and startlingly wide hips. I had heard about him for years, but I first met him in the ground-level office of the factory the day I got my final marks for the first half of ninth grade. My mother and I waited patiently across the desk from my father and the rabbi as they completed the paperwork for the pre-Passover inspection.
As Rabbi Blattfarb got up to sign off, his chair rose with him. He then awkwardly prized it from his hips, lowered it back to the ground and announced that his fee had just gone up to ten thousand dollars a year.
After the rabbi sheepishly said goodbye to all of us, Dad raised the window and called to our handsome Portuguese driver, Wilson, that we would be right out. We were Brooklyn bound. My mother and father were in one of the better stretches of their marriage, and she had uncharacteristically telephoned Dad with the news of my exceptional marks. Dad uncharacteristically responded with spur-of-the-moment reservations for a congratulatory communal feast at Peter Luger's Steak House right across the Williamsburg Bridge.
"What does Rabbi Blattfarb actually do to deserve that kind of money?" I asked Dad at our artery-clogging dinner.
"Just ridiculous!" my mother marveled.
"Long answer or short answer?" Dad asked me.
"Short," Mom said.
"Long," I said.
"To begin with," Dad said, "the flour and water going into the factory must be certified one hundred percent kosher, which basically means a few phone calls. Then, since Moses and his followers had no time for leavening as they left Egypt, the matzo that's specifically kosher for Passover cannot be baked longer than eighteen minutes, which is the longest time flour and water can go without self-fermentation. It's not Blattfarb's time we're paying for though, it's his name."
THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS by Laurie Shapiro
Published by Red Dress Ink
Copyright (c) 2004 by Laurie Shapiro
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