Spring 2006

Deborah Israel :: From Gefilte Fish to Steak and Potatoes: Food and Identity in Jewish Women Immigrant’s Autobiographies.

“To write about food is to write about the self as well” (169), insists Anne Goldman, thereby stressing the significance of food in autobiography. Perhaps because food preparation is central to Jewish religious practice and a basic aspect of duties within the domestic sphere, food stands out as a recurring trope in Jewish women’s autobiography. Texts of immigrant women from the Pale of Settlement, in particular, contain numerous references to food, for one major distinction with which these Orthodox Jews had to contend was the prevalence of traife, unkosher food, in America. In the Pale of Settlement, Jews, living in a religion-dominated community, ate only kosher foods, but such was not the case in America. Here freedom extended to the foods one ate. And, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, “Food is a powerful resource for giving tangible expression to the choices that are being made” (84). When a Jew raised in Orthodoxy chooses to abandon dietary restrictions, that person elects to separate herself from one of the mainstays of her religion. The choice is generally conscious and willful, which indicates a reevaluation of her identity and place within the Jewish community. As contemporary Jewish scholar Doris Friedensohn puts it, food is “a yardstick of consciousness: a reflection of choices made among a multiplicity of options, choices which define communities of meaning and configurations of identities” (246). Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s contends that when religious Jews give up “rituals and ceremonies to which they had previously conformed . . . usually the daily prayers go first, the ritual dietary laws last” (7). Food thus becomes the final ground upon which Jews from Orthodox backgrounds do battle with their self-identity in order to establish their place in their community. Examining references to food in immigrant Jewish women’s autobiography consequently yields more than simply an understanding of their physical sustenance; food metaphorically reveals these women’s self-concepts and worldviews as they strive to acculturate to their new land.

Three such women who wrote autobiographies detailing their early lives in America are Rachel Bella Calof, Rose Cohen, and Anzia Yezierska, all depicting food images throughout their texts, their detailed discussions of food providing readers with a yardstick by which to measure the extent to which they have acculturated. Calof describes situations involving food to demonstrate her continuing religiosity, her sense of self worth, and her advancement in material wealth, while Cohen employs food as symbolic of unsolvable identity dilemmas. Yezierska, obsessed with food both literally and metaphorically, ultimately employs foods in her texts as metaphors for communities in order to identify the cultural environment she finds most sustaining. All three provide insights into their acculturation process through discussions of food.

Calof homesteaded in North Dakota between 1894 and 1904 where she lived in a 12 by 14-foot shack in dire poverty and braved the most severe winters imaginable. As Calof’s “My Story” progresses, readers learn of her commitment to follow Jewish dietary laws by her frequent references to them. Although Calof twice confesses to eating nonkosher food, she carefully justifies doing so. First, with the family freezing and at the brink of starvation, and with a newborn infant severely burned, Calof reports that her husband Abe braved a trip to the nearest town and returned with medicine, fuel, and food, including what he thought was pickled herring, a mainstay of the Jewish immigrants’ diet. Unfortunately, however, the “herring” was in fact pickled pigs’ feet. Calof states, “Considering our condition, you may draw your own conclusions as to whether Abe or I disclosed the true contents of the container which held this particular food” (67). She does not explicitly admit in print that she actually ate the pigs’ feet, for such an admission would be horrific for an observant Jew, but the words “considering our condition” evoke the hierarchy of Talmudic law which places the preservation of human life before following dietary laws; in other words, Jews are commanded to maintain the health of their bodies, even if that means violating the dietary laws. The shochet (loosely defined as a kosher butcher) affirms this interpretation of the law when he commands Calof to eat meat he has deemed nonkosher because of her poor health at the time. Again Calof justifies her breach of dietary laws, this time through the words of the shochet. No where else in the narrative does Calof indicate that she abandoned the dietary laws. Given that her text maintains constant respect for the commandments of Orthodox Judaism, readers must suspect that she otherwise followed dietary laws throughout her life.

Calof also demonstrates her religious devotion with reference to food when she describes the feasts in which the family indulged at times of simchas, events which evoke great joy in the Jewish religion. The first such event was her own marriage. After ensuring readers that food was scarce, describing meals of “groats and milk” (26) as well as other scanty provisions, Calof recounts a veritable feast of beans, rice with raisins, chicken soup, and roast chicken for the wedding dinner, which served not only the entire Calof clan but two neighboring families as well. Of course, most celebrate their wedding with a special meal, but given the circumstances under which the Calofs were living at this time, and with winter coming on after this November wedding, a time when the family often approached starvation, such a meal appears to be irresponsible. But a marriage in Judaism is a sacred event, one which must be solemnized through rituals which heighten the significance of the occasion. Perhaps a more distinctly Jewish celebration is the bris, the ceremonial circumcision of a Jewish male. The Calofs planned an elaborate menu for their first son’s bris, given their circumstances, including cheese, butter, and two roast chickens. Rachel reports that the family became reckless as their excitement over the bris grew, a recklessness that led to the decision to slaughter one of their oxen to mark the event. To butcher one of their farm animals indeed appears foolhardy, but such a sacrifice underscores the significance of the bris. Food, then, stands as a clear means of revealing religious devotion in this text.

More interesting than Calof’s references to food is her response to dearth. Readers first glimpse the starvation Calof was to face in her description of the “welcoming meal” her new family prepared upon her arrival: “flat pieces of boiled dough and cheese, with water or milk to drink” (24). Her most noteworthy response to her physical hunger occurred at the beginning of spring during her first pregnancy. The Calof community was still dependent on their winter stock of provisions, which had dwindled to a dangerously low level. Determined to acquire water and fuel, Calof ventured into the prairie to search for melted snow and dried grass, which she found. After carrying two pailfuls of water back to the shack, she returned to the prairie for the dried grass. At this point, she states, “The prairie . . . held many provisions if one only knew where to look” (41), her comment implicitly revealing her adventurous spirit and self-confidence. She decided to hunt for something to enhance her meager food supply and discovered some wild garlic and mushrooms. She gathered an apronful and carried all of her booty home. Calof details her food preparation:

First I sieved the water through the fabric of a flour sack. I kneaded the dough and put it in the oven. I cleaned the mushrooms and steeped them in hot water. I then chopped up the garlic, put butter (we had our cow back) in the pan, and fried everything together . . . I was so happy . . . and very proud. I had used my brains and my nerve and as a result my husband would soon sit down to a fine dinner, just the two of us alone. (emphasis mine; 42-43)

This passage deserves attention for several reasons. First, Calof elaborates more than one might expect from this narrator many years after the events in explaining her procedure. The vividness of her memory attests to the importance of this seemingly minor event in her life. Clearly proud of her accomplishments, she elects to dwell on them, emphasizing her own strengths, mental (“I had used my brains”), emotional (“and my nerve”), and physical (she was pregnant while hauling water, fuel, and food). From an American perspective, her achievements are commendable, for she relied upon her own wits, analyzing her problem and arriving at a more than viable solution, one which brought her a sense of self-worth. This need to specify accomplishments develops as a hallmark of this autobiography, a sign of her adaptation to the American conviction of self-reliance. Near the end of her narrative, she underscores the significance of food as a sign of accomplishment when she writes, “We had plenty of food now. Each late fall now, the shochet paid us a visit for the coming winter. The dressed animals were stored in the barn which served as our winter freezer. What a contrast to the slow starvation of the early winters” (86-87). Food thus becomes a benchmark throughout Calof’s text as a means of assessing the family’s condition and tracking their “rags to riches” rise in America, establishing Calof’s Jewish-American identity.

While food in Calof’s story demonstrates her advancement in material wealth and sense of self-worth, it takes a very different course in Rose Cohen’s autobiography, Out of the Shadow. Just as Calof struggles to feed her starving family, so Cohen and her family also continuously face hunger. But food for Cohen emphasizes her dilemmas rather than sustaining a sense of self-worth. Upon leaving Russia, foreseeing the lack of kosher food, she brought a small bag of zwieback with her for her shipboard journey, but not nearly enough to survive on. In Hamburg, she encountered her first bout with hunger. The steamship company served its passengers meals while they waited for permission to embark. At the first of these meals, as soon as the bread and potatoes were placed on the communal table, the emigrants around Cohen grabbed the food so quickly that she was left with nothing to eat. Vowing to grab food at the next meal, she again failed to procure any nourishment. As Cohen reports, ”Going hungry seemed easy in comparison with the shame [I] felt to put out [my] hands for the bread while there was such a struggle” (60). This incident foreshadows the hunger and humiliation Cohen would face in America and her future wrestling with her pride.

Once in America, Cohen’s first meal consisted of coffee and buttered rolls, a paltry spread which seemed a feast, for it constituted the first substantial repast available since leaving Russia. This meal foreshadows future meals she would eat in her new home. Cohen and her father, whom she met in New York, scrimped on everything they could, including food, because their goal was to save enough money to send for the rest of the family. She describes her daily diet during the time when she worked in the same sweatshop as her father: an apple and roll for breakfast, and half a pound of beef and a pint of beer split between two or three other men for lunch. Later, when she worked in a shop separate from her father, she provides a glimpse of her diet there, which appears to have been even more meager, as she writes, “When the pedlar [sic] came into the shop everybody bought rolls. I felt hungry but I was ashamed and would not eat the plain, heavy rye bread while the others ate rolls” (110). Hunger and shame followed Cohen throughout her ghetto life, meals becoming more and more insufficient, eventually reaching a nadir when the family had literally no food because none of them could find work. Even with nothing to eat, Cohen maintained her pride, refusing handouts from a charity worker. She became extremely ill as a result of her need for food, doctors constantly warning her to “feed up” because she suffered from debilitating anemia. The conflict between Cohen’s pride and illness engendered even more internal turmoil for her when she eventually became so ill that she had to convalesce in an uptown hospital. Here nourishing food abounded, but the meat, of course, was traife. Her mother, well-schooled in Biblical mandates, instructed her to eat everything to become well, which Cohen did. Yet she remained cognizant of breaking the vow she had taken to never eat traife after a Russian neighbor had predicted that she would eat swine in America. She realized that she had not actually violated the spirit of her religion in doing so, yet later in her text, whenever writing about American ways conflicting with Judaic practices, she comments on having eaten traife, indicating just how much this action disturbed her in spite of its restorative power. Cohen never resolved this dilemma, always reverting to the letter of her religion as a comfort zone from which she could not part.

Food also becomes a yardstick for determining Cohen’s state of mind throughout her autobiography. When content in the hospital, she ate well and gained back her health. Back in the ghetto, the shabby apartment and paleness of her sibling depressed her, as did the dearth of decent food, for she craved meat and potatoes when all the family had for dinner was oatmeal gruel. Depressed, she began to understand the significance a meal had on her life view. Later, when a suitor demanded to know whether she was hungry, she admits that his line of questioning made her happy, for care for food indicated a more personal affection to Cohen. For Cohen, then, food meant far more than mere physical nourishment, providing a window into her sense of spiritual and emotional well-being in her text, a means by which she faced her shortcomings, as well as a symbol of the contentment for which she hungered yet could not achieve.

Yezierska is the woman most obsessed with food and hunger. In noting the prevalence of food images juxtaposed with hunger throughout Yezierska’s works, Ellen Golub states that the Russian Jewish woman in her writing “uses hunger to articulate her peculiar discontent” (53). Although Golub analyzes Yezierska’s fiction, an examination of her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, yields much the same message. Immediately upon learning that Goldwyn has offered ten thousand dollars for the movie rights to Hungry Hearts, Yezierska’s mind turns to food: “Five, ten thousand dollars was a fortune in 1920. I was suddenly aware of my hunger. I saw myself biting into thick, juicy steaks, dipping fresh rolls into mounds of butter, swallowing whole platters of French fried potatoes in one gulp” (27-28). With a ten dollar advance on her fortune, she straightaway hurries to Child’s Restaurant and orders “the most expensive steak on the menu,” after which:

A platter was set before me--porterhouse steak, onions, potatoes, rolls, butter. I couldn’t eat fast enough. Before I was half through, my throat tightened. My head bent over my plate, tears rolled down my cheeks onto the uneaten food. When I hadn’t had a penny for a roll I had had the appetite of a wolf that could devour the earth. Now that I could treat myself to a dollar dinner, I couldn’t take another bite. (28)

This early episode in the autobiography foreshadows later encounters with food, as when she is served “cream in big silver pitchers three times a day” on the train to Hollywood and feels “like the beggar who drowned in a barrel of cream,” losing her taste for this luxury (41), or when, as a speaker at Ohio State University, she is served an elaborate dinner that she cannot eat because she associates this food with the wealthy ingénues in the audience; she could not eat their rich food, for she could never ingest their way of life.

For Yezierska, food images and hunger stand as a metaphor for her yearnings for meaning in life, which she associates with achievement as a writer, in contrast with the world she encounters. Her craving for artistic achievement reaches its peak in Hollywood, where she waivers between the urge to fit in with the group of famous authors, and the revulsion she experiences when she views these same writers as hucksters concerned only with acquiring as much money as possible from their literary efforts. This revelation comes to Yezierska at a dinner party at which the host plied her with champagne and served roast squabs, rich cuisine that ironically served to sober her up to the reality of “business authors,” whom she viewed as “the fish market in evening clothes” (62). Struck dumb by her distaste for the empty values she comes to associate with these writers, she must return to her own people, immigrant Jews, and immerse herself in the realities of the ghetto in order to retrieve the traditions which enabled her to create the emotion-filled texts for which she had become famous. Herring and gefilte fish, not roast squab, nourished her writing career.

Food becomes one means of portraying Yezierska’s psychological conflict between her relationship with the American society of plenty and her European Jewish heritage. When in Europe, as she begged her parents to go to America, she shouted, “White bread and meat we’ll eat every day in America!” (51), but such a diet can never satisfy her once she immerses herself in American society. Although drawn to the prosperity available in her adopted country, she cannot partake of the rich fare that becomes a symbol of Mammon, a gourmet extravaganza on which she chokes. Although she details the food listed on the gilded menu at the Miramar Hotel in Hollywood, “Terrine de Pâté de Foie Gras, Green Turtle Soup au Sherry, Jumbo Pigeon on Toast, Canapé Royale Princesse--whatever that is!” (40), she does not mention actually ordering or eating this exotic fare; in fact, she makes it clear that she does not even understand what it consists of, perhaps because this language of affluent America, in appearing as pretentious as the gilding on the menu itself, is empty. This menu stands as a symbol of the rich options her ten thousand dollars have provided, privileges she elects to reject. For nourishment she prefers “Jewish” food, herring, gefilte fish, and challah, or simple food, such as a pot of oatmeal. Her penchant for such staples emphasizes the ethnic identity she cannot shed, regardless of her means or position.

In the final analysis, Yezierska employs foods in her texts as metaphors for communities. Exotic cuisine characterizes Hollywood, the martini luncheon distinguishes the New York literari of the Algonquin set, bland but sustaining food defines the New England natives, and gefilte fish and herring mark the Jewish ghetto. Ammons stresses Yezierksa’s use of food as communal ceremony and as a celebration of “the nourishment to be received from traditional patriarchal culture, and . . . the life-steeped words of a loud, physical, this-worldly Jewish mother” (165). One might argue that the religious traditions of the Jewish patriarchy did not truly nourish Yezierska, for her independent nature would not allow her to continue in the ways of her father. But the culture that the patriarchy produced provided her with the ethnicity that fed her self-identity and her ability to write. As Levin points out, the fare she encounters in Fair Oaks--boiled pork, grape jelly, cabbage, and turnips--metaphorically excludes her from the Anglo New England community she strives to enter (35), sending her back to the community in which she can partake of the flavorful environment which provides the cuisine, and thus the cultural environment, she finds sustaining.

The manner in which these three women employ food in their autobiographies provides readers with a key to understanding the true nature of the acculturation of each. Throughout their texts, Calof and Cohen stuck to the hierarchy of Judaic law, never questioning the dietary laws or the overriding mandate to sustain human life, indicating their faithfulness to their ancestry within an American setting. Calof did not find doing so problematic, but Cohen did. As natural as following the dietary laws was to her, she perceived their effect as separating her from the rest of American society, creating a wall between the world to which she aspired and the world within which she lived. Yezierska experimented with cuisine, but returned to her heritage, recognizing the connection between the food that nourished her physically and her less tangible yet inherent spiritual and emotional disposition. As these women established a place for themselves in America, they gave tangible expression to their reevaluation of identity through choices concerning food, in the end metaphorically defining themselves through the foods they prepared and ate.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Calof, Rachel Bella. “My Story.” Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains. Ed. Sandford J. Rikoon. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. 1918. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995.

Friedensohn, Doris. “Yom Kippur at Um Luk: Reflections on Eating, Ethnicity, and Identity.” People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity. Eds. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. 245-57.

Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda. “Jewish Food Rituals.” Trans. Christopher T. Bever. Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis 23 (1995): 7-17.

Goldman, Anne. “I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 169-95.

Golub, Ellen. “Eat Your Heart Out: The Fiction of Anzia Yezierska.” Studies in American Jewish Literature. Number 3. Ed. Daniel Walden. Albany: State U of New York P, 1983. 51-61.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “The Kosher Gourmet in the Nineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in Historical Perspective.” The Journal of Gastronomy 2 (Winter 1986-7): 51-89.

Levin, Tobe. “How to Eat without Eating: Anzia Yezierska’s Hunger.” Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. Ed. Mary Anne Schofield. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1989.

Yezierska, Anzia. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 1950. New York: Persea, 1987.