Make-Believe Traditional Tales from Boro Park:

The Passover Haggadah

Norman Simms

So you know what, there are lots of things I remember from Pesach in the olden times when I was a boy. First of all, that everything takes too long during the seder and everybody gets hungry, so what you hear all the time are not songs from the Old Country or prayers droned on by grown-ups who don’t know how to read so good in Hebrew, but what you listen to most of the time is stomach rumbles. And maybe this is true, but even of it isn’t, I remember that grandfathers have the loudest rumblings of all; like tremendous kettle drums banging away down deep dark tunnels in their guts.

Also let me tell you that when finally they get around to eating, which is the main point of any holyday, the main dish that comes out after all that endless storytelling and sour rumblings is in big shissels (bowls) of chicken soup wherein are placed a few thin coins of sliced carrots, this is for colour in the middle of globules of chicken fat that have the most taste, and then big round matzoh balls. They are truly cannon balls like there used to be long ago in the Civil War and you can see piled up in Gettysburg if the family takes you for a visit so you can become an expert in American history. My grandma must have been a real patriot because her matzoh balls were bigger and heavier than any pile of cannon balls on the battle field where the Union soldiers fought day after day against the other side, the rebels from the South. You could tell she could have been a great general because she always put in a bit of onion, pronounced union, into her soup, and the president back in those days a very long time ago before my father or grandfather was born, he was Avraham Lincohen, obviously with a name like that a Jew, and also he had a beard and spoke wise sayings. Could he have won the war or freed up all the schwarzes (Blacks) if he wasn’t, at least deep in his heart, a proper Yid? What puts that way of looking at American history beyond doubt and proper to think about at a Pesach table is that the no-goodniks shot Honest Abe dead, right in the theatre while he was watching a play. The doctors couldn’t save his life, but my grandma could have if she had been there with her big bowl of matzo ball soup.

So, nu, let me get back to what I am talking about, the celebration of Pesach at the seder table according to the Haggadah, the official one from Maxwell House Coffee. There comes after the hot soup with its hard-as-a-stone matzah balls, the next course: You know what that is? A dish of gefilte fish. Here’s how you make it. You cook up some carp, white fish and pike, take off the skin, squeeze out the guts inside, and pick the bones out as much as possible; then put in a grinder and grind away. Shape into balls and boil until finished.  Then serve. This is a magical and symbolical event because, when you look at it closely, a round ball of gefilte fish looks very much the same as a matzoh ball, only you eat it cold and you don’t need soup around it. You eat it in a special way, so you remember the stories and the prayers that the grown-ups recite in the boring parts of the seder.  The gefilte fish sits on a little piece of lettuce, with a few carrot coins (to remind you of the soup, of course), and also what you don’t have to eat because it is disgusting some fatty, gelatine-like roe, a substance that has something to do with how three kinds of sea creatures reproduce themselves to make gefilte fish. If you try to eat all this, like maybe you think you are already becoming a grown up, you can put a lot of horseradish, the red kind that is made from purple hairy beets and ground up with other bitter roots, it takes a way the bad taste of the roe and by this time soggy carrot coins, and the rough mixed fish balls, not so finely mushed as can be done in later ages with kitchen machinery, but in the olden times when grandmas and mothers cooked, with hocking (chopping) tools in a wooden bowl. Each part of this dish, each taste separately and pushed together on a fork, has a traditional Jewish meaning that comes from the Old Country. It was such a wonderful meal that rabbis who were Litvaks and Hasidim who were Galitzianas would stop fighting for one or two nights and enjoy the shmeck (taste) and be friends—because they were usually brothers or uncles, anyway.

Now you can see what I am getting at here. A seder consists of two big things.  A lot of tedious reading from the Haggadah at both ends of the meal, everything explained in detail and with jokes that only adults and almost grown-up teenagers can understand, that is one thing. The other thing is the meal itself, served as I am trying to explain to you in a series of courses; and whatever it means, nobody has to talk about it anymore because everything has already been chanted or sung before the meal and then again in much more boring readings after the real food.

So after the matzo ball soup, that is one, and after the gefilte fish dish, that is two, in comes a number of large platters with such things as a roast chicken, a sliced up hunk of stringy flanken beef, large flat bowl full of a kugel, nicely browned, a series of little dishes with carrots, green beans, peas, fried onion, potato latkes with cinnamon and apple sauce, sliced half-sour pickles, brown and green onions, red peppers burned properly on the stove surface, eggplant similarly singed all around, left over charosis and other debris from the seder plate not necessary for the later readings.  Of course, also on the table are opened boxes of matzoh, squirting bottle of Good Health seltzer, kosher Maneshevitz wine (the kind you need a knife and fork to eat with), a few pitchers of Welch’s grape juice for the young kids and their mammas that don’t drink alcohol, and a few strategically placed little jars of Alka-Seltzer, with spoons next to them, just in case you need to burp. Well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea, and it’s time to eat. The eating, or fressing as it was known back then, might go on for a few hours, except somewhere along the way someone says, it is time for dessert, and then back to the final act of the Haggadah.

No one can eat after all that you would think, but you can’t eat until the Afikomen is found, paid for and shared around. So the meal goes on, with a little bite of desert, like some apple sauce, some Italian ices flavoured different colours, cups of tea or coffee, maybe a glass of schnapps or a Coca Cola or Hoffmann’s Cherry Soda, a few pieces of shredded coconut macaroons, a mound of honey, almonds and raisons.  By then, finally, you can sing Chad Gadya, which is special riddle at the very end of the seder, and makes it all kosher. And what does it all mean?

Once we were slaves in Egypt, now we are contented gluttons in Boro Park.