The past, present and future how genealogy connects us
Shedding Light on Genetic Memory. How the experiences of our ancestors might be encoded in our DNA. Also how in three generations hunger was warded off allowing food to become culinary art.
It is accepted that heredity is passed down through generations. Food is entrenched in traditions; it connects generations together through time and space. This shared heritage forms our kinship, habits and values; it solidifies the shared knowledge that is already within us. Putting love into food is a way of connecting, caring for family, each other and the resources available to us.
Our younger daughter's creativity solidified in Italy. Her first trip there was to Rome, Naples and Milan to embrace the history and culture. After this journey, she traveled to the south east coast to places like Bari, Foggia, Pescara to learn about the food. Traveling, photographing, embracing the food culture became her passion. I can’t help but wonder, was it her ancestors who clamored for her attention throughout all those centuries? A historical catastrophe against Jews forced them to end up in Europe. The destruction of Jerusalem and the 2nd Temple, in the 1st century CE, resulted in Jews living under Roman occupation. It’s how many ended up in diaspora; scattered. It is why generations of Jews were born outside of their homeland. The oldest Jewish community outside the Land of Israel is dated to Rome. Jews came to Rome as slaves with the Roman soldiers; some fled on their own to save themselves. Over the centuries, they traveled and scattered. But no matter where they lived, they had very few rights. Suffered discrimination, persecutions, pogroms, eventually ending up in the Holocaust. No one protected them. With the destruction of the 2nd Temple, Rabbinical Judaism emerged. It is studying the written and oral laws, Torah, which can be done anywhere, without a temple. Evoking the spirituality of John Paul II, the Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, who said that he felt most spiritual when walking in the Polish Tatra Mountains. There, in nature, he felt the closest to God. Pope John Paul II helped bring down Communism in Poland and establish a relationship between the Vatican and the state of Israel.
I see our ancestors in our 3rd Generation, 1st G American daughter, granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors. A self-starter, entrepreneur, chef, foodie. Dedicated to creating minimal, regional, seasonal, recipes, dishes using only quality ingredients. She makes breads, pastas and desserts from scratch. Her beautiful photographs document the food she creates and monthly recipes of complete dinners help others to entertain at home like pros.
We are fortunate that today we can think about what we eat and what is important for a healthy mind and body. Our 1st Generation American is an ordinary person who is able to do extraordinary things, unimaginable to those who came before her. This hope that life can be better is what carried her ancestors through the darkest of times. Entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and upward mobility are the traditions at the heart of America's exceptionalism. This optimism is uniquely an American experience. Surrounded by local food growers she collaborates with farmers, distributors, manufacturers. Takes advantage of seasonal food fairs, farmers markets, fish, seafood and meat vendors. She pursues unique products, exported by artisan companies. Her generation has the choices the generation before her could have only dreamed of.
As immigrants, we left behind a tyrannical ideology, communism, where Antisemitism never went away the way it was supposed to. My mother had no idea what the future held for us, but she knew in America, our life under freedom will be better. My mother and her only surviving sister were able to be reunited after twenty years of separation. They were separated after returning to Poland from the Soviet territories in 1946. We waited in line for five years to come here legally. We left the Old World behind at the end of the 1960s, and embraced the New World. We entered a strange country with a totally different way of life. We tried to keep a delicate balance between the old world and the new one. We tried to keep our small family intact. Learning English, working and going to school were the priorities. We chased after the familiar smells and tastes; food was the last vestige, it connected us to the old country, it stayed intact. It was a way of keeping alive the ghosts we left behind.
We celebrated July 4th with hotdogs and cake, a tradition which took my mother back to the interwar years in Warsaw. On Sunday evenings boys took girls to the movies, and then to a coffee house, where they stayed until midnight, eating hotdogs, cake and drinking coffee. With winter holidays came the delicious dish of thinly sliced potatoes with onions cooked in oil, done crisp on stove top. My mother recalled eating potato soup with onions after WWI and sliced potatoes with onions while surviving the German onslaught.
My mother’s vibrant community and individual people came to life after WWI; The Holocaust is responsible for 2 out of every 3 of Europe’s Jews murdered before WWII was over. Modern genetics show that all European Jews are 70 % descendent from the Middle Eastern genes of 3 thousand years ago and about 30% from European stock. Ashkenazi Jews adapted the Western European culture and the Sephardic adapted the Southern European culture. Mizrahi are Jews who never left the Land of Israel. A conspiracy theory circulating on social media today is that a semi-nomadic Turkic people, the Khazars, is from where European Jews have originated. The Khazar Empire existed from the 7 till the end of 10 century, an empire from the steppes of the Caspian to the Black Sea. That Jews are the descendants of Khazars is a Conspiracy Theory. Modern genetics show that Khazars are not related to Jews and have nothing to do with Jews.
Hard work and procurement of food is how we survived for generations. My 3rdGeneration daughter was young when her grandmother died. My mother left behind journals on which I based my book on “Memory is Our Home”. Those vivid details describe how after WWI America established soup kitchens to feed the hungry and impoverished Polish people, as the country slowly recovered from World War I. Every day, before going to work, my mother’s brother Adek took her there, and she would get a cup of milk and a piece of bread. Later, when the family had money, they would go to the bakery for fresh kaiser, onion, or caraway seed rolls. In the evenings, men went from courtyard to courtyard with baskets full of fresh, hot bagels. These crisp bagels were my mother’s favorite. They were braided and baked in a special way, with a crust that crackled when she bit into them. On good days, they ate them with butter. Walking through the public gardens my mother saw wealthy mothers loudly encouraging their children to eat bananas and oranges. My mother recalled how she would watch, imagining the taste of these exotic fruits.
Growing up in California, our two daughters were exposed from an early age to shop for fresh produce at our local farmer’s market. This family tradition is a continuation from the past, going back to my mother’s childhood. As a child, my mother loved going with her mother on Fridays to shop in the open market where food was fresh and less expensive. Early in the morning farmers arrived in the streets of Warsaw with fresh milk, eggs, chickens and fresh produce. This was the least expensive place for people to buy food. The milk had to be boiled; at that time many cows were sick with tuberculosis. On Fridays, the market was always crowded, dusty and loud, packed with people shopping for Sabbath. My mother was astounded by the wide array of colors of the fruits, vegetables and flowers. The farm animals made noises and people bargained loudly.
My mother was the youngest of six siblings, the oldest Pola, became the family’s cook when their mother became ill. She was great at it, in a time when they struggled to survive, she prepared delicious fish, meat, soups and fruit compote dishes. Cooked lunches for the working siblings and for the brother when he was confined to bed. Our daughters were eating this type of food during all the holidays and while visiting with family in NYC. The food we procured at Zabar’s, ate at Russ & Daughters, Carnegie Deli, and from all the different stands on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which included pickles, sauerkraut, pastrami, lox, knishes and babka.
My mother survived because she fled East. She was the only one in her family who read Mein Kampf. Hitler’s hatred of Jews was displayed openly and it terrified her. His mad visions, evil racist propaganda and his use of Jews as scapegoats for all of Germany's problems were clearly outlined. My mother and her siblings came of age during the interwar period; her three older married siblings had five beautiful children. My mother was an aunt to five children who were not permitted to live by Nazi ideology. We will never know what extraordinary people they would have become and what contributions to our society they would have made. Out of the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust 1.2 million were Jewish children. My mother tried to convince her married siblings to run, but they thought it was best to stay in Warsaw and endure the war. At this time there existed the belief that the great German civilization would never hurt women and children. At the end of 1939, my mother, Sevek and Pola were the three siblings who ran east toward Russia, they were single and had no children.
In Saratov, Russia, my mother worked in a factory. Her paycheck went to pay for a room she shared with three girls; the rest of the paycheck went for food rations. The extended family that left Poland for Russia after WWI came to my mother’s rescue. Cousin Isaac came to Saratov with food, clothing and news about the family. Overnight, my mother was no longer poor or hungry.
In February of 1941 my mother visited her family in Moscow. She was fed a delicious breakfast that her uncle prepared; a table was arranged with breads, butter, jam, different meats, cheeses and eggs. Her cousin Isaac made hot tea from a beautiful silver samovar. After work, Isaak, a Yiddish theater director, took my mother out to eat in restaurants and coffee houses. My mother was transported to a time that had nothing to do with war and poverty. She ate food that she could not afford, food that was not available in the city of Saratov. The stores in Moscow were large, with signs in both Russian and French. Chicken, veal, beef: everything was available on the menu. Stores were stocked with a large variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. Groceries, bakeries, and meat stores were full. Ice cream was sold everywhere, even in February. This was done for diplomatic reasons, foreign dignitaries were only allowed to travel in cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Foreign bigwigs saw only the successful side of Russia. It was clear to my mother that Russian people lived under lock and key, detached from outside information. When she told her six cousins about the destruction of Warsaw, how her city was bombed and on fire, from their faces she saw that they did not believe her. My mother’s first reaction was, maybe it was for the best, maybe the Russian people will get to keep their innocence.
In October 1941, Hitler was at Moscow’s door. My mother lost contact with her Russian family. She never again was able to find any of them. She was fluent in Russian and after the war she searched for them in vain. Dire conditions existed inside Moscow, from Oct. 1941, to Jan. 1942, during those four months, close to 1 million Russians died defending their city, more casualties than that of the US and Britain during all of WWII. Those were ordinary men and women who took up arms to defend Moscow. It ended with famine, starvation and disease, the conditions were horrific, and people turned against each other.
My mother and the man who became my father came to Uzbekistan with the Polish Army but in the end, they were left to fend for themselves for four years. They traveled from town to town chasing after work and food. By now fluent in Russian, it was my mother who undertook the job of participating in the illegal black market. This is how the entire Russian population survived, trading with each other for the foodstuff not available in the stores. On Sundays, at the big bazaar, the local Uzbeks brought fresh produce to sell. The refugees, like my mother, sold items they obtained from the passing soldiers, and in this way, they traded with the local population. They also traveled to towns further away to buy buckets of eggs or sacks of cucumbers, where those goods were less expensive, bringing them back to sell at a higher price.
The grapes that grew here were huge and harvested for wine. They were the sweetest my mother ever tasted. All kinds of melons grew there too; the watermelons were as sweet as sugar. Rice, wheat and cotton grew here, the cotton was called Russia’s white gold.
In communist Poland our life after the war was not any different from how my parents survived the war years. The illegal black market is how people subsisted; the stores were always empty. The promised utopia never happened; the opposite did. The term “bread lines”, belongs to the socialists and communists. I do have some beautiful memories connected to food, especially around holidays. We ate oranges, chocolates and walnuts at Chanukah that came all the way from Israel. I remember carp fish swimming in our foyer in a large basin. My mother turned those into wonderful gefilte fish. And the live chickens she procured at the local farmers market, which she knew how to butcher. Every part of the chicken was used and turned into delicious chicken soup.
On our daughters’ father’s side, grandfather Aron, was not only a serial entrepreneur beating the Polish socialist system, but was also an early foodie. He extracted essence from Israeli Jaffa orange peels to make natural orangeade in his “Jutrzenka” soft drinks company. He used sugar from Polish beets, farmers supplied fresh butter and imported cocoa to make chocolates in his Fruktoza factory. This foodie passion of an electric power company lineman had to travel to our daughters. See my husband’s Substack post “Empty Shelves” about this and also of the failures of a socialist system:
Our daughters never met their grandfathers; my father died in Poland when I was ten years old and my mother never remarried. My husband’s father died before our daughters were born. When they were young, we chose not to burden them with our past and traumatic history. We only talked about our connection to the old world in terms of culture, food, music and art. Our older daughter, without knowing much about her grandfather’s history in Poland went on to learn about growing, harvesting and making of chocolate. She spent time in Mexico and Puerto Rico studying the process, from growing cacao trees, fermentation and roasting the cocoa bean to the making of the paste, or cocoa mass - the chocolate. Grandfather’s Genetic Memory journeyed, clearly visible in this granddaughter’s DNA.
We escaped communist tyranny and came to build up our adapted country not to tear it down. My mother sacrificed in the now to make sure her daughters and the next generations had a future. Be able to live free with the values installed in us and shared by our ancestors. Be able to achieve our dreams as individuals regardless of religion, ethnic background and politics, in the spirit of American exceptionalism. Food embodies this timeless connection to family, friends, to happiness and joy despite all the hardships and setbacks we endured.