(No. 10) Claiming my Jewish heritage through matzo ball soup
Even if the “wrong” half of me is Jewish
Hi friend,
I wrote this essay during Passover a few weeks ago, but I didn’t share it here at the time. It’s an attempt to make sense of what being sorta-Jewish-sorta-not-Jewish means to me.
Claiming my Jewish heritage through matzo ball soup
Even if the “wrong” half of me is Jewish
I recently attempted to make one of my favorite meals that I’ve never successfully prepared: matzo ball soup. The ingredients are simple enough. Matzo (unleavened flatbread) or matzo meal (matzo that’s been ground), eggs, fat, seltzer, and seasonings for the matzo balls, plus broth for the soup-y part of matzo ball soup.
After scouring a few grocery stores for matzo meal—I was in Oxford, where aisles overflow with creme eggs and chocolate bunny sculptures but Kosher foods, not so much—I managed to track down some matzo boards in a local shop. I couldn’t find matzo meal or even Kosher-for-Passover matzo. But I don’t keep Kosher, and I figured there was something rustic about laboring my matzo meal from scratch, anyway. I also bought a bottle of Kedem grape juice, which I used to smash the matzo boards into powder.
To an outsider, I may have looked like one of the millions of other people around the world preparing for a Passover seder. But my relationship with matzo ball soup as a “half-Jewish” girl is a bit more complicated.
My dad is Jewish, but my mom is not, and my Jewish upbringing is probably described as “informal” at best. In part this is because my parents are divorced, and because my mom had primary custody when I was a kid, I didn’t spend as much time with my Jewish family. But even my dad hosted Easter and Christmas at the house. Maybe this was because the custody arrangement assigned my dad national holidays (aka Christian ones), so it made sense to celebrate them. Or maybe it was just a classic case of assimilating into the dominant culture. Sure, we also celebrated Passover, went to temple a handful of times, and occasionally went for Shabbos at my second cousin’s house, but I grew up with the Easter bunny and Christmas trees as much as dreidels and gelt.
It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I learned that Judaism practices matrilineal descent. I feel embarrassed admitting something so basic now, but I didn’t grow up in a Jewish community where this kind of knowledge was commonplace. I had grown up thinking having a Jewish dad made me half Jewish; after all, I have one Jewish parent. But one by one, experiences started rolling in in early adulthood that told me otherwise. There was the mom of the Jewish boy I was dating shouting across the table at her son during Shabbos dinner, “MAIS ELLE N’EST PAS JUIVE!” (“But she isn’t Jewish!”). In New York, there were the Orthodox men on Sukkot, turning away from me wordlessly after asking if I was Jewish and learning only my dad was. And then there was the familiar line of questioning, So, is your mom Jewish? Oh, only your dad? Right…
Half Jewish is a contradiction in terms. Either you’re Jewish (because your mom is), or you’re not (doesn’t matter who your other parent is).
The part of me that was Jewish was the wrong half, and this made me Jewish not at all.
For a while, having learned that being half Jewish “isn’t a real thing,” when people asked me if I was Jewish, I responded that my dad was. That way, they would know that I wasn’t ignorant enough to claim real Jewish identity, but if I was lucky, they might still validate my Jew-ish identity. But to make things more complicated, I’ve been estranged from my dad and most of his side of the family since I was twelve. I haven’t been immersed in familial Jewish celebrations for most of my life, my memories are sparse, and my cultural knowledge incomplete. I’m only loosely tethered to the half of me that I could claim as Jewish, anyway.
If “half Jewish” isn’t a thing, and the half-Jewish bit of me is complicated on top of that, what does it even count for?
On a walk the other day, I discovered Schmaltzy, a podcast by the Jewish Food Society that explores Jewish identity through our relationships with food. They had hosted an in-conversation episode with food writer and cook, Alison Roman, whose recipes I have enjoyed making over the last year or so. Like me, Alison grew up half Jewish (Jewish dad, non-Jewish mother). Although she describes her Jewish upbringing as “casual,” she still felt like being half Jewish was important to her identity. That is, until she got older, and people started questioning what she meant by that—But is your mom Jewish? Oh, so you’re not really Jewish, then—and she doubted whether a core part of her identity was even real.
Even though Alison didn’t know Jewish prayers or go to the “right” kind of Jewish summer camps, and even though she was made to feel like her half-Jewish identity didn’t count for anything, the one thing that connected her to Jewish identity was food.
The same is true for me.
I may not remember what goes on the seder plate or even why you drink four glasses of wine on Passover (it’s four, right? — let me google), but I do remember my grandmother’s cooking. When we went to hers on weekends, there was her noodle pudding (kugel, although I only learned the word as an adult), farfel (my cousin’s favorite), and marble bundt cakes with a slice taken out (so she could “sample” it before serving, then smoosh the cake back together so no one would notice). And on Passover, there was my all-time favorite: matzo ball soup.
Over the years I’ve attempted to make matzo balls a handful of times, but they’ve never worked out. They’ve turned out not just dense but impenetrable, chewy but not in a fun spongey way. They haven’t fluffed to twice their size, and they’d prefer to sink rather than float. Maybe it’s because I never inherited my grandma’s recipe.
Maybe it’s because I’m not really Jewish.
This Passover, I decided to try making matzo balls again using a recipe by Alison. I wasn’t hosting or attending a seder, but I wanted a bowl of matzo ball soup, and good luck finding a Jewish deli around here.
I swapped in butter for schmaltz (chicken fat) to make them vegetarian, following Alison’s suggestion. I could have used oil to keep things parve and appropriate for a real seder, but I thought butter would taste better. I made them with regular matzo instead of Kosher-for-Passover matzo, meaning no one really celebrating Passover would even eat them.
As I rolled the dough into golf ball-sized balls, doubts started creeping in. The herbs were chopped too coarsely because the knives I used were blunt—how would the dough hold together? And the matzo meal was not nearly as fine as it should have been. Why did I forget about the food processor on the kitchen counter, and why did I think smashing the bottom of the grape juice bottle was the best way to grind matzo?
And there were the voices echoing in my head. Oh, so did you make them with schmaltz? No? Well, you at least you used Kosher-for-Passover matzo, right? You… what? Oh, so they’re not even really matzo balls, then, are they?
Trust me, trust the matzo ball, Alison writes.
Cautiously, I lowered the matzo balls into the boiling water. I hoped they would float, but all I could do was let them go, and wait.
Although I crave an identity that is held together a little more neatly, there’s something to celebrate about my contradictions, too. Maybe they aren’t contradictions at all, just pieces of my history, memories, and family that fit together a little differently than expected. That doesn’t make them any less real. What I realized listening to Alison talk about her food memories was that even though the “half-Jewish” identity doesn’t count for some people, it means something to her.
Being half Jewish means something to me, too.
They expanded and floated to the top like Alison said they would, the matzo balls. And they were delicious, by the way—fluffy but still a little dense, nourishing but still comforting. Real matzo balls, half-matzo balls, or not-even-really matzo balls, what did it matter?
Like me, made with a little of this and a little of that, my matzo balls turned out just as they were meant to.
(belated) Chag Sameach
<3 Rachel
Hi, Rachel. Thank you for your comments. Applaud your efforts to make the matzo ball soup. Often the older generation did not write down their recipes. This is true of your Great-grandma Carlson. It was a handful of this & a handful of that.
I love reading your musings, Rach! Thanks for sharing your experiences in this space. There is so much written here that I didn’t know about being Jew-ish. This was eye-opening for me! Food always brings us together and definitely in places where cultures divide. I love how you used the grape juice to crush the matzo. That’s totally something I would do! I hope you continue to explore being Jew-ish and be inspired. I love you!