I was at the mercy of history.
The only thing I have from Aunt Lida is a recipe for a refreshing drink known as kvass. The recipe recently jumped out at me from a pile of unpaid bills, as though I owed something to Lida. After the war, Aunt Lidiya, or Lida, as we called her, was known as the classical beauty of the Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Lida from the Department of Defectology, as orthopedagogy is still called back home. Yet when I knew Lida, the same Lida who peered down at us serenely and unflappably from photographs, she was a shuffling creature in an apron who had said nothing for years, just served, one course after another, then into the kitchen and back again, on plates with a gilded rim. Eat! She had been the last one in the family to teach the deaf-mute children, she knew the secret, she knew patience, she cooked in silence, and now she was gone.
For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the EBP.KBAC at the very top of the slip of paper might signify. I stared at this EBP, thinking that the Cyrillic abbreviation could be understood as EBPопейский, YEVropeysky, European, or just as easily as EBPейский, JEWreysky, Jewish kvass—an innocent utopia of the Russian language and the Urbi et Orbi of my aunt, as though Europe and the Jews were descended from one root, and this recipe and this abbreviation fostered the refreshing hypothesis that all Jews, even those who were no longer Jews at all anymore, were among the last Europeans, having, after all, read everything that constitutes Europe. Or didn’t my aunt want to write out the word Jewish, because the incomplete and abbreviated form left open yet another interpretive option, for example, that this drink was not all that Jewish, but only allusively, only a little, in spite of the garlic?
The recipe turned out to be a kind of encrypted poetic exercise. I had never picked up on anything Jewish about my aunt, and there was nothing there anyway, aside from her penchant for cooking these dishes, which I couldn’t figure out until after her death, and I understood that she of all people, who wanted nothing to do with the whole pain of saying “Jew” and thinking of graves right away and who, because she was still alive, could not be a Jew, had learned a tasty, juicy set of recipes from her grandparents, who were still Jewish, and had adopted many things that even her mother didn’t know. Now gefilte fish, strudel, and chopped herring were part of Lida’s Ukrainian cooking repertoire.
INGREDIENTS:
One large bunch of lettuce
One large garlic bulb
One large bunch of dill
[One line is missing here]
You boil water and let it cool down to room temperature.
You rinse the lettuce, then you cut off the root and stem, then you cut everything into small pieces and peel the garlic.
This epistle was addressed to me. Who writes recipes in direct speech with a hint of pathos?
You should rinse and cut the dill
Then you stir everything and put it into a three-liter jar.
Had Lida been addressing me with this you, or people in general?
The three-liter jar, tryokhlitrovaya banka, rattled me even more. A generation of utensils lies between the kitchen over there, with its three-liter jar to store brine, its cheesecloth to strain the broth, its cast-iron pan, and my kitchen here. Where can you buy cheesecloth in Berlin? Over there we have little rags and worn-out towels and cheesecloth, copper basins and wooden spoons for the plum preserves, all of which had once been bought, and if you asked when, you were told, after the war.
She kept everything to herself, and when she died, all her strudels, gefilte fish, and sweet sausages with raisins went with her, her cookies, the ones with dried plums, the ones with honey, lemons, and nuts, and she also took the word tzimmes with her, as though everything had to remain a mystery. She kept everything to herself, her beauty as a young woman, all the reading she’d done, she kept it all inside, just for her husband, a war hero, felled by seven shots, one of the handsomest heroes, she said nothing about her illnesses and worries, her teaching methods, her increasing deafness, when she went in and out of the kitchen, she said nothing about the birthdays of the dead, the birthdays of the murdered, which she commemorated for years, alone, she also said nothing about other dates, she remembered everyone and everything that touched her in life, she said nothing about the war and the before and the after and all the trains and all the cities, the grief about her father, who survived the war, but did not return to the family and later lived next door, for years, in one of the nine-floor prefabricated buildings of our anonymous Soviet development. As she grew older and then old, she was still waiting, and eventually she turned mute, because she understood that she was going deaf, and so she returned to the deaf-mute children she had taught all her life, and if she could have, she would have kept her death to herself as well. I hadn’t asked her about anything and now wonder why I missed out on her so completely, her and her life, as though I had accepted her resolute deaf-muteness right from the start, her service and her role. What was I up to back then, anyway, when she could have given me everything, the recipe for EBP.KBAC, for example, to me and all of Eвропa?
Abstract thinking is not my forte, Uncle Vil, my father’s older brother, liked to quip, when I talked about friction losses. To test me, he gave me the most ingenious problems to solve when he visited, problems about Egyptian triangles, the model of perpetual motion, as though a fundamental truth would be revealed to me if I found solutions to Vil’s problems. But I never did.
He himself was the product of a Soviet metempsychosis, a transmutation of the energies between state, soul, and machine, the perpetual motion of my country. Vil was born in 1924, eight months after Lenin’s death, when the country was expressing its grief by naming factories, cities, and villages after him. Lenin lived, his name made power plant turbines revolve, your name shall be Lenin, and the lightbulbs glow. Hence my grandparents named their firstborn Vil, after the late Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was considered the grandfather of all Soviet children, so Lenin had grandchildren, albeit no children. Even fifty years later, we were his grandchildren, and we said Dedushka Lenin, Grandpa Lenin, because everything was in motion but time.
There were all kinds of marvelous creatures, such as Rabfak, Oblmortrest, Komsomol, Molokokoopsoyuz; everything was abbreviated and compounded back then, Mosselprom, Narkompros, or Cheka, the most long-lived organization, which later turned into GPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB. I knew a Ninel, a name formed by spelling Lenin backward; a Rem, a son of Trotskyites, from Revolutsiya Mirovaya—World Revolution; a Roi, from Revolution October International; and I even knew a very nice Stalina.
Maybe the choice of name also had to do with the fact that my grandparents could still speak Yiddish: the Yiddish force of will—vil—shone through, and, in fact, no one in our family was as single-mindedly determined as Vil, who never stopped optimizing his efficiency, and even the authorities went along with him. In 1940, when he applied for a passport in Kiev at the age of sixteen, he got a document with a statement on the fifth line that he was Russian even though his parents were Jewish and had the corresponding note in their passports. With his blond mop of hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, Vil looked like the valiant Ivan from the fairy tale. It remains a mystery what mathematical operation could have led a Jewish couple to produce a Russian child, not even at birth, but at a passport agency. As a result, Vilya, as we called him, became a full-fledged Russian and shed the weight of his Jewish background, which receded to a mere detail, a superfluous add-on that was better left unmentioned. Besides, there was no cause to look back; there was only the future, for the world is vast, and knowledge infinite.
Vil’s little brother, my father Miron, born eight years later, carried on his grandfather’s name, Meir, in a modified form, and had the word Jew in his passport. However, for