The one where the family prepares for Sabbath.
Listen to the episode
Join hosts Merav and Batya as they delve into all things All-of-a-Kind Family. This two-part episode features special guest Terri Ash of Geek Calligraphy, talking about bundle buggies, pickles, the kashrut and sanitary concerns of an open air market, using the library as a transition point, and the priest that lives in Terri’s house (hint, it’s her husband!)
Our chapter in summary
Just this once, Mama takes all the girls to market with her on a Thursday afternoon to shop for the Sabbath. The family stops in the library, then spends a busy time at the market seeing all the offered goods at shops and pushcarts and making their purchases. Then Friday comes, and the family brings in the Sabbath together.
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Show Notes:
Terri Ash: Geek Calligraphy
Geek Calligraphy is a woman-owned business co-founded by Ariela Housman (she/her) and Terri Ash (she/her) in 2015. Ariela and Terri are committed to providing high quality art, exceptional customer service, and halakhically sound ketubah texts to geeks across the spectrum in a respectful and inclusive manner. Find them here and take home some unique Jewish art today!
Rivington Street Market history
A nickel for a shtickle? Only at Rivington Market. This landmark space was a daytime home to Jewish peddlers, pushcart owners and shopkeepers, where haggling was common, chickens and were sold fresh from the chopping block, and fish from a tank or bucket. In the latter case you could take them home to wiggle in your bathtub until it was time to make the gefilte fish. You can see period footage of Rivington Street here, starting around 1:26 in D.W. Griffith’s A Child of the Ghetto. While we’re not big fans of Griffith, who was an early champion of the KKK, credit for capturing a vanished Jewish world.
George Burns grew up on Rivington Street
Well known Jewish comedian and television personality George Burns grew up on Rivington Street, going from chocolate syrup slinger to street singer to the vaudeville theaters. It’s not surprising, as his synagogue, the First Romanian-American Congregation, was known as Carnegie Hall for Cantors, and had a reputation for great acoustics. Burns had a long and fruitful career in radio, television, movies and as a double act with his wife, comedienne Gracie Allen. As far as we know, no relation of our Miss Allen!
Traditions around challah
Challah as we know it has come from a variety of sources. From the “show bread” of temple times in ancient Jerusalem, to the familiar braided egg loaf that we call “challah” today which has its roots in eastern Europe, “challah” or “taking challah” refers to a practice where a portion of the dough the bread is made from is reserved for the local priest. Today these portions are discarded, but in the time of an active priesthood, they would been part of a system that allowed landless priests to subsist on portions from the community.
Galitzianer and Litvak Jewish pronunciations
Kugel or kigel? Regional differences in Yiddish present us with a Venn diagram around the vowel in the middle of this Jewish culinary favorite dish, but what is the root of the Galitzianer vs. Litvak pronunciation? Some of it is linguistic vowel drift, some of it is culinary regionalism, and some of it is good old fashioned Jewish stubbornness. But who doesn’t like a nice noodle k*gel?
Bundle buggy / “bubby cart” / Baby carriages in the 1910s
Retractable folding metal structures were starting to come on the scene shortly after the advent of the folding perambulator, which is a fancy baby stroller. These devices have remained pretty much the same, a metal cage on wheels that folds flat for storage, much like a folding stepstool, ladder or stroller. Largely used in urban areas for ease of carrying home parcels without arm fatigue, they are common in the Jewish populations in the New York City area, and in Israel, where they are often called “bubby carts” because they were something your grandmother had. Bundle buggy is apparently a Canadianism.
Candied grape and candied tangerine
Candied fruit on a stick just feels like a decadent little treat, especially in winter when fruit is more scarce. We know Mama’s girls are frequently eating preserves for their fruit course, so a little piece of fruit on a stick that isn’t mushy is a treat. Even so, these fruits may been prepared or picked ahead of being candied for sanitary and longevity reasons. And you can make your own!
The pickle stand
Everyone loves a nice fresh pickle from the barrel, as seen in this photo (Photo by Irving Browning, 1930, via @NYHistory on X). Whether you like a full sour pickle, a half-sour, a kosher dill, a gherkin, a pickled tomato, or a pickled watermelon rind, the pickle vendor has you covered. In modern times there are also olives, tapenades, stuffed grape leaves, and even kombucha and brine by the quart available from online pickle vendors. And for Lower East Side authenticity, Guss’s Pickles is still going!
What is gefilte fish?
Depending who you ask, gefilte fish is either chopped fish or stuffed fish. The former is more common in North America, the latter calls back to the European subtleties of court life in 1400-1700s where the height of the art would use the skin or even the feathers of an animal to make it look lifelike for a dramatic presentation on a formal table. Most stuffed fish recipes today are cognizant of modern sanitary ideas and steam and cook the chopped fish in the skin so that everything is cooked to modern standards. Read more here.
Gelatin and red dye
Bundle buggies aren’t the only bugs in this episode. In this not-for-the-squeamish look at how beetles were used in the production of red dye, you can start to understand why Merav’s family read labels very carefully for ingredients from non-plants sources. Frequent offenders were gelatin, and some mono-and-diglycerides. If you’ve ever looked closely at a bag of Passover marshmallows, you may notice the unique use of fish gelatin which made them permissible for use with dairy cocoa and after a meat meal (but on a separate plate!).
History of the Bat Mitzvah
In modern times, the coming of age-ceremony for Jewish children is often abbreviated to B-Mitzvah, but originally people who identified female and non-binary weren’t often recognized as needing a formal recognition of adulthood. Starting as early as the 18th century some communities called for the recognition of all parties. However, it wasn’t until the advent of the Reform Movement that Judaism started celebrating the Bat Mitzvah as well as the more traditional Bar Mitzvah.
What were school hours like in 1910s New York City?
According to our research, school hours in New York City in the era of All-of-a-Kind Family varied a lot. The New York City School Board wanted to offer classes not just for children whose parents could afford to keep them out of the workforce, but also for children whose jobs at factories and sweatshops kept them for long hours, but who still wanted to learn to read and do math, so they went to school at night, after their bosses had gone home. Talk about a long day.
Sabbath traditions – bathing, changing clothes
Ushering in the sabbath comes with a lot of traditions, including taking a bath or shower as a form of self-preparation and even meditation around the transition from chol, the days of the week, to shabbat, the sacred space we create for rest. Not every family was lucky enough to have a secret mikvah under their tenement, but there were Jewish owned bathhouses or you could always take a bath in the tin tub, after Papa was done cleaning the fish.
Traditions around lighting shabbat candles to represent family members
In our modern age of mass-produced shabbat candles it’s easy to forget that these were once a hand-produced item, artisan goods like bread and wine and part of the cost of producing a spotless shabbat table. The modern tradition of lighting one candle at a young age is often attributed to Chabad pre-schools where young girls are taught the shabbat candle blessing as a way of instilling tradition. They are often gifted a small brass candlestick and sometimes a box of candles to help form the habit of lighting, with the intention that they light a pair of candles when they marry, and sometimes a candle for each child or each absent living family member. As with many Jewish traditions, once you take on an obligation, you are obliged to keep performing it at the same level, so count your candles before lighting.
Blessing the children, and Eishet Chayil
Upon returning from synagogue the head of the household, in our stories that’s Papa, blesses the children and sings a song of praise from the book of Proverbs for his partner, in this case Mama. The children are blessed according to a gendered formula, the girls are blessed to be like their fore-mothers, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, but boys are blessed to be like Ephraim and Menashe the two sons of Joseph, the one son of Jacob who did not give his own name to one of the tribes of Israel. According to tradition the girls are being blessed with strength and fortitude and the boys with the wisdom and peace-loving natures of Joseph’s children. Check out a modern interpretation of eishet chayil here. NB: Many women chose not to have their partners recite eishet chayil.
Other books we mentioned
As we often do, we brought up other books in this episode — this time, other authors talking about similar experiences. In particular, The Carp in the Bathtub by Barbara Cohen, Everything But Money by Sam Levenson, The Discworld books, by Terry Pratchett, the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill.