How do the depictions of rituals, symbols, and cultural assumptions govern interpretation of the world?
Valley of The Gun
1 “Take ‘em, Joe!” cried Grandpap as the three deer, a buck and two does, stretched out at a lope across the ridgeline above us, swi� dark silhouetes against the tan buckwheat stubble of what we called the ridgefield. My father, “Big Joe,” leaned into the frost-�nged air. ka-krak, ka-krak, ka-krak, ka-krak—the sound of each shot was followed by that ratling echo through the chilled gray woods that every meat hunter knows and can hear in his sleep. The first deer, the buck, was thrown sideways by the impact and went down at a running roll. The two does did approximately the same thing; the second one would later be found a�er an hour of tracking the blood on fences and grass. We had just witnessed an amazing feat s�ll talked about in the Bageant family all these years a�er my father’s death.
2 That was in the late fall of 1957. I had been allowed to go with the deer hunters for the first �me, and already I had seen family history made. Dad had stepped into family folklore, become one of those to be talked about for genera�ons in a family of hunters, men�oned in the same breath with old Jim Bageant, who shot a whole washtub full of squirrels one November morning just before World War II.
3 These men—Daddy, Grandpap, and two of my uncles, Uncle Toad and Uncle Nelson—were meat hunters who trudged the fields and woods together right up un�l the day they got too crippled up to do it or died. And it was because they were meat hunters that they let my dad take the three deer, one each on their tags, on the last legal day of hun�ng season. Everyone knew that my dad, the best shot in the family, had the most likelihood of ge�ng more than one of the deer.
4 Later in the day, a�er dressing the deer and hanging them on the back porch to chill, we sat around the living-room woodstove, cleaned the guns, and talked about the day’s hunt. To an eleven-year-old boy, the smell of gun oil and the stove’s searing raw heat on the face, the polishing of blued steel and walnut, the clean raspy feel of the checked gun grips, the warm laughter of the men, well . . . that’s primal a�er-the- hunt stuff so deep you can feel the sparks from Cel�c yew log fires and the brush of bearskin leggings on your knees. It has been going on in this place and on this land for 250 years.
5 I quit hun�ng years ago, yet this remembered room and the long-dead men who inhabited it that day in the fall of ‘57 remain for me one of the truest and finest places and events on this earth. Guns can have a place inside a man, even remembered guns in the soul of an arthri�c sixty-year-old old socialist writer. The crack of a distant rifle or the wild meat smell of a deer hanging under a porch lightbulb on a snowy night s�ll bewitches me with the same mountain-folk animism it did when I was a boy. And though I have not hunted since 1986, the sight of a fine old shotgun s�ll rouses my heart.
6 In families like mine, men are born smelling of gun oil amid a forest of firearms. The family home, a huge old clapboard farmhouse, was stuffed with guns, maybe thirty in all. There were 10-, 12-, 14-, and 20- gauge shotguns, pump guns, over-and-unders, and deer rifles of every imaginable sort from classic Winchester 94 models to 30-ought-sixes, an old cap and ball “horse pistol” da�ng back to the mid-1800s, and even a set of dueling pistols that had been in my family since the 1700s. No hillbilly ever threw a gun away, even when it could no longer be repaired. And un�l they stopped working completely, guns were endlessly cared for and patched back together. Otherwise they weren’t to be parted with except under the direst circumstances, either on your deathbed or because you were so broke your cash bounced. For example, there is one ancestral family gun that my brother Mike did not inherit—my father’s prized old Ivers and Johnson double-barrel shotgun, which had been in the family since the turn of the twen�eth century. An out-of-work trucker at Christmas�me, Daddy sold it to buy us kids the standard assortment of
Christmas junk so we would not feel disappointed. I remember a Robert the Robot for me, a �n stove for my sister, a litle red wheelbarrow for my brother, and, of course, toy guns and holsters. That was in 1952. We s�ll have the photographs, and we s�ll lament the loss of that fine old Ivers and Johnson.
7 Through our early years we boys could not hunt, but we were allowed to beat rabbits out of the bush for the dogs to chase back around to the hunters. With clothes torn in the blackberry thickets and feet frozen in the winter creeks, faces pricked and bleeding, we rustled the brush piles. This would be considered child abuse today, but so would a lot of things we once did. Besides, there are far fewer boys hun�ng nowadays, thanks to computer games and television. Anyway, surviving the brush torture test of manhood earned us the right to sit around with the men-folk when they told hun�ng stories—so long as we kept our mouths shut unless spoken to. It was then we learned the family lore, who did what back when and with which gun. This imbued each gun with a sense of ancestry, made us feel part of a long and unbroken chain of men, a history we would contemplate over decades of seasons during that long pa�ent wai�ng game that makes up most of successful hun�ng—or ge�ng skunked.
8 A�er a couple more years came a day when they let us help clean the guns, running oil-soaked patches down the barrels and polishing the stocks and metalwork self-consciously under the eyes of grand-fathers, fathers, and uncles, our mouths set serious and every move as careful as if each gun were made of dynamite, trying to demonstrate that we respected their destruc�ve capability enough to be trusted with one. Then the mighty �me came when Pap would pull the small 22-caliber “cat rifle” down from the bedroom wall to begin real target prac�ce, along with what would today be called gun-safety training, though it was more ins�nct and common sense for farm boys back then. We had observed gun-carrying prac�ces for years, absorbing such lessons as these: Never crawl through a fence with a loaded gun. Never point a gun at anyone, even accidentally while walking together. Never kill anything you are not going to eat, unless it is a varmint like a groundhog or a pest such as a copperhead snake under the front porch. Never shoot in the known direc�on of a house, no mater how distant. In 251 years of hun�ng these hills, no one in the Bageant clan was ever accidentally shot while hun�ng, which tes�fies to the prac�cal responsibility na�ve to the three-century-old gun culture of the southern uplands.
9 Half a dozen years a�er the Christmas Daddy sold the Ivers and Johnson, I turned thirteen, grown up enough to start hun�ng with an old family 12-gauge, the en�re barrel and forestock of which was held together with black fabric “tar tape,” as electrical tape was then called. And when I looked down at that 12-gauge shotgun cradled in my arm under a bright cold October sky, I knew that my grandfather had walked the same fields with it when it was brand-new from the Sears catalog, and had delivered mountains of meat to the smoky old farmhouse kitchen with it. I knew that my father had contemplated all this too under the same kind of sky, carrying the same gun, and that my younger brother would too. Ritual and clan. My family has hog-butchering knives that have been passed along for genera�ons. I’ve heard that Norwegian carpenters do the same with tools. And perhaps there is the same ritual passing of male family heritage and custom when upper-class sons of, say, the Bush family go off to the alma mater prep school and are handed the keys to the Lincoln. I wouldn’t know. My symbol of passage was an old shotgun with black tape along the barrel.
10 For millions of families in my class, the first ques�on asked a�er the death of a father is “Who gets Daddy’s guns?” That sounds strange only if you did not grow up in a deeply rooted hun�ng culture. My brother Mike uses the same guns our daddy used. If there is a hun�ng gene, he’s got it, so he inherited
the family guns. True to form, Mike is a meat hunter who puts a couple of bucks and a doe in the freezer every year and probably could bring them home given only a bag of rocks with which to hunt.
11 If you were raised up hun�ng, you know that it is a ritual of death and plenitude, an animis�c rite wherein a man blows the living heart out of one of God’s creatures and then, if he deserves to be called a hunter, feels deep, honest gra�tude for the creator’s bounty. The meat on our tables links us to the days of black powder and buckskin. I can see why millions of urban ci�zens whose families came from teeming European ci�es through Ellis Island don’t understand the links between Cel�c and Germanic setler roots, guns, survival, and patrio�sm. Gunpowder is scarcely a part of their lives. Unfortunately, uter lack of knowledge and experience doesn’t keep nonhun�ng urban liberals from believing they know what’s best for everybody else—or simply laughing at what they do not understand.
12 To nonhunters, the image conjured by the �tle of this book [Deer Hun�ng with Jesus] might seem absurd, rather like a nuke the whales bumper s�cker. But the �tle also captures something that moves me about the people I grew up with—the intersec�on between hun�ng and religion in their lives. The link between protestant fundamentalism and deer hun�ng goes back to colonial �mes, when the restless Presbyterian Scots, along with English and German Protestant reformers, pushed across America, developing the unique hun�ng and farming-based fron�er cultures that sustained them over most of America’s history. Two hundred years later, they have setled down, but they have not quit hun�ng and they have not quit praying. Consequently, today we find organiza�ons such as the Chris�an Deer Hunters Associa�on (chris�andeerhunters.org), which offers convenient pocket-size books of medita�ons, such as Devo�ons for Deer Hunters, to help occupy the �me during those long waits for game. Like their ancestors, deer hunters today understand how standing quietly and alone in the natural world leads to contempla�on of God’s gi�s to man. And so, when a book like Medita�ons for the Deer Stand is seen in historical context, it is no joke. For those fortunate enough to spend whole days quietly standing in the November woods just watching the Creator’s world, there is no irony at all in the no�on that his son might be watching too, and maybe even willing to summon a couple of nice fat does within shoo�ng range.
A Look Behind the Veil
1 What objects do we no�ce in socie�es other than our own? Ishi, the last of a “lost” tribe of North American Indians who stumbled into 20th Century California in 1911, is reported to have said that the truly interes�ng objects in the white man’s culture were pockets and matches. Rifa’ah Tahtawi, one of the first young Egyp�ans to be sent to Europe to study in 1826, wrote an account of French society in which he noted that Parisians used many unusual ar�cles of dress, among them something called a belt. Women wore belts, he said, apparently to keep their bosoms erect, and to show off the slimness of their waists and the fullness of their hips. Europeans are s�ll fascinated by the Stetson hats worn by American cowboys; an elderly Dutch lady of our acquaintance recently carried six enormous Stetsons back to The Hague as presents for the male members of her family.
2 Many objects signify values in society and become charged with meaning, a meaning that may be different for members of the society and for observers of that society. The veil is one object used in Middle Eastern socie�es that s�rs strong emo�ons in the West. “The feminine veil has become a symbol: that of the slavery of one por�on of humanity,” wrote French ethnologist Germaine Tillion in 1966. A hundred years earlier, Sir Richard Burton, Bri�sh traveler, explorer, and translator of the Arabian Nights, recorded a
different view. “Europeans inveigh against this ar�cle [the face veil] . . . for its hideousness and jealous concealment of charms made to be admired,” he wrote in 1855. “It is, on the contrary, the most coque�sh ar�cle of woman’s a�re . . . it conceals coarse skins, fleshy noses, wide mouths and vanishing chins, whilst it sets off to best advantage what in these lands is most lustrous and liquid—the eye. Who has not remarked this at a masquerade ball?”
3 In the present genera�on, the veil and purdah, or seclusion, have become a focus of aten�on for Western writers, both popular and academic, who take a measure of Burton’s irony and Tillion’s anger to equate moderniza�on of the Middle East with the discarding of the veil. “Iranian women return to veil in a resurgence of spirituality,” headlines one newspaper; another writes, “Iran’s 16 million women have come a long way since their floor-length coton veil officially was abolished in 1935.” The thousands of words writen about the appearance and disappearance of the veil and of purdah do litle to help us understand the Middle East or the cultures that grew out of the same Judeo-Chris�an roots as our own. The veil and the all-enveloping garments that inevitably accompany it (the milayah in Egypt, the abbayah in Iraq, the chadoor in Iran, the yashmak in Turkey, the burqa in Afghanistan, and the djellabah and the haik in North Africa) are only the outward manifesta�ons of a cultural patern and idea that is rooted deep in Mediterranean society.
4 “Purdah” is a Persian word meaning curtain or barrier. The Arabic word for veiling and secluding comes from the root hajaba. A hijab is an amulet worn to keep away the evil eye; it also means a diaphragm used to prevent concep�on. The gatekeeper or doorkeeper who guards the entrance to a government minister’s office is a hijab, and in casual conversa�on a person might say, “I want to be more informal with my friend so-and-so, but she always puts a hijab (barrier) between us.”
5 In Islam, the Koranic verse that sanc�ons the barrier between men and women is called the Sura of the hijab (curtain): “Prophet, enjoin your wives, your daughters and the wives of true believers to draw their veils close round them. That is more proper, so that they may be recognized and not molested. Allah is forgiving and merciful.”
6 Certainly seclusion and some forms of veiling had been prac�ced before the �me of Muhammad, at least among the upper classes, but it was his followers who apparently felt that his women should be placed in a special category. According to history, the hijab was established a�er a number of occasions on which Muhammad’s wives were insulted by people who were coming to the mosque in search of the prophet. When chided for their behavior, they said they had mistaken Muhammad’s wives for slaves. The hijab was established, and in the words of the historian Nabia Abbot, “Muhammad’s women found themselves, on the one hand, deprived of personal liberty, and on the other hand, raised to a posi�on of honor and dignity.”
7 The veil bears many messages and tells us many things about men and women in Middle East society; but as an object in and of itself it is far less important to members of the society than the values it represents. Nouha al Hejailan, wife of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to London, told Sally Quinn of The Washington Post, “If I wanted to take it all off (her abbayah and veil), I would have long ago. It wouldn’t mean as much to me as it does to you.” Early Middle Eastern feminists felt differently. Huda Sh’arawi, an early Egyp�an ac�vist who formed the first Women’s Union, made a drama�c gesture of removing her veil in public to demonstrate her dislike of society’s a�tudes toward women and her defiance of the system.
But Basima Bezirgan, a contemporary Iraqi feminist, says, “Compared to the real issues that are involved between men and women in the Middle East today, the veil is unimportant.” A Moroccan linguist who buys her clothes in Paris laughs when asked about the veil. “My mother wears a djellabah and a veil. I have never worn them. But so what? I s�ll cannot get divorced as easily as a man, and I am s�ll a member of my family group and responsible to them for everything I do. What is the veil? A piece of cloth.”
8 “The seclusion of women has many purposes,” states Egyp�an anthropologist Nadia Abu Zahra. “It expresses men’s status, power, wealth, and manliness. It also helps preserve men’s image of virility and masculinity, but men do not admit this; on the contrary they claim that one of the purposes of the veil is to guard women’s honor.” The veil and purdah are symbols of restric�on, to men as well as to women. A respectable woman wearing a veil on a public street is signaling, “Hands off. Don’t touch me or you’ll be sorry.” Cowboy Jim Sayre of Deadwood, South Dakota, says, “If you deform a cowboy’s hat, he’ll likely deform you.” In the same way, a man who approaches a veiled woman is asking for trouble; not only the woman but also her family is shamed, and serious problems may result. “It is clear,” says Egyp�an anthropologist Ahmed Abou Zeid, “that honor and shame which are usually atributed to a certain individual or a certain kinship group have in fact a bearing on the total social structure, since most acts involving honor or shame are likely to affect the exis�ng social equilibrium.”
9 Veiling and seclusion almost always can be related to the maintenance of social status. Historically, only the very rich could afford to seclude their women, and the extreme example of this prac�ce was found among the sultans of prerevolu�onary Turkey. Stories of these secluded women, kept in harems and guarded by eunuchs, formed the basis for much of the Western folklore concerning the nature of male- female rela�onships in Middle East society. The stereotype is of course contradictory; Western writers have never found it necessary to reconcile the ero�c fantasies of the seraglio with the sexual puritanism atributed to the same society.
10 Poor men could not always afford to seclude or veil their women, because the women were needed as produc�ve members of the family economic unit, to work in the fields and in cotage industries. Delta village women in Egypt have never been veiled, nor have the Berber women of North Africa. But this lack of veiling placed poor women in ambiguous situa�ons in rela�on to strange men.
11 “In the village, no one veils, because everyone is considered a member of the same large family,” explained Aisha bint Mohammed, a working-class wife of Marrakech. “But in the city, veiling is sunnah, required by our religion.” Veiling is generally found in towns and ci�es, among all classes, where families feel that it is necessary to dis�nguish themselves from other strangers in the city.
12 Veiling and purdah not only indicate status and wealth, they also have some religious sanc�on and protect women from the world outside the home. Purdah delineates private space, dis�nguishes between the public and private sectors of society, as does the tradi�onal architecture of the area. Older Middle Eastern houses do not have picture windows facing the street, nor walks leading invi�ngly to front doors. Family life is hidden from strangers; behind blank walls may lie courtyards and gardens, refuges from the heat, the cold, the bustle of the outside world, the world of non-kin that is not to be trusted. Outsiders are pointedly excluded.
13 Even within the household, among her close rela�ves, a tradi�onal Muslim woman veils before those kinsmen whom she could legally marry. If her maternal or paternal male cousins, her brothers-in-law, or sons-in-law come to call, she covers her head, or perhaps her whole face. To do otherwise would be shameless.
14 The veil does more than protect its wearers from known and unknown intruders; it can also be used to conceal iden�ty. Behind the anonymity of the veil, women can go about a city unrecognized and uncri�cized. Nadia Abu Zahra reports anecdotes of men donning women’s veils in order to visit their lovers undetected; women may do the same. The veil is such an effec�ve disguise that Nouri Al-Said, the late prime minister of Iraq, atempted to escape death by wearing the abbayah and veil of a woman; only his shoes gave him away.
15 Poli�cal dissidents in many countries have used the veil for their own ends. The women who marched, veiled, through Cairo during the Na�onalist demonstra�ons against the Bri�sh a�er World War I were coun�ng on the strength of Western respect for the veil to protect them against Bri�sh gunfire. At first they were right. Algerian women also used the protec�on of the veil to carry bombs through French army checkpoints during the Algerian revolu�on. But when the French discovered the ruse, Algerian women discarded the veil and dressed like Europeans to move about freely.
16 The mul�ple meanings and uses of purdah and the veil do not explain how the patern came to be so deeply embedded in Mediterranean society. Its origins lie somewhere in the basic Muslim a�tudes about men’s roles and women’s roles. Women, according to Fa�ma Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, are seen by men in Islamic socie�es as in need of protec�on because they are unable to control their sexuality, are temp�ng to men, and hence are a danger to the social order. In other words, they need to be restrained and controlled so that society may func�on in an orderly way.
17 The no�on that women present a danger to the social order is scarcely limited to Muslim society. Anthropologist Julian Pit-Rivers has pointed out that the supervision and seclusion of women is also to be found in Chris�an Europe, even though veiling was not usually prac�ced there. “The idea that women not subjected to male authority are a danger is a fundamental one in the wri�ngs of the moralists from the Archpriest of Talavera to Padre Haro, and it is echoed in the modern Andalusian pueblo. It is bound up with the fear of ungoverned female sexuality which had been an integral element of European folklore ever since prudent Odysseus lashed himself to the mast to escape the sirens.”
18 Pit-Rivers is wri�ng about Mediterranean society, which, like all Middle Eastern socie�es, is greatly concerned with honor and shame rather than with individual guilt. The honor of the Middle Eastern extended family, its ancestors and its descendants, is the highest social value. The misdeeds of the grandparents are indeed visited on the children. Men and women always remain members of their natal families. Marriage is a legal contract but a fragile one that is o�en broken; the �es between brother and sister, mother and child, father and child are lifelong and enduring. The larger family is the group to which the individual belongs and to which the individual owes responsibility in exchange for the social and economic security that the family group provides. It is the group, not the individual, that is socially shamed or socially honored.
19 Male honor and female honor are both involved in the honor of the family, but each is expressed differently. The honor of a man, sharaf, is a public mater, involving bravery, hospitality, piety. It may be lost, but it may also be regained. The honor of a woman, ‘ard, is a private mater involving only one thing, her sexual chas�ty. Once lost, it cannot be regained. If the loss of female honor remains only privately known, a rebuke—and perhaps a reveiling—may be all that takes place. But if the loss of female honor becomes public knowledge, the other members of the family may feel bound to cleanse the family name. In extreme cases, the cleansing may require the death of the offending female member. Although such killings are now criminal offenses in the Middle East, suspended sentences are o�en given, and the newspapers in Cairo and Baghdad frequently carry sad stories of runaway sisters “gone bad” in the city and revenge taken upon them in the name of family honor by their brothers or cousins.
20 This emphasis on female chas�ty, many say, originated in the patrilineal society’s concern with the paternity of the child and the inheritance that follows the male line. How does a man know that the child in his wife’s womb is his own, and not that of another man? Obviously he cannot know unless his wife is a virgin at marriage. From this considera�on may have developed the protec�ve ins�tu�ons called variously purdah, seclusion, or veiling.
21 Middle Eastern women also look upon seclusion as prac�cal protec�on. In the Iraqi village where we lived from 1956 to 1958, one of us (Elizabeth) wore the abbayah and found that it provided a great sense of protec�on from prying eyes, dust, heat, flies. Parisian ladies visi�ng Istanbul in the 16th Century were so impressed by the ability of the all-enveloping garment to keep dresses clean of mud and manure and to keep women from being atacked by importuning men that they tried to introduce it into French fashion.
22 Perhaps of greater importance for many women reared in tradi�onal cultures is the degree to which their sense of personal iden�ty is �ed to the use of the veil. Many women have told us that they felt self- conscious, vulnerable, and even naked when they first walked on a public street without the veil and abbayah—as if they were making a display of themselves.
23 The resurgence of the veil in countries like Morocco, Libya, and Algeria, which have recently established their independence from colonial dominance, is seen by some Middle Eastern and Western scholars as an atempt by men to reassert their Muslim iden�ty and to reestablish their roles as heads of families. The presence of the veil is a sign that the males of the household are once more able to assume the responsibili�es that were disturbed or usurped by foreign colonial powers.
24 But a veiled woman is seldom seen in Egypt or in many parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Tunisia, Turkey, or the Sudan. And as respectable housewives have abandoned the veil, in some of these Middle Eastern countries pros�tutes have put it on. They indicate their availability by manipula�ng the veil in flirta�ous ways, but as Burton pointed out more than a century ago, pros�tutes are not the first to discover the veil’s seduc�veness. Like women’s garments in the West, the veil can be sturdy, u�litarian, and forbidding—or it can be filmy and decora�ve, hin�ng at the charms beneath it.
25 The veil is the outward sign of a complex reality. Observers are o�en deceived by the absence of that sign, and fail to see that in most Middle Eastern socie�es (and in many parts of Europe) basic a�tudes are unchanged. Women who have taken off the veil con�nue to play the old roles within the family, and their chas�ty remains crucial. A woman’s behavior is s�ll the key to the honor and the reputa�on of her family.
26 In Middle Eastern socie�es, feminine and masculine con�nue to be strong polari�es of iden�fica�on. This is in marked contrast to Western society, where for more than a genera�on social cri�cs have been striving to blur dis�nc�ons in dress, in status, and in type of labor. Almost all Middle Eastern reformers (most of whom are middle and upper class) are s�ll arguing from the assump�on of a fundamental difference between men and women. They do not demand an end to the veil (which is passing out of use anyway) but an end to the old principles, which the veil symbolizes, that govern patrilineal society. Middle Eastern reformers are calling for equal access to divorce, child custody, and inheritance; equal opportuni�es for educa�on and employment; aboli�on of female circumcision and “crimes of honor”; and a law regula�ng the age of marriage.
27 An English woman film director, a�er several months in Morocco, said in an interview, “This business about the veil is nonsense. We all have our veils, between ourselves and other people. That’s not what the Middle East is about. The ques�on is what veils are used for, and by whom.” The veil triggers Western reac�ons simply because it is the drama�c, visible sign of vexing ques�ons, ques�ons that are s�ll being debated, problems that have s�ll not been solved, in the Middle East or in Western socie�es.
28 Given the biological differences between men and women, how are the sexes to be treated equitably? Men and women are supposed to share the labor of society and yet provide for the reproduc�on and nurture of the next genera�on. If male fear and awe of women’s sexuality provokes them to control and seclude women, can they be assuaged? Rebecca West said long ago that “the difference between men and women is the rock on which civiliza�on will split before it can reach any goal that could jus�fy its expenditure of effort.” Un�l human beings come to terms with this basic issue, purdah and the veil, in some form, will con�nue to exist in both the East and the West.
An Island Passover
1 The countdown began exactly two months before Passover. Ma checked the dates on the Jewish Echo calendar, which hung on a rusty nail under the mantelpiece, where matchboxes, leters, and china ornaments were crammed together in no par�cular order.
2 The Jewish Echo, now defunct, was the weekly Jewish newspaper, published in Glasgow. The calendar was Ma’s guide for Holiday dates as well as Sabbath candle-ligh�ng �mes. By the �me of the High Holidays in September, the pages were well thumbed and grease-stained. Since dusk in the north comes later in summer and earlier in winter, Ma adjusted candle-ligh�ng �mes accordingly, ra�onalizing thus: “As long as I light candles, God doesn’t mind what �me it is.”
3 The Echo was her only connec�on to the Glasgow Jewish community. As she scru�nized the births, marriages, and deaths published each week, she could be heard to exclaim, “Oh my, Annie Smith has passed away. We used to go together to the Locarno dances every Saturday night.” Or, “E�e Goldstone has had a baby. . . . That must be Ronnie Goldstone’s daughter-in-law.”
4 Planning ahead was essen�al. Deliveries were unreliable. The steamship St. Magnus, carrying supplies from the Sco�sh mainland, arrived in Shetland only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. And if the weather was stormy, deliveries could be delayed. Shetland sea captains were highly skilled, but none would risk the North Sea crossing from Aberdeen while figh�ng one-hundred-mile-an-hour gales. “That would be madness,” to quote a feisty captain of the 1930s. Besides dealing with this uncertainty over ge�ng food on �me, Ma divided her days between working in the shop and cooking for the family.
5 Two days before the Holidays, Ma had extra help. There were no freezers, so cooking could not be done very far ahead. Thankfully, in early spring, Shetland weather is cold, so food was stored outside in a meat safe, a wire-mesh box hung high off the ground, or in our unheated, enclosed back porch.
6 Pu�ng together the Passover order was a family affair and the beginning of weeks of joyful an�cipa�on. “Go fetch a wri�ng pad and pencil,” Ma instructed me. Jostling each other to be next to her, we dragged kitchen chairs across the linoleum floor. “I want to sit here.”
7 “No, I was here first”—this from Roy as he was pushed off the chair.
8 This went on un�l Ma intervened. “Ethel, you sit on one side and Roy you can sit on the other side.”
9 Pencil in hand, she began to compile the list. At first, it was not very detailed. In the 1940s the only Passover items available for the eight-day holiday were matzo meal, matzos, and wine. And from 1940 to 1945, food was ra�oned so that coupons in the ra�on books were saved for special occasions. Lerwick shops stocked sugar, buter, flour, jams, and other basic necessi�es. But Michael Morrison’s delicatessen in Glasgow, s�ll in existence, carried foods we tasted only on holidays: sharp and tangy, sweet and sour, exo�c and exci�ng.
10 Ian Morrison remembers, as a teenager, packing the jars to go to Shetland. “Everything had to be wrapped in two or three sheets of newspaper; then each jar was placed in the box, separated by cardboard. That way, if one jar broke, the contents wouldn’t mess up the remaining jars.”
11 The list became longer as each of us added our favorite “Jewish foods.” Ma yearned for pickles and sauerkraut, which she used to buy in Glasgow whenever she needed to, so half a dozen cans of each was the standard order. Dad insisted on two five-pound wursts (salami). As soon as they were unpacked, the long, fat, garlicky sausages were atached with wooden clothespins to a line strung across the back porch, which served as a natural refrigerator, the temperature in April rarely exceeding fi�y degrees. For a Passover snack, Dad sprinted up the steep wooden stairs leading from the back shop, through the kitchen, to the porch. Pulling a silver penknife from his trouser pocket, he cut off a hunk of wurst and ran back to the shop again, savoring small bites on the way. Customers never complained if, at �mes, he reeked of garlic. And if our supply of olive oil was low, six one-gallon cans were also ordered, Ma never �ring of informing us once more, “I was cooking with olive oil long before it became fashionable.”
12 Finally, there was the matzo order—fi�een boxes. “How much can one family eat?” came a call from Michael Morrison before mailing the first of many packages to “the Greenwalds in Shetland.” Ma began to explain, “I need a box for Granny Hunter, one for the Laurenson family in Hamnavoe, one for the Mullays who live at the top of the lane . . . ,” before the exasperated deli owner finally hung up on Lerwick 269, one of his best customers. Most of the matzos were delivered to our Chris�an neighbors, who anxiously waited for the unleavened bread, symbolic of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt—and, in their eyes, we were indeed the Chosen People.
13 When I was eight years old, my birthday fell during Passover. Determined that I should not feel deprived, Ma placed a surprise order. Along with the enormous brown-paper-wrapped boxes containing the Passover order, there was a small package. “Open it,” said my mother. I tore off the paper, Ma helping with scissors, and I gasped. Inside, framed in a froth of white �ssue-paper, nestled a magnificent, layered,
chocolate nut cake. It had been packed so carefully that the swirly rosetes of chocolate fros�ng, each crowned with a toasted hazelnut, had retained their shapes perfectly—miraculously surviving the fourteen-hour ocean journey in the ship’s hold. Memory being enhanced by nostalgia, this remains the most glorious birthday cake I have ever had.
14 We ate fish every day, but meat only occasionally. Like every island household, we stored a barrel of salt herring to carry us over the winter, when the weather was too rough for the fishing boats to go out. We stored our herring in the garage, covering the barrel with a slated, easily removable wooden lid. It was my job to brave the wind and rain, sprin�ng from the back door of our house to push open the rickety garage door to “get a fry.” Of course, that didn’t mean the herring would be fried. It is the Shetland expression meaning “enough to feed the family,” in our case, a family of five. Ma rinsed and soaked a few herring, as needed, to make pickled herring, chopped herring, and, occasionally, when fresh herring was out of season, to make poted herring (rolled and baked in a vinegar–bay leaf mixture).
15 One month before Passover, she put up a ten-pound jar of pickled herring. First, the fish was soaked in cold water to leach out the salt. Then, in a single slash with a razor-edged knife, the head and backbone, with all the �ny bones atached, were removed, later to be tossed outside to delighted seagulls. The fillets were cut into bite-sized pieces, then packed into an empty ten-pound glass swee�e jar, layered with thick onion slices (a�er the swee�es were sold, there was no further use for the jars, except in our house). Finally, vinegary brine was poured over the fish to cover it completely. Bay leaves, peppercorns, and fronds of dill floa�ng throughout helped give a piquant flavor, which mellowed over the weeks. The lid was �ghtly screwed on, and the jar set on a shelf high above the jams and jellies in the back porch. The pickled herring was perfectly marinated by Passover. To make chopped herring, Ma drained a couple of handfuls of pickled herring and hacked it on a big wooden board with a broad-bladed messer. She mixed in chopped onion and hard cooked eggs before spooning the sharp, savory mixture into a bowl. Good plain food—no apples, sugar, mayonnaise, or preserva�ves added to mask the taste of homespun ingredients.
16 Two days before Passover, our kitchen was the scene of frenzied ac�vity: Ma, Granny Hunter, and “the girl,” dar�ng around like hens vying for their daily grain feed. Ma directed culinary opera�ons while she mixed and whisked—never measuring. “Keep that stove stoked . . . bring in more buckets of peat . . . top up the ketle; we need more boiling water.” Her cohort cooks followed direc�ons explicitly. The Rae-burn stove devoured huge quan��es of coal and peat to keep up the oven heat. To boil water, needed to scrub all the pots and cooking utensils, they carried water from the cold-water sink to a stout aluminum ketle on the hob.
17 Before the chicken soup could be started, chickens were plucked of feathers, then singed over a gas flame, to be sure not a scrap of feathers remained. Nothing was wasted, Ma insis�ng, “Chicken feet have all the flavor.” Accordingly, the scaly feet were thoroughly scraped and scalded in boiling water before they were added to the pot, along with an assortment of root vegetables.
18 Fresh beets—boiled, cooled, and peeled—were grated on the coarse side of a grater to make sweet and sour borscht. Ladled over a chunky potato from a Dunrossness cro� (where the soil was said to help produce the mealy texture) the ruby-red soup, flecked with soured heavy cream, was my father’s favorite meal. He would sit back in his chair, licking his lips, pronouncing it the best—a meichle.
19 Ma’s favorite combina�on for gefilte fish was halibut and hake, delivered to the door by a neighbor fisherman. He had usually guted them, but Ma had to skin and bone them. “Pull away the oilcloth,” she ordered whoever was around, usually me. “Now hold the grinder steady while I clamp it onto the kitchen table.” The grinder was ancient, made of heavy cast iron, but Ma handled it with enviable ease as she pressed the fish through the funnel and into the blade.
20 We always served two varie�es of gefilte fish. One big pot contained oval-shaped balls of the chopped- fish mixture, simmered with onion skins; the rest of the mixture was formed into pa�es and fried in hot olive oil in an enormous black iron skillet. Not just for Passover, fried gefilte fish topped with a dollop of salad cream (Sco�sh mayonnaise) and eaten at room temperature was a weekly Sabbath dinner.
21 Instead of the rich butery cakes usually baked each Friday morning, Passover cakes were feathery sponge cakes, each made with a dozen new-laid eggs, beaten to a foam with a hand whisk. Baked and cooled, the cakes were sprinkled with sugar, then snugly wrapped in greaseproof wax paper; wine biscuits, coconut pyramids, and cinnamon balls were stored in �ght-lidded, round, five-pound �ns, recycled from Quality Sweet chocolates, another item making up the conglomera�on of goods sold in Greenwald’s shop. The last of the botled plums and gooseberries were transformed into sweet compotes and matzo fruit puddings.
22 Everything was stored on shelves in the back porch. Food poisoning was unheard of. In April, the temperature in the unheated porch was rarely more than fi�y degrees. The “girl from the country,” the maid, did the menial jobs like scrubbing the floor, then laying down newspapers, “to prevent the floor from ge�ng dirty,” as Ma ordered. As for eight days of matzos, it was no hardship. We slathered each sheet with fresh, salty Shetland buter, then covered it with a thick layer of Ma’s homemade, heather- scented, blackcurrant jam.
23 Although we usually ate all our meals in the kitchen in front of the peat fire, at Passover we dined in the “front room,” the parlor, where lace-curtained bay windows overlooked the fields across the one-lane road. The room was large enough to seat family and guests comfortably. The drop-leaf oak table was set with a white lace tablecloth and the best china and glassware (we didn’t possess crystal). Our close friends dressed up in their Sunday-best church clothes. Rebe, a few years older than I, arrived in a new black and yellow tartan kilt, her white sa�n blouse with a frilly collar peeping out under a black velvet jacket. I was insanely jealous and pestered my parents un�l, the following year, I was given a similar ou�it—not quite the same, but I was happy. Children and adults were silent as my father, in his heavy Russian-accented Shetland dialect, recited parts of the Haggadah, first in Hebrew, then in English. I repeated the four ques�ons, and my mother explained the symbolism of the foods on the Seder plate. Each year, discussions became more animated, as our devout Chris�an guests added their comments and views, always in a respec�ul manner.
24 Our Passover Seders con�nued, even though the peaceful existence of the Shetland community was shatered by the onset of World War II. My parents had an added fear. Norway, only two hundred miles east of the Shetland Islands, was under German occupa�on. It was obvious from the bold signage above the shop, announcing the name Greenwald, that Jews owned the store. A German invasion would have meant certain death for our family. Fortunately, the islands being well protected, that never happened. With Lerwick’s natural harbor a strategic base for naval opera�ons from 1939 un�l 1945, thousands of troops, including more than three hundred Jewish men and women, were based throughout the islands. They far outnumbered the local community.
Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers
Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.
Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS
Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?
Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.
We write plagiarism Free Content
Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.
Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.
