My mum made cheesecake, and it was wonderful - well, what amalgam of sugar and fat, with just a faint matrix of starch to hold it all together - isn’t wonderful? Once I asked her for the recipe, but she wasn’t a recipe kind of cook. She’d learned it from her mother, and all the quantities were by look and feel. I don’t think she even had timings that made any sense because they were all linked to her oven and its peculiarities. When she changed cookers some time in the 1970s it all changed and there were some ruined cakes for a while.
My mum’s cheesecake was wonderful, but it wasn’t a matter for reflection or interpretation. It was a thing in itself, as Kant would say. I didn’t think of it as a Jewish cheesecake, it was just a thing we had in our family, the way we did most Jewish stuff. We were members of a synagogue, but we didn’t really participate in anything communal, family life and celebrations and food were at the core of our Jewish identity. That, and an ongoing anthropological process of classification of things and activities into Jewish and Non-Jewish, in a way that would have been familiar to Lenny Bruce, or - weirdly - to Nancy Mitford.
But I didn’t really know that the cheesecake was Jewish until I found out that it wasn’t. This happened in the late 1990s, when I was working in a tech company based in Hammersmith. Things had started to go not so well with the company, and my workmates and I responded to the failings of strategy and senior management by taking longer and longer lunch breaks. We went further afield in our quest for more interesting lunches, and eventually discovered the cafe in the Polish Cultural Centre that had been in West London since shortly after the Second World War. It was like some inter-war canteen, with the menu mainly in Polish, and the clientele a mixture of really old Polish men who looked like they’d been there since 1946, and recent-wave Polish immigrants - young building workers and tradesmen, and tired looking young women.
I can’t remember what I ate - something that had a lot of cabbage but no pork, I think - but I finished off with the cheesecake. And it was my mum’s cheesecake - not similar, but exactly the same - a Proustian moment, defined by the texture, the taste, the shape and dimensions of the portion. Of course this was a surprise, but it was one of those special surprises when you realise something that you acknowledge ought to have been obvious all along. Our Jewish cheesecake was a Polish cheesecake.
Well, why not? My ancestors had lived in Poland - a rather vague geographical expression that had shifted this way and that over the centuries - for perhaps a thousand years. What ought to have been surprising was not that they’d picked something up over that period, but how small that something was, and how unacknowledged. Except occasionally to distinguish ourselves from Jews of other kinds of extraction - Litvaks, or German Jews who were ‘Yekkes’, or Dutch Jews who were ‘choots’, we never described ourselves as Polish. If they were quoting their own parents, they’d refer to the place they’d come from as ‘The Heim’, or sometimes as Russia. I knew not one Polish word, and had no idea where in Poland my ancestors had lived. My parents’ memories were of their parents and grandparents speaking Yiddish, not Polish. My Dad did have a memory of his own grandfather, speaking Polish to a lost and bewildered soldier from the Free Polish Army in London - and the point of the story was how surprised he had been that his grandfather could speak Polish.
But there it was, in a cafe in West London - my mother’s cheesecake, a Polish cheesecake. And there I was, brought face to face with the fact that my heritage - however I’d understood it - was part Polish. And this despite the fact that our self definition had not only been not Polish, but self-affirmedly not-Polish. My dad remembered his grandfather - the same one as in the other story - being pleased by the newsreel footage of the Nazi bombing of Warsaw, despite the fact that the Poles were our allies and the Germans our deadliest enemies. “Worse than the Germans,” I’d heard said of Poles often enough as a child. The Jewish Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer writes of Polish peasants with not just loathing, but contempt and disgust. Of course, we knew that none of this counted as racism, because we’d been the victims and the Poles the perpetrators.
A few years later, on a work trip - by then a different tech company - to Warsaw with a Polish colleague, to visit Polish clients, I’d been struck by this all over again. Lots of the food was alien, pork-based stuff, but lots more was recognisable as the food of my childhood...beigels, borscht, latkes, pickled herrings and cucumbers, stuffed cabbage and smetana - exactly like the stuff I’d grown up with.
Walking up and down the streets I was struck by how similar everyone’s faces were. There was definitely a Polish face, and I knew how much the faces of my ancestors must have stood out, because it wasn’t their face. Though every so often there would be a person who didn’t have that look, whose head was a different shape and whose complexion and hair colour were completely different; and I’d wonder if their ancestors and mine had been related or connected.
The names of those streets were familiar too, from books that I’d read about Jewish Warsaw - including the works of Bashevis Singer. Jewish Warsaw; one third of the population of Warsaw had been Jewish before the War. What was it like for Warsaw, afterwards, for the Jews who had made up so big a part of its urban life to not be there? What would it be like for say London to wake up one day and find all its Black people - and everything that they contributed to the city - gone?
I made the mistake of trying to talk about this to my Polish colleague. An expression of fierce distaste descended on her face. “It’s better that we don’t talk about this,” she said. So I wasn’t the only one in denial.
My mum’s cheesecake was wonderful, but it wasn’t a matter for reflection or interpretation. It was a thing in itself, as Kant would say. I didn’t think of it as a Jewish cheesecake, it was just a thing we had in our family, the way we did most Jewish stuff. We were members of a synagogue, but we didn’t really participate in anything communal, family life and celebrations and food were at the core of our Jewish identity. That, and an ongoing anthropological process of classification of things and activities into Jewish and Non-Jewish, in a way that would have been familiar to Lenny Bruce, or - weirdly - to Nancy Mitford.
But I didn’t really know that the cheesecake was Jewish until I found out that it wasn’t. This happened in the late 1990s, when I was working in a tech company based in Hammersmith. Things had started to go not so well with the company, and my workmates and I responded to the failings of strategy and senior management by taking longer and longer lunch breaks. We went further afield in our quest for more interesting lunches, and eventually discovered the cafe in the Polish Cultural Centre that had been in West London since shortly after the Second World War. It was like some inter-war canteen, with the menu mainly in Polish, and the clientele a mixture of really old Polish men who looked like they’d been there since 1946, and recent-wave Polish immigrants - young building workers and tradesmen, and tired looking young women.
I can’t remember what I ate - something that had a lot of cabbage but no pork, I think - but I finished off with the cheesecake. And it was my mum’s cheesecake - not similar, but exactly the same - a Proustian moment, defined by the texture, the taste, the shape and dimensions of the portion. Of course this was a surprise, but it was one of those special surprises when you realise something that you acknowledge ought to have been obvious all along. Our Jewish cheesecake was a Polish cheesecake.
Well, why not? My ancestors had lived in Poland - a rather vague geographical expression that had shifted this way and that over the centuries - for perhaps a thousand years. What ought to have been surprising was not that they’d picked something up over that period, but how small that something was, and how unacknowledged. Except occasionally to distinguish ourselves from Jews of other kinds of extraction - Litvaks, or German Jews who were ‘Yekkes’, or Dutch Jews who were ‘choots’, we never described ourselves as Polish. If they were quoting their own parents, they’d refer to the place they’d come from as ‘The Heim’, or sometimes as Russia. I knew not one Polish word, and had no idea where in Poland my ancestors had lived. My parents’ memories were of their parents and grandparents speaking Yiddish, not Polish. My Dad did have a memory of his own grandfather, speaking Polish to a lost and bewildered soldier from the Free Polish Army in London - and the point of the story was how surprised he had been that his grandfather could speak Polish.
But there it was, in a cafe in West London - my mother’s cheesecake, a Polish cheesecake. And there I was, brought face to face with the fact that my heritage - however I’d understood it - was part Polish. And this despite the fact that our self definition had not only been not Polish, but self-affirmedly not-Polish. My dad remembered his grandfather - the same one as in the other story - being pleased by the newsreel footage of the Nazi bombing of Warsaw, despite the fact that the Poles were our allies and the Germans our deadliest enemies. “Worse than the Germans,” I’d heard said of Poles often enough as a child. The Jewish Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer writes of Polish peasants with not just loathing, but contempt and disgust. Of course, we knew that none of this counted as racism, because we’d been the victims and the Poles the perpetrators.
A few years later, on a work trip - by then a different tech company - to Warsaw with a Polish colleague, to visit Polish clients, I’d been struck by this all over again. Lots of the food was alien, pork-based stuff, but lots more was recognisable as the food of my childhood...beigels, borscht, latkes, pickled herrings and cucumbers, stuffed cabbage and smetana - exactly like the stuff I’d grown up with.
Walking up and down the streets I was struck by how similar everyone’s faces were. There was definitely a Polish face, and I knew how much the faces of my ancestors must have stood out, because it wasn’t their face. Though every so often there would be a person who didn’t have that look, whose head was a different shape and whose complexion and hair colour were completely different; and I’d wonder if their ancestors and mine had been related or connected.
The names of those streets were familiar too, from books that I’d read about Jewish Warsaw - including the works of Bashevis Singer. Jewish Warsaw; one third of the population of Warsaw had been Jewish before the War. What was it like for Warsaw, afterwards, for the Jews who had made up so big a part of its urban life to not be there? What would it be like for say London to wake up one day and find all its Black people - and everything that they contributed to the city - gone?
I made the mistake of trying to talk about this to my Polish colleague. An expression of fierce distaste descended on her face. “It’s better that we don’t talk about this,” she said. So I wasn’t the only one in denial.
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