Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Lily America (+ a recipe)

A few years ago, Margaret Randall solicited family stories about food with accompanying recipes for a book as a gift to an editor about to retire. As far as I know, the book never materialized, but this story did, so I offer it up here.
 

“Lefi Paretsky, 14,” reads the manifest of the Campania that sailed into New York harbor on July 9, 1904. “Last place of residence: Slonim.” “Ethnicity: Hebrew.” “Occupation: Servant.”

Long before I knew her as my grandmother, Lefi became Lily and no servant she. Ever. Also no longer Paretsky, nor Ratzkin, nor Rosenthal, not any of the names she adopted as she moved through her new life. But Lillian LaVine, wife of Samuel LaVine, a name also changed en route from Vilna to Golders Green to Ellis Island.

Not Ellis Island for Lily, though. For her, it was Boston harbor, and the ship she was supposed to be on was somewhere on the bottom of the sea. The rest of the family was busy mourning in New York when the telegram arrived, announcing, We’re here! Tanya, the oldest son, a businessman in Brooklyn, was dispatched to fetch them: Lefi; her younger sister Rochel (soon to be Rose); and their parents, Pesche and Jankel.

Jankel was 56 years old, too old, the authorities said, a burden on the state.

"He’s my father. "l’ll take care of him! " " replied Tanya, pulling himself up to his full five feet and change.

"You?" scoffed Mr. Authority, "You’re a cripple. What can you do? "

It was true. Tanya’s arm had been maimed in an accident at his window sash factory, but he wasn’t a greenhorn and he wasn’t intimidated. With his withered arm, he took the table where Mr. Authority sat and hoisted it above his head. "My father," he insisted. "I Will Take Care of Him."

Or so the story goes.

I’ve never found a boat that sank between Liverpool and New York in 1904, and the one record I did find shows the Paretsky 4 arriving at Ellis Island, not Boston. But my family has never been one to let facts interfere with a good story and so I imagine them steaming into the harbor at a top speed of 21 knots on the first boat ever to publish a shipboard newspaper. They travel second class, not steerage, please note, and the $40 in their possession on arrival is among the largest amounts claimed on the manifest. Rochel and Jankel have taken to the sea immediately, clamoring over the decks and indulging in an occasional lager. Lefi and their mother stay below, wretchedly seasick from port to port.

America! What do they think as they arrive into the chaos and clamor and stink of the harbor? And then gathering up all they own and filing down the gangplank into a huge shed, the Campania’s 1,000 passengers added to how many others for processing and recording and renaming in a veritable Babel of languages and needs. The Paretskys all know how to read and write (Pesche sometimes gave up her dinner to a passing yeshiva student in exchange for lessons for her children, the girls educated along with boys), but not in English. They have only an address and the expectation of Tanya to translate the strangeness for them. How many hours between arriving and sending off that crucial telegram? How many more while Tanya’s train chuffs north from Brooklyn? How small can they make themselves so nobody notices and sends them back to the old country, already milky and slipping from memory’s grasp? No one tells that story.

But it seems accurate that Tanya eventually arrived and translated and fetched, and Lefi swooped into America, where she lived for another seventy years, quite happily for a woman who assumed responsibility for whole neighborhoods and lost as much sleep over a new slipcover as pending surgery. She didn’t tell many stories about the place she left. Lily’s America was more possibility than loss. And she loved New York, its jangle and thrum and things to do every evening when she was finally old enough to work and not be stuck at home doing the dishes.

Then she was an orphan, left to the care of relatives, though not necessarily their kindness. When she married Sam, she was living in Syracuse with her brother David and his wife, Etta, who was noted for two things: her immaculate house and her meanness. It was the Sabbath and Etta refused to light a fire to heat water so that Lily could bathe on her wedding day. Taking pity, other relatives invited her to their house, lit the damn fire and brought her bath salts and fresh towels. (I imagine maidens trilling hosannas and strewing rose petals on the waters, while a lusty matron instructs in the damp pleasures of the marriage bed.)

So a laundered and fragrant Lily married Sam in a dress of navy blue georgette covered with the tiny beads she had sewn on by hand. Sam was twenty-five years her senior, handsome and dapper with patrician yearnings. Other families have Marxists in the closet; mine has a Republican.

Story? Apocrypha? A swatch of cloth? Not enough. I want to get Lily right.

Lily was clever: a deft seamstress and a quick study, she examined the designs at expensive stores, then recreated them for her daughter Phyllis, the one child she was allotted. Lily was tough: when Sam got sick, she supported the family with her sewing. Lily loved to sing: her voice was high and clear. As a girl, she hid behind churches to learn the Christian hymns. As a young woman, she performed at musicales, the get-togethers at friends’ houses where she and Sam, a violinist, were sought-after guests. As a grandmother, she taught us the popular songs of her day, “I"ll be loving you always" and "How much is that doggie in the window?" and after she and my mother had a disagreement, a chorus of "They wouldn’t believe me." Lily was fun. She danced the kazatsky, squatting low and kicking her legs high, as we clapped and egged her on.
They were good legs, shapely and surprisingly long for such a small woman. She showed them off, wearing high-heeled, Minnie Mouse shoes. She wanted red ones, arguing to the end of her life with her daughter who thought otherwise.

So, yes, Lily was vain -- a little. She was proud of her hair that reached to her waist, sleek and black, even in her old age. Each morning she coiled it into a bun at the nape of her neck, crimping waves like the edge of pie crusts -- her "dips" she called them -- to frame her face. And flirty. Scoliosis had twisted her spine and stopped her growth, which meant that she had to look up at nearly everyone. A tilt of her head, hint of a smile, eyes lit with amusement -- at what? That this is what it had come to?

"Your family’s stories!" teases my husband. "Everybody couldn’t have adored Lily." But I just smile. She would have played him like the Roxy.

Lily was in her sixties before I had much memory of her. She called me Mominke, little mother, and I called her Gramalee because she was a very little grandmother. Sam had died, leaving her to live among women for another twenty-three years. I think she missed men. I wonder what else she missed. What else I missed. How nearly impossible to imagine our parents or grandparents in love or doubt or regret for a different life that wouldn’t have included -- have made -- us.

What Lily made were sponge cakes. For celebration and consolation, it was her signature. She spent years perfecting the recipe -- a dozen eggs! she’d brag in the days before we discovered cholesterol -- and then more years training her daughter, a violinist, not a baker, to do it right. She beat the batter by hand, her arm a cyclone of purpose -- the only way to do it, she insisted, suspicious of electric mixers. Eventually she gave in to labor-saving appliances, fewer eggs and quantifiable measurements (a cup as 8 ounces, not just whatever she was drinking from at the time) to settle on this recipe. I’d like to report that she brought it with her across the ocean -- it would make a good story -- but no one knows where it came from. I guess I’ll just have to make it up.


LILY’S 9 or 10 EGG SPONGE CAKE
Ingredients
have ready 10-inch tube pan with removable bottom
2/3 cup of potato starch, available at many large supermarkets
1/3 cup of matzo cake meal (not matzo meal), available at many large supermarkets
10 large or 9 extra large eggs
juice and grated zest of medium-size lemon
1# " "50 cups of sugar

Instructions
* Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix the potato starch and matzo cake meal together by hand and sift 3 times. Put aside.
* Separate the egg whites and yolks. Use an electric beater at medium speed to beat the yolks until thick and custardy. Add the lemon juice and zest and mix well.
* In a large bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Add the sugar by spoonfuls as you continue beating at the lowest speed until well mixed. The peaks will become a little stiffer.
* Add the egg-yolk mix and fold in by hand. Sift in the dry ingredients a little at a time, folding them in gently and thoroughly after each addition. Be careful not to overbeat..
* Pour the batter into the ungreased tube pan and bake for about 1 hour or until cake has risen almost to the top of the pan, the top is light brown, and a tester comes out clean.
* Invert the pan onto a plate or rack, making sure air can circulate all around the pan. (You may need to stick a bottle in the center to raise it above the plate.) Cool completely, then run a knife around the edges carefully to loosen the cake and remove it. Best if eaten within a day.

Icing and Variations
* Slice cake in half and put fresh strawberries or raspberries, macerated with sugar, between the layers, then cover it with whipped cream and decorate the top with whole berries.
* Frost with lots of apricot jam mixed into whipped cream;
* Stir 2 tbsp. of milk into 3/4 cup of confectioner sugar (or adjust for desired consistency) until a smooth glaze. Add a little lemon juice and dribble over the top of the cake, allowing the glaze to run down the sides. Festoon with sprinkles, especially for birthday parties.

© Nan Levinson 2008

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