Father's Day Present, and Past

For Father’s Day, my daughter Ellie gave me a present that reminded me of my mother.

Ellie spent Saturday night preparing kreplach and chicken soup with lots of thick, sweet carrots and thin lokshen (noodles). Kreplach are Jewish wontons. Jewish meat ravioli. Jewish stuffed dumplings. Triangular in shape, at least the way my mother used to make them and Ellie did as well, kreplach are among my favorite foods. Alas, they are also among the foods I rarely get to enjoy, as they are labor intensive and messy to make.

One of the most enduring memories of childhood in Brooklyn is my mother cooking for the holidays. Each Jewish holiday brought different treats. For the night before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the signature culinary delight were kreplach. Mom would painstakingly hand-shred well-cooked brisket. With flour dusting up the kitchen and adjacent dinette, she’d roll dough until wafer thin, cut it into squares, place a dollop of shredded meat in the center and fold the edges over into perfectly shaped right angle triangles. Like a general preparing troops for battle, mom would array the boiled kreplach in lines worthy of military precision on the dinette table. It was my job to deliver some of her handiwork to the neighbors. I hated that job, not because as a young boy I’d be embarrassed. Rather, it pained me to part with any of my favorite food.

Ellie’s kreplach easily were two, or even three, times the size of my mother’s, and just as tasty. When I ate them Sunday afternoon in her apartment in Brooklyn I was instantly transported back to the 1950s and 1960s. We couldn’t finish them all, so naturally I took home the leftovers for lunch today. And that’s when the kreplach shifted my memories back to my father.

In keeping with the nostalgia moment, during lunch I turned on I love Lucy. The episodes I watched (yes, episodes; watching I Love Lucy is like eating potato chips—you can’t watch just one) conveyed the continuing story of Little Ricky getting a dog despite Lucy and Ricky’s objections and the Ricardos’ decision to move to the suburbs, to Westport, Conn.

I’ve already chronicled our father’s antipathy to the two dogs we had, each for one year (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2010/06/no-time-for-pets.html).

Around the time I joined our family in March 1949, we moved from an apartment on Tehama Street in Brooklyn to an attached two-floor row house on Avenue W in the Sheepshead Bay section. “Modest” would be a kind description of its architecture, layout and, most cuttingly, interior decoration, considering the resources available to our father and mother. Yet, I was content there. I think my brother was, as well. Our sister was not. She lobbied long and hard for a move to the suburbs, a move to Long Island. Her friend Pauline’s family moved to Woodmere, if memory serves, right after they both graduated from elementary school. It was the perfect time to transplant the family, right before she would be starting high school, Lee said. Pauline’s dad was no more successful than ours, so why couldn’t we move as well, Lee argued.

Dad had no desire to play the game of “keeping up with the Joneses” (in this case, the Lipsons). He continuously resisted our mother’s entreaties to shed his Buicks and buy a Cadillac (he did so once, then reverted back to form). He had no desire to ride the rails to his factory in downtown Manhattan, and since commuting by car from Long Island had less appeal than hearing Lee kvetch and moan, he chose to stay put, no doubt reasoning that Lee’s tenure at home was maybe four or eight years more, but a move to the suburbs was a life sentence.

So we stayed at 1810 Avenue W, building up memories that to this day can be evoked by the aroma and taste of simple foods made with love by a younger generation, and eaten, maybe, with a tear forming in the corner of an eye.