For my Mother, on her 14th Yahrzeit

If you’ve not yet read Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets, you’ve missed death-day parties. It seems that once you become a ghost, you celebrate the day you died with a big party, with all your ghost-y friends, much like we celebrate our Birthdays with parties in this realm. Well, sort of:

On the other side of the dungeon was a long table, also covered in black
velvet. They approached it eagerly but next moment had stopped in their
tracks, horrified. The smell was quite disgusting. Large, rotten fish were laid
on handsome silver plattersl cakes, burned charcoal-black, were heaped on salvers; there was a great maggoty haggis, a slab of cheese covered in furry green mold and, in pride of place, and enormous grey cake in the shape of a tombstone, with tar-like icing forming the words,

Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington
Died 31st October 1492

My mother was a wonderful cook – when she felt like it – though she had a tendency to make weird things, like oxtails and ceviche, that other kids’ Moms did not serve for dinner, and which seemed kind of gross at the time. She was, however, a wonderful baker: pies; cookies; nut cakes; even baklavah, which she learned to make from Mrs. Menugian, our Armenian landlady who lived upstairs. It was quite some time after my Mother died that I realized that I had, indeed, learned how to make pie crust from all those years of just watching her do it.

But she wasn’t particularly connected to Jewish baking. (Well, there was the time, exiled in Germany in the early 60’s when my father was stationed in Heilbronn as a “Russian translator – read, “spook” – that she so desperately wanted a decent bagel she made a batch herself – boiling them in the bathtub – and completely freaking out her landlady. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

So I taught myself to bake babkas, and challahs, and hammentaschen, learning from books, and experience, and from my little-old-lady neighbor on Fort Washington Avenue.

This weekend, I’ll make hammentaschen with Tina and David. I like to think that my Mother, too, will be eating hammentaschen, at her “death day” party, which comes three days after Purim.

But if she makes them herself, she could only have learned that by watching over me.

(c) Elizabeth Lorris Ritter
for Bettina Ruth Silver Lorris
3 March 2000 / 11 Adar II 5760