most NEP businesses were no more than market stands or carts. This was the era of pop-up soup counters, blini stalls, and lemonade hawkers. Also of canteens run out of citizens’ homes—especially Jewish homes, according to Russia’s top culinary historian, William Pokhlebkin.
Checking in on Mom and her twenties research, I find her immersed in reconstructing the menu of one such canteen. It’s in NEP-era Odessa as she imagines it, half a decade before she was born.
The focus of my mother’s imagining is one sprawling room in Odessa’s smokestack factory neighborhood of Peresyp. Owner? Her maternal grandmother, Maria Brokhvis, the best cook in all of Peresyp. To make ends meet, Maria offers a public table. And there’s a regular customer, dining right now. Barely in his twenties, with dark hair already starting to recede but with lively, ironic eyes and dazzling white teeth that make him a natural with the ladies. Often he comes here straight from work in his suave blue naval uniform. He’s new to Odessa, to his posting in the Black Sea naval intelligence. Naum Solomonovich Frumkin is his name, and he will be my mother’s father.
Naum pays lavish attention to Maria Brokhvis’s chopped herring and prodigious stuffed chicken. But his eye is really for Liza, the second of Maria and Yankel Brokhvis’s three daughters. There she is inthe corner, an architectural student running gray, serious eyes over her drafting board. Ash blond, petite and athletic, with a finely shaped nose, Liza has no time for Naum. He suggests a stroll along the seaside cliffs, hints at his feelings. Not interested.
But how could she ever say
nyet
to tickets to Odessa’s celebrated, glorious opera house? Like everyone in town, Liza is crazy for opera, and tonight it’s
Rigoletto
—her favorite.
Naum proposes right after
Rigoletto
. And is turned down flat. She must finish her studies, Liza informs him indignantly. Enough with his “amorous nonsense”!
So Naum, the crafty intelligence officer, turns his focus to the parents at whose table he dines. How could Maria and Yankel refuse such a fine young New Soviet Man for their pretty
komsomolochka
(Communist youth)?
How indeed?
Naum and Liza would be happily married for sixty-one years. Their first daughter, Larisa, was born in Odessa in 1934.
“So you see,” Mom says grandly, “I owe my birth to NEP’s petty capitalism!”
The enduring union of my grandparents, on the other hand, owed nothing to cooking. Like Lenin’s Krupskaya, Grandma Liza had scant passion for her stove; and just like Dedushka Lenin, my grandpa Naum submissively ate whatever was on his plate. Occasionally, Liza would make fish meatballs from frozen cod, awkwardly invoking her mother Maria’s
real
Jewish gefilte fish. She even made noises to us about someday making the actual stuff—but she never did. In our “anti-Zionist” State of the seventies, gefilte fish was an unpatriotic commodity. And Babushka Liza was the wife of a longtime Communist intelligence chief.
But I did encounter real gefilte fish as a kid—in Odessa, in fact, the city of my grandparents’ Bolshevik-NEP courtship more than forty years before. And it shook my young self, I recall again now, with themeaning of our Soviet Jewishness. A Jewishness so drastically redefined for my mother’s and my generations by the fervent Bolshevik identity policies forged in the 1920s.
That first taste of gefilte fish in Odessa still torments me, here across the years in Queens.
“Ah, Odessa, the pearl by the sea,” goes the song. Brought into being by Catherine the Great, this rollicking polyglot port on the Black Sea was by the nineteenth century one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe; its streets remain a riot of French and Italian Empire–style architecture, full of fantastical flourishes.
Ah, the Odessa of my young Augusts! The barbaric southern sun withered the chestnut trees. The packed tram to Langeron Beach smelled thickly of
Checking in on Mom and her twenties research, I find her immersed in reconstructing the menu of one such canteen. It’s in NEP-era Odessa as she imagines it, half a decade before she was born.
The focus of my mother’s imagining is one sprawling room in Odessa’s smokestack factory neighborhood of Peresyp. Owner? Her maternal grandmother, Maria Brokhvis, the best cook in all of Peresyp. To make ends meet, Maria offers a public table. And there’s a regular customer, dining right now. Barely in his twenties, with dark hair already starting to recede but with lively, ironic eyes and dazzling white teeth that make him a natural with the ladies. Often he comes here straight from work in his suave blue naval uniform. He’s new to Odessa, to his posting in the Black Sea naval intelligence. Naum Solomonovich Frumkin is his name, and he will be my mother’s father.
Naum pays lavish attention to Maria Brokhvis’s chopped herring and prodigious stuffed chicken. But his eye is really for Liza, the second of Maria and Yankel Brokhvis’s three daughters. There she is inthe corner, an architectural student running gray, serious eyes over her drafting board. Ash blond, petite and athletic, with a finely shaped nose, Liza has no time for Naum. He suggests a stroll along the seaside cliffs, hints at his feelings. Not interested.
But how could she ever say
nyet
to tickets to Odessa’s celebrated, glorious opera house? Like everyone in town, Liza is crazy for opera, and tonight it’s
Rigoletto
—her favorite.
Naum proposes right after
Rigoletto
. And is turned down flat. She must finish her studies, Liza informs him indignantly. Enough with his “amorous nonsense”!
So Naum, the crafty intelligence officer, turns his focus to the parents at whose table he dines. How could Maria and Yankel refuse such a fine young New Soviet Man for their pretty
komsomolochka
(Communist youth)?
How indeed?
Naum and Liza would be happily married for sixty-one years. Their first daughter, Larisa, was born in Odessa in 1934.
“So you see,” Mom says grandly, “I owe my birth to NEP’s petty capitalism!”
The enduring union of my grandparents, on the other hand, owed nothing to cooking. Like Lenin’s Krupskaya, Grandma Liza had scant passion for her stove; and just like Dedushka Lenin, my grandpa Naum submissively ate whatever was on his plate. Occasionally, Liza would make fish meatballs from frozen cod, awkwardly invoking her mother Maria’s
real
Jewish gefilte fish. She even made noises to us about someday making the actual stuff—but she never did. In our “anti-Zionist” State of the seventies, gefilte fish was an unpatriotic commodity. And Babushka Liza was the wife of a longtime Communist intelligence chief.
But I did encounter real gefilte fish as a kid—in Odessa, in fact, the city of my grandparents’ Bolshevik-NEP courtship more than forty years before. And it shook my young self, I recall again now, with themeaning of our Soviet Jewishness. A Jewishness so drastically redefined for my mother’s and my generations by the fervent Bolshevik identity policies forged in the 1920s.
That first taste of gefilte fish in Odessa still torments me, here across the years in Queens.
“Ah, Odessa, the pearl by the sea,” goes the song. Brought into being by Catherine the Great, this rollicking polyglot port on the Black Sea was by the nineteenth century one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe; its streets remain a riot of French and Italian Empire–style architecture, full of fantastical flourishes.
Ah, the Odessa of my young Augusts! The barbaric southern sun withered the chestnut trees. The packed tram to Langeron Beach smelled thickly of
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