That Time of Year
The dread kicks in for me around late February. It's not
just the onslaught of my spring allergies. It's also the
anticipation of Passover — that unwelcome time of year
when I curse my ancestor, Izzy Greenblotz. I couldn't
avoid the stupid holiday even if my cousin Jake would
allow me to skip my annual obligations in the factory. In
my prewar apartment building's elevator, Mrs. Minsky from
Penthouse A launches the annual Inquisition as she tugs on
her Majorica pearls in glee."Whose matzos are you buying
this year?" Every year this is the funniest question she's
ever asked,and her powdered face flushes with self-
satisfaction.There's no need to answer her. Green-blotz
Matzo is not only the number-one-selling matzo in the
United States, it's the leading brand in Canada and
England, even in Venezuela and South Africa.Wherever there
are Jews, there is Greenblotz.
I handle my widowed neighbor with a diplomatic smile. Even
though it's weeks too early — Passover is not until mid-
April this year — she wishes me an anticipatory happy and
healthy Pesach when we stop at our floor.
Soon,someone will ask the question I despise most:"How
does the Greenblotz family celebrate Passover?"
Since "Greenblotz, Heather" is the only Greenblotz listed
in the Manhattan phone book,when reporters from New York
or Hadassah Magazine can't get through to the factory,
they call my home line.I never deny that I'm from the
Matzo Family, which would be too weird.
This year,when a reporter insists on specific details on
our upcoming seder, I'm stuck delivering the family white
lies that Jake usually spins from the factory office.
Why haven't I gotten my damn home number unlisted already?
"We have a quiet evening together," I say."Just family."
How can I ever tell the truth?
Can you imagine the family that makes the millions of
artificial trees for sale in Kmart not celebrating
Christmas, or the Cadbury family not celebrating Easter
with a basket of chocolate eggs? I'm too mortified to
admit that come Passover I'm home alone in my
apartment,chugging down a liter bottle of Diet Coke and
stuffing my face with a Panini 2 from the Italian deli
around the corner on Second Avenue.That's prosciutto, red
peppers and Swiss cheese — a quadruple nono as far as the
traditional holiday is concerned.
My take on what's kosher has always been a little hazy,
but even the most wayward Jew knows that pork is never
ever kosher.When I was about training-bra age, eleven or
twelve, I asked my father if pigs weren't kosher because
they love mud.This made perfect sense to my preadolescent
mind:dirty equals not kosher. Grandpa Reuben and Dad were
padlocking the metal gate on the factory entrance;Wilson
was waiting patiently by the open limo doors in the late-
winter sleet. Dad, who my mother insists is very, very
smart, too smart for his own good — she claims he has an
IQ of 150 — shook his head and said,"No,kid,pigs are not
kosher because they don't chew their cud. Only plant-
eating mammals with multi-chambered stomachs are kosher.
Ruminants do not carry as many diseases."
"What's a ruminant?" I asked, but Grandpa Reuben
interrupted.
"Some say that God didn't want us eating animals that eat
other animals. Some say that God didn't want us eating the
more intelligent animals. I say a bunch of people made up
a bunch of rules to give a desert tribe something to
believe in." Grandpa and Dad had a rare shared laugh.They
forgot that my follow-up question was left hanging, and I
quietly climbed into the black limo, so out of place on
the (then) low-rent Lower East Side.
Secondly on the kosher affront,eating ham and cheese
together is mixing meat and dairy.Such a combination is
strictly forbidden to the observant, because, as Grandpa
continued his religious lesson in the limo,"If you didn't
watch what you ate in the desert without a Frigidaire, you
got sick."
Then there's the panini bread itself, which our customers
would call hametz. Bread is not allowed for the entire
eight days of Passover.This custom honors the Jews that
didn't have time to wait for yeast-leavened loaves to rise
the day Moses rushed them the hell out of Egypt and away
from the Pharaoh's rule.
Observant families prepare for Passover by burning any
hametz that may still be in the house, every last crumb.
It's a curious sight to see the handful of remaining
religious Jews on the Lower East Side carrying their half-
finished loaves and frozen waffles to a communal bonfire
raging in a Grand Street metal trash can. Sometimes when I
speed by in a cab, I spy a happy teen stoking the hametz
fire with a broomstick, smiling broadly at the joy of
tradition.
The plate my sandwich rests on is my fourth sacrilege. A
properly observant Jew would have one set of plates for
meat, one set for dairy,and a third Passover set to use
once a year.But this is a dish from the same
Mikasa "TulipTime" dinnerware I bought at Bloomingdale's
my first year out of college and I still use all year
long.Somewhere in my mother's colossal apartment on Park
Avenue is a set of special Passover dishes given to my
parents as a wedding gift. They were by Rosenthal, hand-
painted a gorgeous pastel turquoise blue with open-petal
fuchsia flowers.Wasted beauty.Now the dishes are bubble-
wrapped and tucked away in a closet. Or maybe Mom gave the
dishes to charity, since we only took the set out once or
twice for company when I was really young.For keeping up
appearances.
As long as I can remember, the Greenblotz Matzo factory
has been kept kosher under the supervision of Schmuel
Blattfarb, a devout rabbi with a sweaty forehead and
startlingly wide hips. I had heard about him for years,
but I first met him in the ground-level office of the
factory the day I got my final marks for the first half of
ninth grade.My mother and I waited patiently across the
desk from my father and the rabbi as they completed the
paperwork for the pre-Passover inspection.
As Rabbi Blattfarb got up to sign off, his chair rose with
him. He then awkwardly prized it from his hips, lowered it
back to the ground and announced that his fee had just
gone up to ten thousand dollars a year.
After the rabbi sheepishly said goodbye to all of us, Dad
raised the window and called to our handsome Portuguese
driver,Wilson, that we would be right out.We were Brooklyn
bound. My mother and father were in one of the better
stretches of their marriage, and she had
uncharacteristically telephoned Dad with the news of my
exceptional marks.Dad uncharacteristically responded with
spur-of-the-moment reservations for a congratulatory
communal feast at Peter Luger's Steak House right across
the Williamsburg Bridge.
"What does Rabbi Blattfarb actually do to deserve that
kind of money?" I asked Dad at our artery-clogging dinner.
"Just ridiculous!" my mother marveled.
"Long answer or short answer?" Dad asked me.
"Short," Mom said.
"Long," I said.
"To begin with,"Dad said,"the flour and water going into
the factory must be certified one hundred percent kosher,
which basically means a few phone calls.Then, since Moses
and his followers had no time for leavening as they left
Egypt, the matzo that's specifically kosher for Passover
cannot be baked longer than eighteen minutes, which is the
longest time flour and water can go without self-
fermentation. It's not Blattfarb's time we're paying for
though, it's his name."
Although the factory still more than meets the strict
standards, and has the all-important Blattfarb stamp of
approval, no one in my family has been kosher at home for
two generations, let alone kosher for Passover with that
scrubbing-the-house-for-all-crumbs business and that
bothersome third set of plates.
Even though my family's dietary habits may raise eyebrows
among those who care about these things, I don't think
we're alone in eating whatever we want. From my
observation, the majority of Jews in America are
culturally, not observantly, Jewish. Except for a High
Holiday or two, they haven't been to synagogue since their
symbolic ascent into adulthood, a bar mitzvah for a
thirteen-year-old boy, a bat mitzvah for a twelve-year-old
or thirteen-year-old girl, supposedly spiritual events,
but these days more about the gifts and party one-
upmanship.The bar and bat mitzvahs I've attended over many
years have featured an inexplicable Italian theme with an
ice sculpture of the Coliseum and a Leaning Tower of Pisa
cake; fifty decorative doves flying around the room who
shat all over the white-and-blue table settings; multihued
cheese cubes laid out on a table so that they formed an
approximation of the bar mitzvah boy's face; the same bar
mitzvah boy's triumphant entrance into the reception hall
wearing a crown with a Star of David orb; three hundred
primarily Jewish guests doing pharaoh dance moves to "Walk
Like an Egyptian"; and most recently, a reception at the
Times Square ESPN Zone during which the rabbi and the
cantor from the morning's services drove arcade bumper
cars.
Unlike today's bar mitzvah extravaganzas,the typical
American Passover centers around a toned-down ritual meal
that is on par with Thanksgiving in terms of family
must.According to my father, it is the most celebrated
Jewish holiday in the world.
Passover is a week long, but the first two days are the
big communal seder days,the ones that you're supposed to
spend with your extended family.True, as far as Jewish
holidays go, Yom Kippur, the High Holiday when you fast to
mourn the dead, is up there. But it's too morose for a lot
of people. Passover is different; it's happy-household
time.
But what does the Greenblotz family do for Passover? The
folks who cater Passover for the Jewish masses? * * *
For the past five years, specifically to avoid Passover,
my mother, Jocelyn Greenblotz (née Kaufman), has sent
herself on a variety of impossible-to-reach-her escapes
that involve snorkeling, an odd new hobby for one of the
world's great shoppers.These high-end adventure tours
attract the richest of the rich, like the man who invented
polyester and several family members of the Roosevelts.Two
years ago Mom took an $18,000 expedition cruise to
Micronesia, which included snorkeling inYap — an island,
she wrote cheerily on a three-line postcard, that has
currency made of huge circular stone. Last year, she
joined three girlfriends from theYap trip on a journey to
the Pitcairns.This time, she cheerily wrote on another
three-line postcard, she snorkeled, and nearly every
islander is a descendant of the mutineers from the HMS
Bounty.
You won't find my expatriate father, Sol, at a seder
dinner either.Almost ten years ago,Dad legally transferred
his Green-blotz Matzo family board of directors vote to
me, his only child, when he left the U.S. for Bali in a
sudden rush to find himself.The last time I heard from him
was after the terrorist bombing of the Sari Club in Bali;
he was bidding goodbye to his villa and his two teenage
servants (one girl, one guy) who got paid the equivalent
of $25 a month. (Apparently a good wage for Bali.) I
attacked Dad's bad handwriting and chronic abbreviations,
working backward like a hieroglyphics expert, and still it
took me twenty minutes to fully decipher the one-paragraph
letter on light blue airmail paper. (I was as proud as the
guy who broke the German code when I worked out abbre was
his abbreviation for abbreviating.)
Server down.Thought I'd let you know I'm abbre my stay
here. I'm spook by the rise of milit Islam in Indon. Have
new luv, and we've decided to move to Amsterd. In touch
shortly.
He wasn't.
As my cousin Jake Greenblotz now heads the matzo factory,
he must pass himself off as a kosher, dedicated Jew. But
even he leaves a day of Passover-week media tours to go
home to his longtime Irish girlfriend, Siobhan Moran, and
they order in spareribs and chicken with jumbo shrimp.
If word got out what really goes down in the Greenblotz
family, it would be a religion-wide scandal.To me, it's
already a personal tragedy.