ARLENE’S BRISKET

I cook dinner most nights and normally my menu plan is heavy on the vegetables, whole grains and--no red meat. But on Passover, I make brisket. Every year. When my son, Max, was fifteen he asked me if I could get “Arlene’s recipe and make brisket for Passover.” When he was nine he had eaten ‘Arlene’s brisket’ at her Seder and apparently, he never forgot it. Arlene is my oldest and best friend. She knows my kids starting with their amnio photos, and when I called and told her Max asked for her brisket recipe, she actually teared up. Max wasn’t so interested in the “service stuff,” as he calls the Haggadah, but he was interested in the brisket, and when he and his sister, Molly, together asked the classic Passover question, “why is this night different from all other nights,” for him, I’m sure the answer was, because tonight we are having brisket! A few years later when Molly was bat mitzvahed, I listened as she sang the prayer, L’ Dor Va Dor. It means “from generation to generation,” and refers to the passing down of the Torah. I love this prayer, both the melody and the meaning, and I wondered, “how do I, who can neither read nor speak Hebrew, pass down my Jewishness to my children?” And then, I thought of brisket. And of women handing down recipes across ages and continents. Recipes scrawled in black pencil on a scrap of butcher paper, or neatly printed in blue ball point pen on a crisp index card. Women reaching out from Polish shtetls and New York’s lower East Side tenements, to my mother’s kitchen in the midwestern town on the Missouri River where I grew up, to my own house now in Los Angeles. It’s not Torah, but it is tradition. L’dor va dor, from generation to generation. Thank you my dear friend for the connections and the brisket.