“Why waste good food?”
Esther said, mopping up soup with
Rye bread
The kind from the corner bakery
With caraway seeds and a hard crust
You never know when the next Great
Depression will come
So eat this while you can
And be grateful it's not
Potatoes.
Only potatoes
Gathered from a frozen field in Poland.
Try to blend in
Blintzes are too sweet
Yiddish too foreign
Go to school
Move away.
Don't be Jewish
Be American.
My dad
Grew up eating caraway seeds
Culturally, he told a friend,
He is “secular American”
Not culturally Jewish
When he moved to
Minneapolis he called Esther
Asked for her recipes,
Blintzes, latkes, hamentashen
For him to copy down.
She didn't understand
Why would her grandson,
Halfway done with medical school,
Associate himself
Go out of his way
To go back that same trail
Esther spent her time bushwhacking.
I made those blintzes.
I used the wrong cheese
And too much sugar
Esther would have said
“Too sweet”
Too sweet for the woman who had
Two lives
One to forget and one to remember.
I burned myself twice
Making those blintzes
Could hardly read
My dad's
20-year-old handwriting,
But they were good.