The (Food) Voice of the Silent

Dos kol fun di shtume (The voice of the silent) was the title of a 1920 Yiddish play by Isaac Horowitz about the many struggles of vegetarians.1 While the play itself may have belonged less to the category of deathless theater than to naked polemic, the author's connection of food choice to food voice is instructive.The useful concept of the "food voice" was introduced by Annie Hauck for interpreting food performance as a kind of speech. Scholars and activists look at food as communication and pay special attention to smaller variations within a shared cuisine. These variations can be thought of as dialects, idiolects, and accents. The food voices of Jewish vegetarians in Poland amplify our understanding of Jewish language and Jewish social history in this particularly vibrant moment. For this paper, I will attempt to amplify the food voice of the vegetarian author and restaurateur Fania Lewando.Fania Lewando, born Fania Fiszelewicz in Włocławek, Poland, was a celebrity chef before the term existed: a restaurateur, writer, educator, and exuberant promoter of her cuisine. Lewando's Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh, published in Wilno in 1938, is made up of 408 vegetarian recipes in Yiddish.2 The recipes are drawn from traditional Ashkenazic cookery and include kugls, blintzes, and kneydlekh, vegetarian versions of such meat dishes as klops (meatloaf), schnitzel, and stuffed cabbage, dishes from Polish and Lithuanian cuisines (bigos, pirozshki, zrazy, and riestainis), dishes from classic European cuisine (Ile flotante, tortes, ice creams, and omelets), contemporary health foods (juices and "vitamin drinks"), and some dishes that seem to be completely original (rice with strawberries, rice balls filled with mushrooms, and so on).Lewando begins her introduction to the book with the statement "It has long been established by the highest medical authorities that foods from fruits and vegetables are far healthier and more suitable for the human organism than meats." She then writes that vegetarianism is also encouraged by the Jewish principle of kindness to all living things and concludes by noting the practical difficulty and expense of obtaining kosher meat in Poland. Lewando invoked the authority of modern Western science and ancient Jewish tradition to establish the soundness and respectability of what was in her day an undoubtedly radical project.Cookbooks are by their nature prescriptive texts, almost a genre of musar literature, and Lewando's speaks with a voice of authority, offering culinary, medical, and ethical instruction to the housewife. Some of the very best recipes in the collection—like pickled cucumber soup with potatoes, the aforementioned rice dumplings with mushrooms, apple salad with horseradish, stuffed kohlrabi, Jerusalem artichokes, and rhubarb sorbet—combine richness with surprisingly sour, sweet, and salty tastes that sound absurd but work beautifully.With some exceptions, the techniques are recognizable to contemporary homemakers. The cook is instructed, for instance, to beat egg whites to a meringue, but not directed to use a whisk. Most of the equipment called for in this book (when equipment is specified at all) is familiar. One device Lewando employs frequently is a food mill, always referred to simply as di mashinke, or "the little machine." A food mill uses a crank turning a metal blade to push soft foods through the holes of a sieve, simultaneously mashing the food and straining out fibrous bits such as seeds and skin. Food mills are available in hardware and kitchen stores. In most cases a food processor can do the job of a food mill, but you must peel and seed the ingredients if needed.The coal or wood-fired ovens available to homemakers in prewar Wilno did not have adjustable thermostats, and Lewando provides no oven temperatures except to specify a "not-too-hot oven" a few times.The authoritative nature of Lewando's voice is doubly remarkable. Firstly, she is writing in Yiddish, a language with no political national authority. In the young Polish Republic, the Polish language was itself finding a new voice after more than a century of disenfranchisement. Jews of Poland were twice silenced, as Poles and as Jews. The YIVO institution was founded in 1925 in Wilno to promote research in Yiddish in the social sciences.The Yiddish scholar and co-founder of the YIVO institution Zalmen Reyzn, reviewing Lewando's book in Undzer Tog (Vilner Tog) mentioned an outlandish suggestion made by an anonymous cultural figure: I will leave open the question as to whether or not a cookbook is literature, but the newly published Vegetarian Dietetic Cookbook by Fania Lewando certainly belongs in the category of culture (even in the most simple and narrow definition of the word), as everyone who has a look at this fine and beautifully produced (and richly illustrated) book must acknowledge.A well-known Jewish cultural figure once said that he would like to see a time when YIVO would see fit to publish a good Yiddish cookbook—a statement perhaps a little too outlandish to make clear the necessity to connect academic inquiry with actual everyday needs. But, if not YIVO, Jewish Vilna was able to publish the cookbook here reviewed.Secondly, her recipes are vegetarian. The silencing of vegetarians seems to have been as urgent a desire in the previous century as in our own. The Yiddish press of the early twentieth century was notably progressive on political and economic issues, but oddly conservative when it came to vegetarianism, viewing the growing enthusiasm for vegetarianism as a threat to continuity in Jewish cooking.3 Horowitz titled his play Dos kol fun di shtume (The voice of the silent) and wrote in his introduction that he hoped the piece would illuminate ideas about vegetarianism that need to be heard. He added that he hoped critics would forgive him for needing to sacrifice the demands of "pure drama" for the sake of "vegetarian propaganda." The heroes of the drama are themselves anything but silent. One vegetarian confronts an opponent with the withering attack: "Your body is a graveyard! You are such a graveyard you should be in Brooklyn!" It remains unknown if this rhetoric attracted many new devotees to the cause.Fania Lewando wrote bright and vivid recipes relying largely on the sturdy vegetables that thrive in the unforgiving climate of northeastern Europe. Carrots, potatoes, celeriac, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), parsley root, kohlrabi, beets, cauliflower, fresh and dried mushrooms, and cabbage are the most important ingredients, along with spinach, tomatoes, asparagus, leeks, cucumbers, and peas. Fresh dill and parsley are the most important seasonings, and butter, most frequently used in lavish quantities, is far and away the preferred cooking medium. Many recipes call for locally foraged ingredients, including mushrooms such as borovkes (cepes or porcini) and lisitshkes (chanterelles) and berries such as bilberries, strawberries, cranberries, and gooseberries. A rich breakfast of foraged treasures is described in Esther Singer Kreitman's novel Der Sheydim Tants (The demons' dance): The house was full of good food, but you weren't allowed to touch a thing. Everything was needed for winter: the sweet cherries, the raspberries, the bilberries, and then the plums and the borovkes, as if in summer you didn't need to eat, as if everything that grows, grows for the sake of the winter, and people have no right to have a little something in the summer. . . . You have to fast and wait for breakfast until she gets back from shul, but when she does get back, she serves a breakfast fit for a king, of bilberries with sour cream, of mushrooms cooked in butter, of fresh bagels with butter and cheese, and of that really fragrant coffee, but you are not allowed to help yourself to a little something.4Fruits such as apples and pears are components in both sweet and savory dishes. Eggs are used in familiar preparations such as omelets and frittatas, and hard-boiled eggs turn up as an ingredient in fillings and other preparations that require further cooking. Red radishes (new moon radishes in Yiddish), black radishes, and horseradish all feature prominently in salads and also in a sweet radish jam.These radishes memorably appear in the famous breakfast scene in The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Kreitman's younger brother), which begins in the early summer, just when they were coming into season: "While Yasha was busy in the courtyard, Esther got up and made breakfast: a griddle-pletzl a flatbread similar to focaccia with farmer cheese, spring onions, new-moon radishes, a sweet cucumber, and coffee she had ground herself in the coffee mill and seethed in milk."5 Kreitman and Bashevis Singer corroborate the evidence brought by Fania Lewando that contrary to dreary stereotypes, seasonal vegetables in great variety were central to the diet of Jews in Poland.Lewando's life was cut horribly short. She and her husband Leyzer were murdered in the Holocaust, and the place and time of their deaths remain unknown. Her voice, her words, and the flavors she loved live on in this text. Read her stern but kind instructions; prepare her recipes; agree with her or argue with her. Let her memory live and be a blessing.