Grandmother's Codfish Balls
Or, the Strangeness of Home
This week my students at Marymount watched Hester Street, a 1975 film about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side based on a forgotten masterpiece of American realism called Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Yekl was published in 1896, championed by one of my favorite authors from that time period, William Dean Howells, who you probably associate with The Rise of Silas Lapham. As I watched, I noticed the many details that might be baffling to a viewer unfamiliar with certain religious and cultural practices of nineteenth century European Jews - things like the social status of yeshiva students, or the meaning of Gitl’s wig, or the cutting of a young boy’s payes. Watching film and reading a novel about the anxiety of assimilation, I found myself thinking about the strangenesses of home, however we understand “home” to be, and our separation from, and adherence to, the modes in which we are all raised when we dare to seek our fortune somewhere new.
To warm the students up for our discussion, I asked everyone to write a short essay in class from the prompt of “the strangeness of home.” What is totally normal for you, that might feel alien to someone not from your home? We agreed on broad leeway in our definitions of home, as narrowly construed as a childhood household, or broader, about the cultures from which our families originate. I loved the essays that they produced on the fly, including one about an epigenetic Korean preference for wooden beds and another about ice fishing in rural New Jersey. A lot of our affection for our own strangenesses of home revolves around food, I discovered. In such details are real lives made.
Because I fashion our classroom as a collective of writers working together, I wrote from the prompt as well. I decided to write about my grandmother’s codfish balls. I’ll share that short essay with you below.
“I don’t remember them,” I wrote, in my truly appalling longhand, “but all of my cousins, who are older than I am, remember Grandmother’s codfish balls. The source she used to find codfish in Houston, Texas remains a mystery to me - does it come in a can? I don’t even know - but she brought this unfortunate culinary artifact with her from New England to Texas in 1938, and inflicted it on her children and grandchildren until her death in 1995. Yankees are not known for their cuisine. They might be known for parsimoniousness, or perhaps for an abhorrence of waste, or for a tendency to make do which also, conveniently, shores up the status quo.
Grandmother covered everything in needlepoint, which is both time consuming to produce and durable without being exactly beautiful. A needlepoint encased brick holding open a loose door might be a perfect approximation of the New England character - making do, and holding fast, and looking back rather than forward. Codfish balls are the culinary equivalent of a needlepoint-covered brick, and about a digestible.
Somehow, though, despite a Texan upbringing and a youth in New York City, I haven’t been able to shake some codfish ball tendencies in myself. A careful accounting of the furniture in my house reveals a fatal tendency to make do and keep same, chipped dining table and sweaters with moth holes, and even more needlepoint than I realized. A pillow, a luggage rack.
No bricks though. I like to keep my doors open, able to swing wide, to be welcoming, to look to the future more than the past. Though I make my living by looking to the past, so perhaps this is a fool’s errand. I work hard to assimilate, to disguise myself as a modern person, but all the while I have a taste for codfish balls that I cannot shake.”
So what’s next?
Halloween is coming! Every day my front porch grows more terrifying design elements, and just know I had to dodge skeletal arms reaching for me from the walkway. I am looking forward to being back at Books by the Banks in Cincinnati on November 15. And I am finally, at long last, making real progress on Bonfire. More on that presently.
Until then, what strangenesses of home do you most miss in your own life?