“passover is passover”

Of all the Jewish festivals and holidays, Passover is the one most Soviet Jews remember.¹¹ Many imagine Passover as the defining Jewish holi­day, and it is the food of Passover—the matzo—that most represents the holiday itself.

All the children and grandchildren would come to the seder. They used to come... my father had friends and they would come. My mother would cook up a wonderful chicken soup with matzo meal. She would make Passover pancakes from potatoes and beetroots. We used to pickle, I'm not sure you know this, but Jews also pickle borscht.

Once again the holiday is associated primarily with food. Certainly the matzo serves as an identity marker, distinguishing Jews from their neighbors, but in Tatiana's memory, it was also the custom of pickling borsht—that most Ukrainian of dishes—that defined what it means to be a Jew during Passover.

The ritual of bdikes khomets (search for unleavened bread), in which on the night before Passover the pious search through their homes for grains prohibited during the holiday, was and remains an important part of the Passover ritual. Elizaveta Bershadskaia told us that in her childhood village of Chernyatka, the Jews celebrated Passover together throughout the 1920s and 1930s. She recalled that her family took out the separate dishes they kept in their attic, brought in matzo from Bershad, and celebrated seders together with the other Jewish families in the village. Evgeniia Kozak told us, “On Passover we took down the dishes from the attic. And when Passover was over we would bring them back up to the attic.” Etia Shvartzbroit told us, “My grandfather was a rabbi. We had separate kosher dishes in the attic.”

Women were predominantly responsible for bdikes khomets and Pass­over cleaning.

Sofia Palatnikova recalled:

My mother was truly religious. My father was really not.... Nothing could be in the house during Passover according to my mother. She took out the flour and everything. And she had special plates and pots and everything in the attic. Everything. There was another set of utensils for Passover.... Yes, that's how it was. I remember how Passover was observed. But, we still used to gather in houses. There were a lot of these.... But by then they were prohibited. I don't remember the earlier years. But before the war, well, we used to celebrate. The Jews used to celebrate Passover.

Several noted the custom of throwing a hot stone into a pot in order to render certain utensils kosher for use during Passover. Evgeniia Krasner of Shpykiv told us, “In the oven we would heat stones to make them glow and we would throw these stones and prepare all of the pots and pans—earthenware pots—and we would put the stones in and pour water over them, and steam would rise up over everything.” Tatiana Marinina told us that her mother “would take down the dishes from the attic, and throw a stone in the oven. There wouldn't be a crumb of bread in the whole house.” When we spoke with her, she explained that she had revived these practices for herself, but regretted that she has not been able to pass them down to her own children:

I do the same now. We also have matzo here. I buy matzos—you’re sup­posed to do it differently—but I buy them all year round. And I make latkes and matzo bry. I make a Passover pancake from sour beetroots and potatoes. In my book, Passover is Passover! No bread comes in my house! I am alone. When I had children, I couldn’t do it. Now that I’m alone, though, why shouldn’t I do it when it is such a pleasure?

There is a wistfulness in her implication that during that period of her life when she was bringing up children to whom she could pass on these traditions, she was unable to fulfill her wish.

Her insistence that she buys matzo all year round is also indicative of the degree to which matzo has become associated with Judaism. Even though the ritual eating of matzo is only required for eight days of the year—and it is precisely the extraordinary nature of the diet that ren­ders the ritual significant, as symbolized by the question “Why is this night different than all other nights?”—the display of matzo and oc­casional eating of it is a year-round activity for many Jews in Ukraine today. Ukrainian Jews use matzo not only as an essential ingredient in their gefilte fish, but also a means of expressing their identity publicly. Although we conducted our interviews either during the summer or the winter season, months away from the Passover festival, countless homes we visited proudly displayed a box of matzo on the mantelpiece. The boxes distributed annually by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Ukraine are even designed as keepsakes: they are colorfully illustrated and include a list of useful phone numbers for Jewish organizations throughout Ukraine. The Federation suggests that the matzo has a shelf life of one year. Matzo boxes are clearly intended not just to hold the matzo for consumption during Passover, but are also to be displayed year round and kept as visible identity markers. No longer used exclusively for ritual purposes in accordance with the periodic calendar of festivals, matzo continues to have a deep symbolic value as a public expression of ethnic identity.¹²

Whereas today matzo is distributed by the Federation of Jewish Com­munities and is readily available for pickup in Jewish community centers and synagogues throughout the region, acquiring matzo—or more com­monly, the flour used to bake it—in prewar Soviet Union was difficult.

Memoirs from the period and reports from foreign visitors often noted the importance Soviet Jews ascribed to obtaining matzo for the holiday. Rabbis in the Soviet Union made numerous appeals to Jews abroad in the 1920s requesting that they send matzo to the USSR, and in 1929 the government responded to popular pressure by briefly permit­ting its importation. David Soyfer recalled, “It was forbidden to bake matzo. That I remember. Before Passover, there was this Jew, and the Jews—the poor Jews—would give him flour and money and he would give them matzo.” Others baked matzo in their homes. Sime Geller remembered how in Bratslav her mother would bake it in the family kitchen: “On Passover, my mother would bake three poods of matzo. Do you know what a pood is? It’s 16 kilos! My mother had six children. We were forbidden bread. We would remove all the bread from the house.” Chaim Rubin told us:

we would make matzos ourselves. In those days there wasn’t anywhere to get them from. A few women and men would gather together and they would help, and with a roller they would make the sheets. They would eat the matzos. They would make matzos. There were also egg matzos. We would mix the matzo with egg, make farfel (egg-noodle pasta) from matzo, make matzo meal, and bake latkes.

Raisa Teplitskaia told us that when she was a child in Ternivke:

My mother would bake matzos. She would gather together three to five neighbors and they would bake. I remember that my father had a rolling pin. He would use the rolling pin and my mother would bake. We had an oven and they used to put the matzos on top of the oven to dry. Three or four neighbors would gather together and would bake matzos and celebrate Passover. My mother would get everything down from the attic.

Grigorii Shor recalled the preparations that took place in Kopayhorod:

Until 1936 they sold matzo made from a machine. But then they confis­cated everything and in Kopayhorod there was no machine left, so we brought matzo in from Mohyliv-Podilskyy or Vinnytsya. And then there was nowhere to buy from, so several families would gather together, I remember, with us in our home. They would bring out all of the kosher utensils that you need and lay them all out with the dishes. They would kosher the oven and the cooking utensils. They would roll it out with a rolling pin... I myself would roll, help roll it. And then they would put it on the cooking utensil and stick it in the oven.

Dora Yatskova also had recollections of importing matzo to Kopayhorod from Mohyliv-Podilskyy: “We observed [holidays] at home. It was for­bidden, but we observed them. We bought matzo... we bought it from Mohyliv. They baked it there and brought it here,” she told us.

After the dishes were cleaned and the Passover utensils were brought down from the attic, the cooking began. Donia Presler recalled a favorite recipe:

For Passover we would make farfel from matzo meal. You would break up the matzo, not too much. You would brush it with two eggs. And you would fry it up. You pour in a little water, you crumble it in the mixture. And then you add potatoes and you already have a kugel [casserole].... My mother used to make a potato kugel.... You grate in the potatoes, maybe five. You grate the potatoes into water.

take four, five eggs and beat them with a little water. You dilute it with the starch and you make noodles. These are Passover noodles.... Then you cut it up. You let it cool and you cut it just like noodles. For a Passover soup this is the best. There is nothing in the world like it!

Evgeniia Kozak remembered: “On Passover we would make great casseroles from matzo meal, latkes from matzo meal, horseradish, a good chicken.” When asked specifically how her family used to observe Passover, she added more details:

Well, listen, we had an oven. We would bake the casseroles. And we would make gefilte fish and good chickens and we had everything. And horseradish. It was good. Potato latkes and gefilte fish from pike perch.... On Passover we would also make gefilte fish in school.... My mother taught me to make them. My mother [also taught me that] for a good broth you stuff a neck with chicken fat, with flour and the neck will be just so. A neck from a chicken. For a good broth you stuff the neck. And you boil it with homemade noodles. Or else you can eat it with matzo and horseradish.... Fish and horseradish is very good. So, we used to also have horseradish for the holidays then. And we had gefilte fish and cheese and we had matzo.

Kozak cherished these foodways all her life, and the memories they instilled were an integral component of her heritage, valued both for gastronomical satisfaction and as a family birthright.

Evgeniia Krasner remembered that during the seder, the central event in the holiday tradition, her father would sit on a cushion, an esebet, and read the Haggadah to the family. Nekha Vainer Shpak, who was born in Vinnytsya in 1921, told us, “on Passover we used to find the afikoymen [matzo hidden during the seder as part of a game]. My father would put it out [hide it] and since we were small children we would see where he put it. And so we would find it.” Maria Yakuta placed particular atten­tion on the custom of reclining during the seder meal:

There was a matzo plate, it was called a matzo bag, beautifully embroi­dered silk. We used to put matzos in there and then lay it aside........................................................................ My

father would sit on a cushion. It was a cushion, and the table was moved up and we sat all around. And he sat himself on a cushion like this and he asked questions. People asked questions. And he prayed. And we spent the whole night there like that.

She does not remember any Passover songs, though, because “we didn't sing songs in our family. Those who had a large family with a lot of people did. But with us, it was just... four children and our mother and father.”

Most of the people we interviewed remembered that asking the Four Questions was a central part of the seder meal, but few could recall either the specific content of the questions or even who was supposed to ask them. These questions, traditionally posed by the youngest male child at the seder table, introduce the central component of the seder, in which the leader retells the story of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. It is noteworthy that many of the people we interviewed told us that their father asked the questions himself because the children had not learned them. According to Bella Chirkova, the women's role in the ritual was purely observatory:

During the celebration of the seder one asks the questions of the father. I didn't ask the questions because I am a girl—not a boy.... So my father asked the questions of the children, of the boys.... The table was set, and my father, grandfather, and the other men would sit down. The women would sit on the other side. And my father would ask the children, the boys, the questions.

One of the primary purposes of the seder—to pass the story of the Exo­dus down from one generation to the next—was not fulfilled. In the ab­sence of the Exodus story as an heirloom, children adopted the foodways of their parents, which they savored as a central part of the tradition.

The Passover holiday is a domestic affair and is intricately bound up with memories of family and loved ones. For Beyle Vaisman, memories of the Passover seder provided a concrete and specific memory she could attach to the family she lost during the war:

I remember Passover, with the four questions.... And the plates. We were daughters, three daughters. There were no brothers, so there was nobody to ask the four questions, but I remember we would open the door... for Elijah the Prophet. We had separate dishes. Everything would be koshered We had a very religious family and that's why I remember

the laws. A very religious family. My father would keep Passover and we would have a seder. And we kept kosher. There was a shoykhet. He would slaughter a cow that people took to him. And there was a shoykhet for poultry.... We led a very religious life, a religious family. And in addition to this, my father was very learned. We had a big family with cousins, aunts, uncles. All of them would celebrate Passover with us, and Sabbath back then. It was so interesting. My father was so learned. He would tell such interesting stories. We children never wanted to go because we just wanted to hear these Jewish stories. They were so interesting. And Hitler took and murdered these people.

The last sentence of her description—“And Hitler took and murdered these people”—seems at first to be out of place in her memory of Pass­over. But the phrase reveals that the memory is not really about Pass- over—it is about her loved ones and her loss. The holiday's significance does not lie in the commemoration of the biblical exodus from Egypt. Rather, it is given meaning because the seder meal is tied to so much else that has disappeared, most importantly loved ones and familial heritage.

Passover was the most observed Jewish holiday in the interwar Soviet Union, as well as the one most condemned by the government. The Jew­ish Sections of the Communist Party also recognized the popularity of Passover celebrations, and so concentrated much of their propaganda on combating its observance through the use of “Red Haggadahs” and mock trials of Passover. Some have suggested that the nationalist con­notations of the holiday also angered Soviet officials—and inspired wor­shippers.¹⁴ Stalin could easily be imagined as a second (or third, or fourth...) Pharaoh, and the dream of liberation from slavery could be applied to modern times. However, I encountered no awareness of the subver­sive potential of the Passover liberation story among those to whom we spoke. In fact, few seemed even aware that the Passover holiday tells the story of the Exodus. Passover, like the Sabbath, is remembered today primarily because it evokes memories of family, food, and domestic harmony. Passover's central rituals—eating matzo, cleaning the house of bread products, and the seder meal—are focused on the home rather than on the synagogue, just as the Sabbath meal and rest are domestic rituals. Both holidays can be observed in private, inconspicuously, and with few resources. Although both also have a synagogue component, it is the home rituals that define the holiday. Passover was and remains a cherished holiday neither because of its universalist message of libera­tion nor because of its centrality as one of the three pilgrimage festivals in the Jewish religious tradition, but rather because the unique tastes and smells associated with its specific dietary restrictions evoke a nostalgic longing for childhood. This nostalgia was perhaps best expressed by Pesia and Yente Kolodenker of Tulchyn. After discussing the Passover meals, Pesia remarked: “Everything we ate, everything we baked back then was very tasty,” to which Yente added, “now it's not good.”