Firm but yielding and delicately flavored, perhaps with a bit of dill, it was a revelation, speaking of craftsmanship and nuance instead of assembly lines and aspic. I was dating a Russian Jew, whose Moldova-bred mother introduced me to the gefilte-fish terrine, a sliceable loaf-shaped version that she bought from a Russian market in Brooklyn. It was while living in New York, somewhere between college and adulthood, that my attitudes finally began to evolve. It refused assimilation or window-dressing it was straight out of the shtetl. While the more accessible of our ethnic foods endeared us to a wider audience-challah french toast, cinnamon-raisin bagels-gefilte fish threatened to undermine the gains. I’d watch as my mom spooned the traditional horseradish condiment over nugget after terrible nugget, and feel embarrassed that Jews ate such ugly, mysterious food. Bland, intractably beige, and (most unforgivably of all) suspended in jelly, the bottled version seemed to have been fashioned, golem-like, from a combination of packing material and crushed hope. Whereas the version of the dish found in “The Carp in the Bathtub” at least had the virtue of transparency-what today we might call tub-to-table cooking-my own Midwestern family was at the mercy of Manischewitz, the Jewish food corporation that sells gefilte fish in pickle-type jars. I, for one, took the book’s message to heart, and in my younger years regarded gefilte fish with a mixture of revulsion and perverse curiosity. It also serves as an anti-gefilte cautionary tale to any child who reads it. The story is a little like an Ashkenazi version of “Charlotte’s Web,” sentimentality deprived of salvation. Although their father subsequently gets the kids a real pet (a cat, which they also name Joe), the siblings, Leah tells us, never eat gefilte fish again. They name the fish Joe, and plot to save him by smuggling him to a neighbor’s bathtub, but their efforts, alas, prove unsuccessful: their finned friend is killed and eaten just like all that came before him. The kids are accustomed to this routine, which was common in the days before refrigeration, until one year they develop an affinity for an “unusually playful and intelligent” carp destined for the Passover table. Twice a year, for Rosh Hashanah in the fall and Passover in the spring, the siblings’ mother would bring a live carp to reside for a week in the family’s sole bathtub when the time for holiday-meal preparations arrived, she would carry the doomed creature off to the kitchen. “We knew what she did with him when she got there, although we would never look,” Leah, the story’s narrator, tells us. As a young person, I, like any number of Jewish children, received an early lesson on mortality and heartbreak from a book called “The Carp in the Bathtub.” Published in 1972, the book, written by Barbara Cohen, with illustrations by Joan Halpern, told the story of Harry and Leah, two Brooklyn kids whose mother is renowned for her gefilte fish-the traditional Jewish patties made from ground fish, egg, and matzo meal.
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