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Fingers, Feet & Treats To Eat

A

fellow fifth-grader once told
me that he hated going to his
grandmother’s house because it
smelled like mothballs.
I loved going to visit both of my grand-
mothers because their houses always
smelled like something wonderful was
happening in the kitchen.
What’s more, at
my mother’s mother’s
house, I didn’t have to
wait for baking to be
done. There was the
bowl.
The bowl looked
big enough to hold a
family’s-worth of soup.
Norman Prady
Grandma kept it on a
high shelf in a kitchen cupboard. I always
feared that she might fall as she climbed
the 1930s Sears stepstool to bring the bowl
down. But she always made it.
The bowl was a reward that she never
brought out until lunch was entirely con-
sumed, a practice I silently objected to
and promised to never inflict on my own
children. The bowl, you see, was filled
with a rotating inventory of treasures for
the tummy. Five or more kinds of chew-
ing gum. Small candy bars. Individually
wrapped candies, including a variety of
caramels, creamy nougats, soft-centered

hard raspberry candies, Hershey’s kisses.
Boxes of Good & Plenty — those remark-
able bits of licorice coated with hard-
candy shells. And enough other stuff that
could make me forget if Grandma’s house
smelled like mothballs, which it didn’t.
Most of the time.
At my father’s mother’s house, it was
entirely about the oven. Grandma’s oven
produced exciting cookies. A favorite of
mine was the one that apparently began
life as a small ball of dough into which
Grandma pressed her thumb, creating a
well that she filled with jellies or jams after
it was baked.
I smelled those little round delights as I
walked into her house, and she’d laugh as
I rushed toward the stove calling out, “Are
they done? Are they done?”
But Grandma made other things, too.
Some that I wouldn’t go near as much
as my father grabbed platefuls from her.
Petchah, for example. Can you imagine
making jelly out of the feet of baby cows?
With carrots, onions, garlic and hardboiled
eggs? To me, it was a recipe that had best
been left in the old country. My father kept
urging me to try it. Baby cows’ feet? No
thanks.
And if one grandma was making
jelly from baby cows’ feet, the other was
making chicken soup from chickens’

Taiglach

feet. Apparently, there was a connection
between the two dishes, called collagen, a
protein that I once tried to learn about in
a book describing the science of cooking.
After a few pages, I felt I didn’t really need
to know.
Meanwhile, Grandma’s sister, my father’s
Aunt Ella, made taiglach. Ah, little balls of
fried dough dredged in honey and clus-
tered with hazelnuts, almonds and dried
fruit. Visiting Aunt Ella on a Jewish holiday
meant leaving with the stickiest and happi-
est fingers you ever could hope for.
At my mother’s mother’s house during
December, Grandma could be found bak-
ing holiday cookies. Lots of menorahs and
Stars of David that looked quite like the
more-widely distributed holiday cookies at
the grocery store. I think Grandma would
have had a nice laugh at an item in a recent
December catalog mailed out by Figi’s Inc.
“Walker’s Festive Shortbread Cookies,
Net Wt. 12 oz., $19.99, combine the very
finest, all natural taste from the Scottish
Highlands with a bit of holiday magic
and you have these delightful, buttery
shortbread Trees, Stars, Santas and Bells.
Kosher.”
Somewhat of a tasty mixed message.

*

Norman Prady, 82, is a journalist and author living
in Berkley.

guest column

A Jewish Organizational Model To Emulate

A

couple months ago, I had the
ence, the shlichot, or female emissaries,
opportunity to present a fund-
will be having their annual confer-
raising workshop in front of a
ence in just a few weeks. As Joseph
varied group of Chabad rabbis, shlichim Telushkin points out in his New York
as they’re called, at their annual
Times’ bestseller Rebbe, the wives of
International Conference of
the shlichim, the shlichot, are
Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries
perceived as full work partners
in the Crown Heights neigh-
with their husbands and that it
borhood of Brooklyn, N.Y.
was actually the Rebbe — Rabbi
The bulk of the conference
Menachem M. Schneerson —
— workshops, classes, study
who suggested the establish-
sessions — took place in a
ment of the annual convention
massive 138,000-square-foot
for shlichot.
armory transformed into a
This wasn’t my first encoun-
Mort Plotnick
convention center for 5,200
ter with Chabad. I’ve long had
rabbis and guests from around
appreciation for these rabbis
the world. I watched with interest as the who, together with their wives and
rabbis, with their trademark black fedo- families, have dedicated their lives in
ras and long beards, slowly filed into
the hope of bringing their fellow Jews —
the room where I’d be talking to them,
often in the most far-flung of places —
a white tent set up in a corner of the
closer to Judaism.
hangar-like space. It’s not your everyday
In fact, I have had the pleasure to
training session, that’s for sure.
work and interact with many Chabad
While I attended the men’s confer-
institutions here in Detroit, including

the Lubavitch Yeshiva-International
School for Chabad Leadership, a school
with hundreds of alumni serving as
shlichim to Jewish communities around
the world, many of whom I had the
pleasure of meeting at the conference.
I’m also very well acquainted with
The Shul, MJI and the Friendship Circle
of Michigan, an extraordinary organiza-
tion that brings together teenage volun-
teers and children with special needs for
hours of fun and friendship.
Rabbi Mendel Stein, the Lubavitch
Yeshiva’s director of development, whom
I have known for several years by now,
invited and encouraged me to speak at
this awesome global Jewish gathering —
an experience I am truly grateful for.
I accepted Rabbi Stein’s invitation
immediately, precisely because of my
firsthand knowledge of the good work
Chabad does here in the Michigan area.
I’ve been involved in community work
and fundraising for close to 60 years,

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continued on page 6

January 28 • 2016

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