To Life, to Life, L’chaim!

This Saturday is the Passover Seder, where every year my family and I get together at my mom’s house and gather around the table to eat, recount the telling of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt and where we take the time to be thankful for the blessings in our lives today. It has always been my favorite holiday. Its many rituals are a perfect example of how every Jewish tradition comes steeped in significance. For every food we eat, there is a reason. The traditions take us beyond the usual pleasures of just getting together with our loved ones for a meal. Ever since I was a kid receiving silver dollar coins for finding the hidden matzah from my Poppy, it’s been a favorite holiday of mine and I can still get quite nostalgic about it.

It is also the holiday where we remember and talk about my grandpa Sol.

My mom’s father, Sol was a Holocaust survivor, the only one out of his family to make it out of the war alive. He lost his mother and father and his sister and two brothers as well as many other extended family members to the Nazis but lived to start a family of his own in Brooklyn, NY. He went on to not only play an immensely important role in all of our lives, but in many others whom he met along the way. To say he was inspiring is to understate it. To say he was kind, generous, loving and full of humor is to put it lightly. He was the greatest man many of us have ever known, his life a huge influence on all of our lives. He spoke and wrote about his childhood as well as his time in the Nazi concentration camps until I think it became too hard for him to rehash those memories. He never really spoke in detail of his family members; I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him to think about them. There is a photo I found a few years ago of his sister, Ruchel before the war when she was about 13 years old and the minute I looked upon her dark eyes, my own filled with tears of immense sorrow. I saw myself in those eyes. I wish I could have known her. So many questions for the person in that photograph, so many lives gone before they could flourish.

One of my grandfather’s greatest gifts to all of us are the stories he wrote about his life that clue us in to the joys and the traumas he experienced before meeting my grandmother in Brighton Beach. He was a great writer and every year we choose another story to read aloud at our Passover seder. And thus we form another bridge between the ancient story of Jewish persecution from the Pharaoh in Egypt, to the enslavement and genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust, to the very personal story of our own family member’s history of loss and survival. It is to not only pay homage to the great man we all love and miss, but to remind us of the ability of the human spirit to overcome such great loss and create beauty and love from unimaginable pain. We in my family are a very emotional bunch, and it is no wonder why. The trauma in our shared histories lives with us today, but we try and remember to live in our blessings and to be thankful for the gifts in our lives, the family we get to share it with and the joys we get to experience.

And to that, I say - L’chaim!

….

As part of our Passover spread, we’re making this roasted carrot dish that I have made a couple of times before and really like. The recipe is from the Meatball Shop in NYC, and it’s the chef’s modern take on Tzimmes, a traditional sweet carrot dish. If anyone need’s a side for the holiday, or just for any other night of the week, I suggest you give it a try!

Honey-Roasted Carrots with  Prunes, Walnuts, and Mint

for the carrots:

8 large carrots Cut into 3 X 1-inch pieces (like thick-cut french fries)

1/4 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup honey

for the topping

1/4 cup chopped pitted prunes

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/4 cup chopped fresh mint

1/4 cup chopped toasted walnuts

1/2 teaspoon salt

squeeze of fresh lemon juice

- Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Toss the carrots with the olive oil in a large bowl, and coat thoroughly. Add the salt and toss to coat.

Combine the honey and 1/2 cup warm water in a small bowl and stir until thoroughly mixed.

Lay the carrots out on a large rimmed baking sheet or roasting pan so that they are evenly spaced and do not touch one another. Drizzle with the honey mixture and put the carrots in the oven to roast.

Roast until all of the water has evaporated and the carrots are soft and beginning to brown, 35 to 40 minutes.

While the carrots are roasting, prepare the topping. Mix the prunes and olive oil in a small bowl. Work the mixture so that the prunes are thoroughly coated and not sticking together. Add mint, walnuts, salt, and lemon juice and mix thoroughly to combine.

Remove the carrots from the oven and arrange them on a serving dish. Spoon the topping over the carrots and serve.

 

  Solomon Wieder, 1926-2005

xx, Randie