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Fresh Challah
By
Sergio Troncoso
Drawings by Jorge Enciso
As soon as I walked into the Royale
Bakery on 72nd Street and Broadway, I knew I would get good Challah
here. The air was heavy with bread baking. A worker in a stained apron scurried
from the back of the store to the shelves against the wall. He carried loaves
of Challah, steamy, soft, and shiny from a nascent
glaze. Behind a waist-high glass counter were vanilla crescents, lemon squares,
linzer törtchen, dandies,
hazelnut spirals, chocolate-dipped sablés, and rugelach. I was in heaven, and I wasn't about to leave, so
I sat down in one of the three small booths in front of the glass counter. An
old woman, not higher than five feet, with a bouffant hairdo, her skin a creamy
pallid except for the smear of rouge on her cheeks, shuffled toward me. Her
apron seemed almost to snag her legs so that she might tumble forward, but she
didn't. She asked me with a generous smile and a wink if I wanted a cup of
coffee. I said yes and felt guilty for having sat down to be waited on by this
woman whose bluish hair reminded me of my grandmother. She didn't seem to
notice, and brought back my extra light coffee with, to my surprise, two pieces
of rugelach and another friendly wink. I really was
in heaven here.
***
Tomorrow would be Yom
Kippur. I decided to fast from sunup to sundown and think about what I had done
wrong over the past year, what I could do to make it right, why it took Yom
Kippur to focus on my problems and fix them. Maybe I wouldn't even accomplish
what might become clear in my head. Thinking rightly didn't imply doing the
right thing. Aristotle had said that against Socrates, and I knew it only too
well. Yet as I sat at the Royale Bakery and drank my coffee, which seemed to
slither down my throat like a hot snake, I was happy and confident that
whatever problems I had would soon enough be resolved,
or at least better understood. I didn't really have crises as did some
excitable people. I had mostly irritations that took the form of questions that
wouldn't leave me, quite pesky disturbances that didn't keep me awake at night
but did bing into my head at
odd moments.
As I chewed on a sweet raisin of the rugelach,
I thought about one thing that had perplexed me for some time. I wasn't Jewish,
but in some sense, wanted to be. True, the woman I was in love with was Jewish.
But that in itself didn't explain everything about how
I felt. In fact, I wasn't exactly sure how I felt. And yes, I loved rugelach, Challah, kasha knishes,
Passover tsimmes, and my favorite, matzoh ball soup. Yet I would also kill for mole poblano, carnitas from a Juárez bistro, my mother's flour tortillas, and asaderos from Licon's Dairy in
Ysleta. It might be true, then, that my religious and
cultural awakenings often had a culinary component, yet that just explained
that I liked to eat good food.
In what sense,
then, did I want to be Jewish? I could only explain that by explaining how I
also wanted to be Mexican like my grandmother, Dolores Rivero.
When I looked at my abuelita, her eyes downcast and
weary, but always ready for a fight, I wanted so much to protect her. I wanted
to make sure she didn't have a hard life anymore. Most of all, I wanted her
relentless optimism not to be ever crushed by the evil in the world she had endured.
She was tough, and she also knew how to hurt me, her toughest grandchild, the one with such a sharp tongue. So we understood each
other only too well. She sometimes told me about her life on a Chihuahua ranch
as a little girl, yet I could tell she kept many things from me. She spoke of
her childhood as if there had been a real limit to how much one could burden
another human being with, as if there had existed some type of pain still just
too vivid to explain, too personal to say to someone you loved. So the stories
she told me were always haunted with the fearsome of the unsaid, with what
lurked so nearby at every turn that you could sense how lucky she felt to have
survived her ordeals. Maybe she thought that this history would expose her as
something less than human if she told me how bad it had been. Maybe she thought
that she had lived a life so painful and so far away from where she was now
that it was better to keep these ghosts buried in the past. Maybe she didn't
want to reveal how others could be so cruel and treat each other like animals,
and so she would keep her grandchild hopeful.
This was what I
knew of my abuelita's life, from what she had told me
to what my parents and their friends had said about her. She had grown up in
rural northern Mexico in abject poverty during the social chaos of the Mexican
Revolution. Several family members, uncles and brothers, died in the war. Those
who lived were refugees for years, often short of food and dying of disease. I
had the suspicion that my grandmother or my great-grandmother might have been
raped when soldiers or gangs of armed horsemen swept through the Chihuahua
plains. No one would actually say 'rape,' although I was told by my grandmother
that there was no law in the middle of the desert, with a war raging around you
and no one to protect you. I did know that my grandmother could and had in fact
shot people with a rifle, and maybe that was the truth, that she had shot and
killed someone trying to rape her. I also knew that as a child she had defended
her mother from being beaten by her husband, that she had placed herself
between the blows of her father against her mother.
As a young girl, my grandmother had been locally famous for her
strength. Not only was she tough-minded, but she was also physically tough. She
could sling a 50-kilo sack of beans over her shoulders and toss it with ease
into the back of a grain truck. I knew that working men would be embarrassed to
be around her, because she was actually stronger than they were. She could probably
beat the crap out of some of them. I also knew that she had a sympathetic
heart, perhaps a bit too vulnerable for her own good. She fell deeply in love
with a man who is hardly spoken of in my family. She had three children by him,
he promising to marry her at every turn, while she did her best to raise three
babies alone, in the middle of nowhere. My mother told me she did not have a
single pair of shoes until she was a teenager. I was also told that many men,
seeing that my grandmother had children yet had never been married to anyone,
assumed that they could have their way with her, that she was available for the
taking. Bad assumption. That was when my grandmother
first learned to shoot a rifle.
When she was older,
probably in her forties, Dolores Rivero met the man I
would know as my grandfather. He was a good man, quick with a smile, loyal, and
even tolerant of my often demanding and headstrong grandmother. I loved my
grandmother (and, of course, my grandfather), yet I knew she was hard to live with.
Maybe it was due to her difficult life, or maybe she already had that
incredible will that was ready to die rather than be defeated. In any case, she
would do what she would do, or else. She ran her household with an iron hand.
My mother and her siblings were put to work to help pay the bills. My
grandfather handed over his check to her willingly and maybe also out of fear,
although I also knew he kept a small personal stash of money for his beer and
cigarettes. Yet my grandmother was also loving and needful. She would stack the
record player with her albums of polkas and corridas
--her favorites were from Los Coyotes
When I looked at my grandmother, this was what I would see. I would see
someone who had a great spirit to live, someone who found meaning in life
despite, and perhaps because of, the pain of her life. It was not, of course,
that she desired this pain and trial, but more exactly, that her character survived
and superceded the history of her life. Somehow, by meeting the pain of history
with flinty courage and skill, she at once created and became her destiny. My abuelita had a character that pushed her forward into
willing what she thought was right. It was never an easy road, yet her
willfulness was always self-imposed and was a method of creating her self. Of
course, this almost guaranteed that she would run up against many obstacles.
Many thought that my abuelita was just plain stubborn
beyond belief.
But those who got
in front of my grandmother misunderstood her and, really, misunderstood what it
was to be willfully right. Many of my grandmother's would-be challengers simply
didn't like the idea, and reality, of a willful woman. These people were sometimes
just selfish or openly evil. They were accustomed to getting their own way, and
when they clashed with Dolores Rivero it was a
terrible clash of wills. But my grandmother was more than just plain willful.
When people wanted to abuse or destroy others, my grandmother would defend the
weak. When a man wanted to puff himself up at somebody else's expense, my
grandmother would deflate the braggart. She wouldn't just be contrary. She
would try to be right. How did she find out what was right, in her own mind?
She began with self-worth. She always told me that you would not achieve
self-worth by putting other people down. I saw that she achieved it by
respecting herself, by improving herself, and by criticizing her own faults.
This open and constant look at her own self was her way of developing internal
standards for her willfulness. She started with her belief in God, she tested
her good actions from day to day, and she gained a sense of what was possible,
what was stupid, what was unjust, and what was a real achievement. Yes, my abuelita was willful, but she also developed a sense of
when and how you were right.
I knew that my grandmother never confused her sense of righteousness
with selfishness. She never tried to dominate somebody, even if she could, simply
because no one would stop her. Instead, her open look at her self made her at
once fearless and quite vulnerable. If she knew her own demons, if she could
conquer them, then she expected others to face their own fears too. Repeatedly
she would give herself up. She would offer a helping hand. She would inject
herself in an argument to say what everyone had been avoiding. She would put a
fire under somebody's butt, somebody who could take it, and push him forward to
conquer his fear. Or she would empathize and laugh with you in the middle of a
disaster. It was not only this strength of will but also this great, hard-edged
kindness that I remembered the most about her. Just after she picked you up
after a terrible fall, she would push you to get going again, to never give up.
This vulnerable
self-confidence that my grandmother possessed, however, was sometimes fraught
with danger. When she criticized herself, she was harsh. When she gave somebody
a second chance, maybe somebody who didn't deserve a second chance, she opened
herself to severe disappointment. But she always believed that you could rise
up, from whatever terrible starting point you were at, and improve your
position if you were willing to be honest about it. Sometimes opportunistic
strangers did take advantage of my grandmother's openness, but at least they
never did it for very long. I knew that her trust was shattered a few times,
yet she never became insular or hateful. My abuelita
fought against her own bitterness so that she could trust someone else again. I
never understood where she could find that reservoir from which she would
deliver herself to kindness again. But I believed she knew that if you never
opened yourself up to these disappointments at all, you could never trust
anyone. You hid from yourself. You became less than what a human being could
be.
When I looked at my
grandmother, I saw sympathy toward others, never pity. I saw a willingness to
help others determine themselves, never control. This was how she created her
destiny, why a community formed around her without her asking that it should,
and ultimately why she was able to die in peace. So when I said I wanted to be
Jewish, this was what I meant. In the Jewish community, I often saw people I
could identify with, those who reminded me of my grandmother. I wanted to
defend them and keep them from evil in the world because I could see myself as
the same type of person. I wanted to make sure good people, those who opened
themselves up to push themselves beyond where they were, those who had the
character to overcome what others might throw at them, these people, I always
believed, should win in the world. In that sense, then, I wanted to be Jewish,
and I wanted to be Mexican.
I knew very well
that in many respects I could never really be Jewish. My mother wasn't Jewish.
I had not converted to the Jewish faith. Even if I did, I would probably never
understand what it really meant to be Jewish. How could a non-Jew ever
comprehend 5,000 years of history and culture, the struggle against countless
oppressors simply because you were a Jew, the meanings of the Torah? So, truly,
there were many ways in which I could never be Jewish. In my imagination, I
thought, all the disparate strands of my life might come together one day if it
were discovered that my ancestors were really Spanish Jews expelled from their
homes during the Inquisition to, among many other places, New Mexico. I did not
research this, but maybe I should.
I also knew very well that not all Jews were Jewish in the sense I was describing, nor were all Mexicans like my grandmother.
Many did not struggle against others, and against themselves, with a character
that would not give up to defeat but that, instead, created human progress
through self-respect and self-criticism. Maybe what I was really thinking about
was not ultimately Jewish or Mexican at all but, somehow, deeply human. I knew
that this humanity was not the niceness toward anything human that 'humanity'
nowadays connoted. The humanity I described was not some blind acceptance of
whatever was done. My humanity was hard-edged. It was more like a challenge to
better yourself by making yourself vulnerable, to engage in making standards by
asking yourself questions that just might unmoor you, to defend others in their
self-determination because you knew how explosive life could be if you did push
yourself in this way. You gained respect for life by knowing what was possible
when you were truthful and critical toward yourself. There was nothing hidden
from you. You knew exactly your own good and your own evil. You developed the
courage and the stamina to keep improving yourself the more you lived such a
good life. I believed you finally developed the courage to live with yourself,
but this was anything but a complacent acceptance of what you did. Living with
yourself was throwing up a gauntlet in front of you, because only this would
truly respect living.
The best I could do
now, I thought after many years of being away from home, was to remember my abuelita and remember what she taught me. I could at least
try to meet her standards by forcing myself to struggle hard, just as she did.
I could remember how easily it was for her to identify with others who
struggled too, who understood that the heart of life was this struggle. I could
remember how she would meet friends I brought home, friends from another side
of the world, and how this poor Mexican woman could easily identify with them,
after a few hours of coffee and raucous conversation, as if these strangers had
been her grandsons and granddaughters coming home. I could remember how my
friends would ask about her, years after they met her, how they could not
forget someone who reached so quickly, and yet so sympathetically, into the
core of who they were.
***
The old woman at
the Royale Bakery finally brought me a round raisin Challah
enough for six and a fresh plain Challah that was
smaller than the first. She had convinced me that I should take the second one
too so that I could eat it before dinner. Later I was glad that she did. I also
bought a half a pound of rugelach, although it really
became over three quarters of a pound after she dropped extra pieces into the
box for free. She asked me if I lived around there, and I said that I did,
about ten blocks away. She told me she was always happy to see all the new
faces at the bakery particularly during the high holy days. Then the place
would bustle quite unlike the rest of the year. It wasn't that she didn't like
the regulars who stopped in for their Challah every
Friday. She simply enjoyed seeing the stream of new faces. She waited for them.
Then she knew the high holy days were near and she would soon see her
grandchildren.
"Fresh Challah"
originally appeared in Hadassah Magazine. Copyright
1999 by Sergio Troncoso.
Listen to Sergio Troncoso talk about his
novel, The Nature of Truth, on
National Public Radio: NPR Interview on
Latino USA. Click
here for discussion questions.
Other essays: Terror and Humanity, Why Should Latinos
Write Their Own Stories?, and A
Day Without Ideas.