Strange Fruit

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." -- James Joyce, Ulysses

As someone who has rarely left food on my plate over an entire lifetime, I was not one to flinch at supper, no matter the shape, color, or texture of food if someone else was eating it. I was a premature birth, housed in one of those little plastic boxes for a while in the nursery, then held in the palm of the delivery nurse, who told my mother I'd always be scrawny. Once I topped 265 pounds.

Consequently, I've eaten most of the odds and ends of living beasts and plants, including blowfish along the Japan Sea, salted herring with onions on stiff bread from a Dutch breakfast cart, blood pudding, kidney pie, and haggis (oatmeal-stuffed sheep stomach) in Scotland, kishke (vegetable-stuffed chicken skin), whale-meat hotdogs in Tokyo (please forgive me), gooey sealfat and nori appetizers (in the Yukon), steamed chicken feet (and other mystery dim-sum), roasted iguana (in the Yucatan), frogs, snails, and an assortment of plants and roots that most people would rather use for compost than shove into their mouth.

Maki-san once fed me kagami mochi, a sticky double-cake of rice that the Japanese eat just after New Year to break open a new experience. My new experience was that the mochi tasted like eating your pillow and chasing it with white paste.

Once, when I was in Athens, I stayed in the Plaka, the oldest section of the city nested in the shadow of the Acropolis. The narrow streets threaded among cozy cafes, jewelry shops, tavernas, and souvlaki joints. Feril cats scampered about or sat begging under the cafe tables. Cats were everywhere. They sat on the steps of the Acropolis, curled for naps in flowerbeds, darted across the tiled walks just ahead of noisy motorscooters. You couldn't take a snapshot that didn't have a cat in it.

Souvlaki is Greek fast food. They serve pork (or lamb) on a skewer or in a pita with vegetables and piquant sauces. I prided myself in finding the cheapest place in the Plaka. Calling it rustic would be a complement. But the souvlaki was most excellent and at nearly half the price in drachmas.

I ate two or three of them at a clip. And continued the practice for several days until a Greek passerby stopped to whisper in my ear that this particular cafe served cat, thereby maintaining its remarkably low price. He said I could wait and see that the meat was delivered fully cooked in a pan to the rear of the joint every hour or so--rather than cooked on the premises. Further, he said, I would never catch an Athenian ordering from their window. After he left I looked to my plate where a scrap of meat lay untouched in the creamy sauce. I didn't wait to see whether the cat was delivered to the rear door. I took the messenger at his word. Yet the souvlaki had been quite tasty.

On a trip to Italy in the late 1980s to attend an international Hemingway conference, I feasted among other academics from around the world at a banquet hosted by the communist government of the town of Lignano Sabbiadoro. We had spent the day touring the Udine reqion, saw the marker on the riverbank where Hemingway had become the first American wounded in World War I, and ended up at long tables set among tubs of iced shrimp, carved melon, and a dazzling spread of cheese and cold cuts. I particularly loved the bright red, thinly sliced beef that had a sweet aftertaste, and went back for more. I asked the server for the Italian name of this savory meat, and she said, "cavallo". Even with my poor Spanish I knew what I was eating. It's tough to say, but dogs have it awfully good.

It's only fitting here to celebrate the rich, Eastern European palate that my mother introduced to our home. Our entrees were so strange, I feared bringing classmates home for supper. We naturally ate organ meats or vegetable soups normally eschewed by my friends. Liver, tongue, borscht, shav (cold spinach soup), matzo-meal pancakes. Mom had a hand-cranked meat grinder into which she fed boiled livers, eggs, chicken fat and onions. Out came a heavenly paste with the faint suggestion of organic chemistry.

Once she put a ground concoction in front of me that vaguely resembled pale, runny chopped liver. It had an unfamiliar smell.

"Spread it on some matzo," she said.

It did not taste good to me. It was something I could not eat.

"Brains," she said.

It might have been the only part of a cow on which I had never dined. Brains.

Fries, No Flies

The Hebrew characters spell the word Chai (sometimes pronounced "hai"). It means life or refers to the living God--depending on how it's used or defined. A variant, l'chaim, is the common toast in Hebrew, meaning "to life". My last name, Hyman, is also a variant on the word, meaning that my last name refers to life and the God that lives inside me.

My last name was changed to Hyman when my forebears arrived from Romania at the turn of the 20th Century, having been hunted and killed by mobs and their villages burned to the ground. Grandpa Max came to America when he was still young, quite without the English language and familiarity with life on these shores. Along the way, he changed our name.

Jewish boys and girls attend Hebrew language and culture training for several years leading up to the Bar/Bas Mitzvah, a ritual that signifies adulthood in the tribe. You learn common prayer, special prayers selected by the calendar that match the season in which you turn 13 years old, our cultural history, and the language used to read and recite scripture.

My family initially sent me to a school that was not affiliated with a synagogue, but a bar mitzvah mill that churned out celebrants by the dozens. We met in a converted store filled with school desks and blackboards under the direction of a taskmistress whose name I have blocked from memory to protect myself from recurring trauma. I love a story from Donald Barthelme in which he calls the teacher "Miss Mandible", and it will suffice for this recollection. My Miss Mandible walked behind the desks--not unlike the demon nuns that have been described to me from recovering Catholics--making sure we kept our Sephardic noses to the grindstone.

I had trouble making out the consonants, although the vowels were simple. They appeared beneath each letter, or to the side, and were few in shape and number. But the consonants! Some were uttered from deep in the throat and when you pronouced them correctly, it sounded as if you were trying to clear a bolus of half-chewed beef from your windpipe. Several characters looked exactly the same to me, which is why I sunk into depths of multi-generational despair when I confused them in recitation beneath Miss Mandible's gaze. When I went to the synagogue, I always chanted the notes to the prayers, mumbling the actual language, which seemed impossibly out of reach.

What I truly loved, however, were the short historical films we watched on biblical heroes from the Old Testament. I particularly had a crush on Ruth, the Moabite woman who said, "Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go." In the film she was utterly delicious, impeccably tanned, lean, and graceful in her white robe and sandals. From then on, I was to search the continents and islands of my travels to find a woman who would commit to everlasting fidelity.

Bethlehem, as it was presented in the film, was a small village with neatly arranged little adobe houses tucked among smooth pathways that ran between desert rocks and plants. In the close-ups you could see Ruth's skin--like spun chocolate--and pleasant eyes. This a was a Bethlehem quite without scorpions, flies, and pestilence--whether biblical or otherwise.

One afternoon--for we went to Hebrew school after regular school let out--my friend David and I made a discovery that was to influence our religious training forever. Just up the alley that ran behind the Hebrew school was a cafe that sold french fries by the bag. These were no diminutive fry bags issued by fast-food joints. These were Number 10 shopping bags, brown as Ruth's skin, and stuffed to the top with hot, oily, heavily salted fries. They made for fine eating and quelled the imperious, full-body shame that rose to the heart from scripture dyslexia.

How many times did we sit in the alley, ignoring the fear of flunking out of Hebrew school, wolfing down those delightful, crisp, heavenly fries that surely God had delivered unto us? I cannot say, except that as my bar mitzva date grew near, my father was disturbed by my apparent inability to read or speak the most rudimentary of expressions required for the ritual. A private tutor was arranged, thereby wiping out the savings my parents might have made by sending me to the cut-rate, bar mitzvah factory run by Miss Mandible.

The venerable David Starr made house calls, teaching me how to perform the entire ceremony phonetically. Ever-more chubby, now entered into a lifelong struggle with my overeating, I mastered the Torah melodies, which I sung in my cherubic, bell-clear soprano voice just months from changing forever--and everyone was proud of me.

Years later, I visited Bethlehem on a day trip from Jerusalem. There was no sign of Ruth in the crowds of Sabras who walked among the modern apartments and rumbling buses. Her descendants wore bright miniskirts, Western jeans and baseball caps, and several carried Uzi machine guns. These were tough women, who had no notion of taking an oath to follow me wherever I went.

And the biting flies, dear God, oh the flies!