Difficult conversations

The view from the house in Schliersee

We had had just eaten a delicious supper of trout and potatoes, followed by ice-cream followed by schnapps.

Everybody knew they wanted a kind of pear schnapps called "Willy" and truthfully it was delicious, served in ice cold little glasses with the edges at the bottom of the glass nicked out.

I find it hard to understand German in big groups of fast flowing dinner conversations. I miss the jokes mostly so I spent some time examining the bottom of the schnapps glass.

It was good to be with old friends again. Not much had changed in 26 years. We were all still with the same partners, and all still in the same professions. We were all still healthy and busy and I think I was the only one who dyed her rapidly greying hair. I was the only one who didn’t go to the Albert Einstein Gymnasium in a small town in South West Germany. I was the only one who didn’t speak German as a first language.

I was also the only one who was Jewish.

In the 26 years I knew them, we had never ever discussed it. In years of holidays together in Germany, in France, in Italy and once in New York, we had never ever discussed the subject.

In the years of coming to Schliersee and hanging out together, hiking and drinking and cooking and laughing and playing cards, we never discussed it.

Even when I went to visit Dachau, close by Schliersee, we never discussed it. It was a non-issue.
They knew I didn't eat pork and that was the end of it.

No one asked me anything about it, and I was glad to be accepted so completely by such kind, funny, loving, wonderful people.

So I was not expecting it when the subject finally came up.

We were all walking back to our hotel. We were full of good food and good will. I was talking to one of the group about his grandfather who had built the house in Schliersee that we always stayed in.

He told me his grandfather had been in the Waffen SS and that when he came back, he never spoke about what he saw and did. He built his house on the hill and lived in it alone for the rest of his life.

It was an awkward conversation. I didn't say what I really think which is there is not in reality an "us" and "them" and that we are all capable of evil actions and kind actions.

That we are all part of the collective whole of life, and that it is our responsibility to be kind, with whatever powers we have, to all forms of that life.

I didn't say any of that.  Instead I told him tearfully about my great-grandmother who was murdered alongside her son, her daughter-in-law and her grand-children in Riga in 1941.

I realized that while I have many thoughts about the Holocaust, the person I was speaking to, didn’t. The issue is not what we remember, but that we remember.

My people read Primo Levi, Martin Gilbert, Anne Frank, Victor Frankel and Elie Wiesel. We visit concentration camps in Germany and Poland. We build Holocaust museums. We teach it to our children. We remember the unspeakable.

It's in our cultural DNA to remember. We have in our history enemies we do not forget like Amalek, Haman and Pharaoh. 

In the shadow of the Holocaust, we are a people with post-traumatic stress disorder. We have all personally lost entire branches of our family or been raised by orphans from the Kindertransport or known survivors of the camps. 

Even far away, in South Africa, where I was raised, we were not unscathed. During the war, my grandfather received a telegram telling him his family had been murdered. My father still remembers the day the telegram came and his father’s cries of pain.

We have two names for it - the Shoah or the Holocaust. They have none. They call it Der Nazi Zeit. The Time of the Nazi's.

My husband's mother's brother was in the Waffen SS. I didn’t know about it until he died. He was based in Gurs concentration camp in France and had worked on the selection of Jews for transfer. When he was alive, I had often been in the same room as him and no one ever said a word about it.  It was never mentioned as if it wasn’t relevant that a man with a tattoo in his armpit, signifying his membership in a group whose function it was to carry out the Final Solution, was now happily chatting to a Jewish woman and her three Jewish children.

 

Here is poster I saw once in the area. It is advertising a memorial hour and the subhead says: 70 years since the deportation of the Jews of the Rhinlenand Palatinate to Gurs.

Gurs was the French holding station for the Jews of the Rhineland Palatinate before they were selected to be taken by train to Auschwitz and Sobibor, where they were gassed.

The poster says - they were deported. It does not say they were murdered. It tells the part of the story that is easier to tell.

Understandably, as a deeply shameful episode, the Holocaust is largely encapsulated and over as far as they’re concerned.

We are like a lesion that was removed from their body, and the body has healed with no sign of a scar. Our partners in crime have moved on.

It is not the same for us. 

But when we remember the Holocaust, we are talking to ourselves.

 

Why this doesn’t work when you want to lose weight:

This I know for sure:

If you get out of your way, your body wisdom will always make a choice for wellness.

You’ll choose to carry less weight on your knees.

You’ll choose to give your pancreas an easier time.

You’ll choose to be kinder to your long-suffering liver.

And the best part of it is you don’t even have to know you have a pancreas or liver or even heart.

Your body knows it wants to be well right now, and it already knows how.

You don’t have to try.

A tree doesn’t have to know about photosynthesis to seek the light it needs.

A baby doesn’t have to count calories to know when to stop suckling.

And you too as a living being on this planet know what you have to do.

It’s not will-power that you lack or a trainer or a diet or a better understanding of the Krebs cycle.

You only need the ability to see your human thoughts as the human condition and to tune-in instead to living wisdom we all have.

So relax. Don’t do anything except things that calm you down. Breathe. And go about your day.

Sooner or later you’ll probably have a thought about food.

I hope you have the privilege of seeing yourself at the moment you think one of your crazy thoughts that you think are so true.  

I hope you see in that moment you have a choice.

I hope you see the difference that makes.

It’s quiet and it flickers, so be gentle on yourself.  

Don’t shout. Don’t try. Don’t grab.

Let go and let love.

Let me know how it goes.

Body Nirvana

Since I wrote about when it clicked for me a year ago, it has continued to click for me.

I’ve clicked that I don’t need sugar in everything I eat.

I’ve clicked that wine isn’t necessary every day.

I’ve clicked that I can do yoga even though I can’t touch my toes.

I’ve clicked that I don’t need to be perfect.

Last week I clicked that my body needs to run, be strengthened and stretched.

Without trying to, I have clicked my way from a UK size 14 to a UK size 10.

And there was no suffering involved.

I’m more and more convinced that the best way to get into shape is through insight. 

And that you don’t get insights by being mean to yourself.

Sudden realisations and aha moments come when you get out of your way. 

It comes when you start seeing that you have created a reality for yourself for years and that “reality” is often just a figment of your imagination.  (With me, I was convinced I needed sugar in everything I ate, that I had to have wine to be mellow, and that I had to be perfect to be worthy.)

Having an insight is a bit like a butterfly landing on your hand.  It’ll come when you’re peaceful.

It’ll come when you’re listening out for the still, quiet voice that knows what’s good for you. 

It’ll come when you’re talking to someone who loves you. It’ll come when you feel safe and heard.

It’ll come when you stop running and trying and grasping and thinking and rushing.

It starts by being kind to yourself, instead of judging yourself.

It starts by having faith in yourself, by being grateful for everything you have and by looking after yourself.

It starts by stopping.

You could even start by cooking delicious food and enjoying it.

Let me know how it turns out.

Three things I cooked this week that were yum yum delicious:

Leek and potato latkes

6 largish potatoes peeled and grated

2 leeks grated

3 tablespoons flour

2 eggs

Half a teaspoon baking powder

Salt and pepper

Mix and place in a sieve and encourage water to leave the batter. You don’t have to go crazy. Gravity will do most of the work.

Fry in lots of hot oil

Michelle’s baked cod with crème fraiche and zatar

Dab bits of butter on cod fillets. Bake uncovered in hot oven (200 degrees) for 10 minutes.

Let fish cool down. Cover with crème fraiche and sprinkle with zatar.

Put back in oven for 15 minutes. Check fish for doneness. If cooked through take out and serve.

Thai chicken curry soup

One tin coconut milk

2 teaspoons lemon grass paste

1 piece of ginger (size of two thumbs) sliced small

3 kaffir leaves crushed

1 chicken breast per person eating – chopped up small

5 tablespoons nam pla (fish sauce)

2 tablespoons sugar

Half a lemon squeezed per person eating

A sprinkle of dried chilli flakes

One teaspoon per person Thai red curry paste

Mix white basmati (one a half cups) and wild rice (half a cup) and cook with 3 cups water.

Boil the chicken pieces in one cup coconut milk, kaffir leaves, lemon grass paste and ginger for four minutes. Add rest of coconut milk and boil for another 3 minutes.

For each person eating: in a bowl mix the lemon juice and the red curry paste. Add a ladle of the ckicken coconut mix on top. Add a half a cup of rice. Stir. Sprinkle with chilli flakes.

Add chopped coriander if you have it/want it.

Es gesunteheit.

I love Yotam Ottolenghi

I love his two cookbooks (The Cookbook and Plenty) and his restaurant Nopi and how he tweets.  I love his way with sesame seeds, capers and Dijon mustard.

I love the recipes he publishes in the Guardian magazine.  I try them every week.

So last week while I was chopping up the ingredients for his Vietnamese Beef Salad, I thought about the difference between him and me.

His people are German and Italian.

My people are Litvak and Litvak.

He comes from a food tradition of refined abundance and I come from a food tradition of primitive austerity.

His people’s food traditions taste good, and my people’s food traditions drew the short culinary straw.

Chopped herring, helzel, ptchar and teiglach are foods that are hard to make and hard to love.

But that’s too bad.

This is what I’ve inherited.   It’s a tradition of simple food made from the cheapest cuts and two or three basic ingredients.

There were no preserved lemons in the stores of Dvinsk in the Nineteenth century.  There was no coriander or fennel seeds to be had in Pinsk. Though apparently there was flour, sugar and onions.  And whole chickens, un-plucked and unprocessed.

I don’t live in Dvinsk in the nineteenth century.  Like the great Ottolenghi himself, I live in London now in 2011, cooking with a wider range of ingredients and food experiences than my ancestors ever had.

I like how freedom tastes. But I wonder if I will be the last person on earth who knows how to make Kichel.

Kichel

3 eggs

1 tablespoon oil

Half a tablespoon salt

Flour

Method:

Two secrets: the dough has to be very thin. The baking has to be watched because it burns very easily. Beat yolk whites separately, and then fold the yellow into the whites. Add salt, oil and flour to a good rolling consistency. Beat well after adding the oil, then beat in the flour.

Roll out thinly and cut into rectangles and place on an oil tray. Prick all over with a fork and sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 200 degrees until shiny and done.

Kichel are like crackers and are basically edible plates for chopped herring or chopped liver.

Essentials

When I was ten, I read a book called My Side of the Mountain.  It was about a child who runs away from home and survives in a forest by living off the land. I was so impressed with this story that I packed a sweet-tin with essentials. There was a safety pin, a pocket knife, salt and sugar in tinfoil wraps, some plasters, matches and a magnet.

I took my survival tin to school with me every day for over a year.  I kept it with me everywhere I went, until the sugar and salt came undone and made a mess at the bottom of my school-bag. 

I still have the pocket knife. And even though I am now a grownup, I still like to make imaginary lists of things I need to survive if I was to run away to a desert island.

These are my lists:

Ten kitchen tools I use every day:

Knife, cutting board, a frying pan, a pot, wooden spoon, Microplane grater, little whisk, spatula, peeler, juice squeezer.

Things in my kitchen at all times:

Butter, onions, milk, bread, lemon, sunflower oil, tinned tomatoes, eggs, barley, flour, potatoes, soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil, sugar, vinegar.

The real essentials that I try to carry with me:

They are love, memory, pleasure, hope, kindness and belonging.

The essential sense of belonging

I belong to the tribe of Litvaks who immigrated to South Africa over 100 years ago from cold, impoverished European Shtetls.

In my mind, I can see my grandparents on the boat as they land in Cape Town.   They are stunned at the beauty of Table Mountain.  They are relieved their long sea journey is over.  They are clutching leather suitcases that contain all their essentials: vests, socks, passports, photographs, prayer shawls, warm clothes and recipes for the food of their mothers.

The recipes are all that are left.

My grandmother’s teiglach

6 eggs minus one egg yolk

Two tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons brandy

Add enough cake meal or flour for soft, but not sticky dough.  Add a teaspoon of ginger.
Beat. Roll into little doughnut shapes and leave for two hours. (in the sun if possible)

Boil 1kg golden syrup, mixed with 3 cups of sugar and 3 cups of water.

Boil for ten minutes.

Lower them into the boiling syrup.
Leave them in for ten minutes.
Then uncover, wipe the inside of the lid to remove condensation,
stir quickly and then replace lid.
Boil for another 15 minutes with lid on. Stir again. Wipe again.
Replace lid and cook till brown stirring occasionaly. Remove from heat.
Add two cups of hot , strong black coffee, but not boiling.

Remove teiglach from pot.

Place them on wet board to dry and drain. Sprinkle with sugar.

Birth stories

What helped the most to prepare me for the birth of my first child?

Twenty years ago, every Wednesday morning, the Birth Unit of St John’s and Lizzie’s used to hold sessions to prepare women for birth.  I was lucky enough to be part of those sessions.

After yoga, we would eat a delicious, home-made lunch, and the pregnant women would listen to the stories of the women who had graduated to the other side.  The swollen, uncomfortable women would listen in awe to the experiences of women holding their tiny babies in their arms.

I learned that birth is intense and personal, and I heard stories of unique journeys to new lives and different selves.   

It also helped that I had experienced the mind-set necessary to keep going a bit more even when the exercise hurt. And, most important of all, I knew not take the pain personally.

What’s the pain like?

You know when you’re running or doing a press-up and you’re in that place where you can’t do any more and it hurts and you want to stop?  And then you hold yourself there and you keep going?

That’s what the pain is like.  Then it stops and you have a rest with no pain for a bit. And you recover and then you start again.  And as the pain builds, your ability to cope builds.

In the end, the last five contractions say, you feel like your head is coming off.

But it doesn’t start like that. No, it starts gentle and you think, look at me. I can do this. Now that stage is just the beginning and in no way resembles what’s coming.

It builds up and up and it breaks you down, till you are an animal, without politeness. The layers of up-bringing are stripped back and you are laid bare to your essential animal body. The pain is just a way to get you there, to the place where you don’t care and you can do what you need to do to get that baby out of your body and into life. It’s not pretty.

What helped me the most during the birth?

Focus was what got me through. Anything that supported my concentration helped me, which is why I needed complete privacy, quiet, dim light and a fully-functioning brain. Sometimes I needed help concentrating.

What was I concentrating on?

The outbreath was my salvation. In the face of the rising pain of the contraction, I breathed out slowly and consciously through pursed lips.

For my first two births, I also moved my hand in circles over my thighs as I breathed out. I did four breath circles on the right side, then four breath circles on the left side. I also kept my eyes open for half and closed for half. Weird I know, but it helped me visualise and find my place in the contraction.  I knew when I was half way and how far I had to go.

And in the bliss of the no pain between contractions, I was so relaxed I think I fell asleep sometimes. I used that time to recover and prepare myself for the next one.

What made things go faster?

It helped being in deep water and for two of my births, having my membranes broken.

How it looked on the outside?

I was quiet and concentrating intensely.  I probably also looked quite silly.

How it felt on the inside?

I had complete faith in my gifted obstetrician Yehudi Gordon, in my skilled midwife Patricia Scott and in my powerful body.

This is the birth story of my first, precious daughter:

Two weeks after my due date, I had mild contractions one night that went away during the day. When it really hurt the next night, I went to the hospital. I was only one cm dilated so the hospital sent me home again. We didn’t have a car, so we went by taxi.

What followed was a night of terrible pain alone in my bed. I coped by doing a complicated breathing dance (see above) but I panicked sometimes, forgot to breathe and then it all fell apart.

At seven the next morning I insisted on going to the hospital. When we got there, I was fully dilated. 

At 12.40 I pushed a tiny baby girl out into the world. In between, through the standing and the squatting, through the pool and the bed, through stage 1 and stage 2, through the pain and the panic, I kept breathing.

That was 18 years ago.  Last Sunday afternoon, she went to University.

I’m still breathing.

What your child with ADHD wishes she could tell you

Dear Mom,

You’re never going to fix me.

All the shouting, lectures and punishments in the world, are never going to make me learn to be organised and focused.  I’ll never be person who doesn’t lose things and follows things through, the way you want me to.  

It just makes me feel bad about myself when you do that.

I can feel bad about myself without any extra help, thank-you.  I live in a world of competent, well-organised people who seem to know where their things are and what they’re doing at all moments. At school and at home, I compare myself daily to these perfect creatures that never seem to put a foot wrong.

I can feel you get irritated when I lose my bus-pass (again)  I can see your disappointment with my performance at school.  I know you get worried when you think about my future.  I know you think that if you don’t fix me, I’ll wonder around in a lost, fuzzy cloud forever.  You worry if you don’t teach me to take responsibility for myself; I’ll never function properly as an adult.  

But you’re so busy worrying about me and trying to fix me,  that you don’t give me what I really need.

So how can you help me?

Get my medication sorted, please.  (And don’t have any second thoughts about it. The pharmaceutical industry has really come through for me on this one.)

Encourage me to exercise regularly, to eat properly and get enough sleep. (Because weirdly, that’s what I really need)

Teach me about Mindful meditation (and do some yourself).

You know that one thing I do really well? The singing or writing or dancing or playing the guitar or acting thing that I am really good at. Facilitate that for me to the max.  I need to do something I’m easily good at (and one day, I could make a living out of it. You never know.)

But this is the most important thing you can do for me: show that I’m loved, even though I make mistakes.

Tell me that I’m loved as I am now, unfixed. Convince me that I am loveable as I am, without the grades and prizes my siblings bring home. 

Be willing to let go of who you think I should be, and see me for the wonderful creature that I am.

For a moment today, let go of your vision for me, and see me as I really am.

See the party-bringing, buzz-seeking, gifted, interesting, unique and loveable phenomenon that I am. 

Let go and let love.