For the Soul
Chicken soup connects me with my own past – family, childhood, memory – and places me within the broader scope of community wistfulness – longing for an imagined, idealized past. I’m not the only Jewish vegetarian who still wants the comfort and culinary nostalgia of chicken soup.
But lest we forget, Jews aren’t the only ones see chicken soup in that light.
Chicken soup isn’t biblically Jewish in the way matzo is, or even ritually Jewish the way challah is. There’s nothing about it that uniquely identifies chicken soup as Jewish as opposed to belonging to any other ethnic or ethnoreligious group. It’s Jewish editors who proclaim chicken soup to be among the 100 Most Jewish Foods; it’s Jewish scholars who wrote we ought to look more closely into chicken soup as a quintessentially Jewish food. We’re possessive of comfort, claiming something shared and recognizable: whether eaten from scratch only for Shabbat or a can every day, whether documented through a throwaway line in an old Yiddish play or a recipe in a community cookbook. Chicken soup fits in the mainstream but can remain distinctive, making it a perfect symbolic fit for the Jewish American community – hence Stock Images.
Through the essays and documents in this project, I’ve presented an exploration of Jewish American cultural history using chicken soup as a prism to reflect continuity and change. As Jewish womanhood entered the public sphere, as the kosher industry nationalized, and as my generation recreates Ashkenazi mainstays, chicken soup illustrates what it means to maintain Jewish identity while acquiring an American one. Jewish America transformed over just a few short generations from ethnic immigrant other to white middle class American – and chicken soup also represents how the latter can yearn for the former.
Key themes of nostalgia and gender weave through Stock Images, just as they play central roles in the Jewish American community and in my life. That leads me to end with how this project began: my grandma.I know master’s projects often come with acknowledgements sections, and, of course, this work is in debt to faculty who provided incredible support and research leads, family who offered motivation and consideration, and friends who held me accountable and found value in my work. But this project – which has sat on the burner at a low simmer for so many months – would not have been possible without the initial spark of inspiration of my paternal grandmother and her soup chicken.
This is going to sound dark, but I really thought my grandmother might die while I wrote this project. She's been incapacitated by dementia for the better part of my adult life: as I write this, she’s bedridden but fortunate enough to have round-the-clock care.
I'm lucky that one of my last memories of my grandma was her as herself. It was after I returned from Birthright, the ten-day exploration of Jewish identity in Israel-cum-nationalizing project. It was right after I graduated from Duke and before I knew what would be next for me. She was proud and excited to hear about my trip, and I remember distinctly talking about the potential of graduate school with her – she was in favor of any additional learning.
Even though in this project, I recognize her as related to family and making bland chicken soup, it's a disservice to not recognize her other contributions. Some of that includes baking the most delicious mandelbrot and pumpkin cookies. Some of that includes being the transcriptionist for my grandfather’s Holocaust memoir. Some of that includes being the secretary of her homeowners’ association in a suburban-dream-golf-course-cookie-cutter-pastel community. Some of that includes her professional career as a librarian – and what I wish is that I had asked her more about was her own work in the archive world; she briefly lived just one mile away from the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.
But I don’t know how much she would have shared without prompting; I think the memory I have of my grandmother as being, well, Jewish grandmotherly fits exactly how she presented through her life. Her gender performance was so coded as traditionally feminine, her daily life governed by frugality, her way of walking through the world on tiptoes acquiescing to my grandfather. She was a Jewish Mother emulating the Yiddishe Mama, even though she held graduate degrees and spent her life in the workforce. She upheld an artifice of Old World despite her own modernity and Americanness. She cooked tradition and lived nostalgia.