Quercus Suber and the Screwtop

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All this time we’ve been together and we haven’t once talked about cork. Can you believe it? No, I can’t either. The truth is, I planned to write about cork 11 months ago, and then something else popped into my head and drove it out. I really must buy a larger-capacity memory stick.

I’ve been pulling corks out of wine bottles for the last half-century, without giving a moment’s thought to the interesting questions: Why do they use cork to seal wine bottles? Where does the cork come from?

I’m guessing you erudite lot don’t think cork is off-topic; just in case you do, let me tell you that Portugal is the world’s largest producer of cork, being responsible for 49.5% of annual production worldwide. Another 30.5% comes from Spain, and the remaining 20% comes from other European and North African countries in the western half of the Mediterranean basin, whose temperate climate is ideal for these trees.

You don’t have to be in Portugal long to discover the cork trees, or cork oaks, as they are properly known, or quercus suber (which is ‘cork oak’ in Latin and therefore posher), or, in Portuguese, sobreiro. Although the main concentration is in the South, the trees are cultivated as far north as Penamacor, where they can easily be spotted in the mixed-tree forest. 25% of Portugal’s total forest area consists of cork trees.

In the south, over a million hectares are covered by the montado system, an ecologically balanced multi-functional agro-silvo-pastoral system, which has existed for over 1300 years; during all that time, the oak trees have been protected by law, and a Government permit is needed to fell any cork oak.

This three-function ecology, supporting agricultural crops, fruit-bearing trees (the oaks’ acorns) and also grazing land, ensures the continued viability of the soil, acts as a barrier to the desertification encroaching from the south, and produces over a billion dollars in export value of natural and agglomerated cork, making cork Portugal’s sixth most valuable export.

Being an evergreen, the cork oak also photosynthesises throughout the year, and captures an estimated 73 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of cork harvested. As if that were not enough, the cork forests provide a habitat for more than 130 different species of vertebrates and about 95% of all land mammals in Portugal, including the Iberian lynx that I encountered, stuffed, in Penamacor’s museum.  

As a result of all this, the montados are recognized as one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world and have UNESCO-protected status. In addition, the cork oak was officially designated Portugal’s national tree in 2011.

There are two final environmental boxes that cork ticks.

The harvested cork retains the ability to absorb carbon dioxide, so your unvarnished cork noticeboard is actually helping the planet.

Because of its cell structure, cork does not burn easily. In addition, it produces no flame. It is, therefore, a very good fire retardant, which, in Portugal, is a significant advantage. You may remember I wrote many months ago about Portugal’s recent spate of forest fires.

Now, I’m the kind of person who can recognize a Christmas tree, even without fairy lights (although I can’t tell my spruce from my pine), a horse-chestnut (after a youth heavily invested in conkers), an olive (you can’t walk 50 yards in Maale Adumim without tripping over the roots of an olive tree), a loquat (we have one in our garden) and a cypress (we used to have one in our garden till it started encroaching on the flight-path of passing planes)….and…and…and that’s about it. However, I quickly learnt to recognize the cork trees around Penamacor, at least the mature ones, because of the extraordinary nature of the tree and the way the cork is harvested.

Cork is basically an outer bark of the tree. It can be stripped away, leaving the inner bark, without damaging the tree, and the tree then produces new cork, growing a new outer skin. The stripping of the cork is strictly regulated by law; only a mature tree (at least 25 years old) can be stripped; the width of the band stripped from around the tree cannot be more than three times the diameter of the tree; a tree cannot be stripped more often than once every nine years.

Since the trees have a lifespan of under 200 years, on average a tree will be stripped 17 times in its lifetime. The first and second strippings of virgin cork do not have a sufficiently regular structure, and are too hard, to be used for bottle corks. They instead are used for tiling and decorative items.

Let me illustrate how you can (at least, how I) identify a cork oak tree; it’s the one showing a lot of leg. The number that you can see on the tree in the foreground records the year in which the cork was stripped. Every year, one ninth of the trees are stripped, and this tree is from the last year of the nine-year cycle. (If you stand close, you can almost hear it shouting: ‘ I am not a number; I am a free tree’.)

So that’s the ‘Where from’; what about the ‘Why’?

Cork has a honeycomb cell structure which gives it remarkable insulating properties.  It’s flexible, compressible and elastic as well as lightweight, impermeable, durable and hypoallergenic. All of this makes it an ideal material for sealing a bottle of wine. And yet….

For white wines, and other wines designed to be drunk young, a completely airtight seal is ideal. This can be provided by an aluminium cap (screwtop). To the best of my understanding, if you keep your white wine for any length of time before opening, a screwtop might be the most reliable way of retaining the full flavour of the wine.

However, many reds are bottled in the expectation that they will mature in the bottle, and they are only ready to drink some time later, and may indeed reach their prime several years later. For this maturation in the bottle to occur, the wine needs to be exposed to some air…but not too much. If the right cork (and I believe this is a function of the exact degree of elasticity and compressibility of the cork, the tightness of the honeycomb ‘weave’) is married to the right wine, then natural cork does a better job than any other material of helping the wine achieve its full flavour.

The big disadvantage of cork is that it can (in a small percentage of cases) taint the wine, so that the wine becomes ‘corked’. How it does that is interesting. Cork, like any wood material, attracts fungal micro-organisms. If the cork has been exposed to certain chlorinated compounds (sometimes used in pesticides), these compounds can combine with the fungal micro-organisms to create TCA, which can be retained in the cork and later dissolved into the wine. While completely harmless and odourless in itself, this TCA can then distort the way our brain perceives smell, and make the wine taste, to us, like mouldy newspaper or wet dog. ‘I’m picking up notes of underripe strawberry and previously flooded basement.’ Remarkably, some people can detect TCA at one part per trillion, which is the equivalent of one thousandth of a teaspoon in an Olympic swimming pool.

However, just as chemistry created this problem, chemistry can resolve it. If you open a bottle at home and find it corked, pour the wine into a bowl lined with cling film. Leave for a few minutes while the non-polar TCA molecules are drawn to the chemically-similar plastic. Decant the wine from the bowl and you will find the essence of soggy doggy gone. (In a restaurant, of course, you simply summon the sommelier and inform him that the wine is corked. If the restaurant does not have a sommelier, you call over the waiter and tell him it stinks.)

Synthetic ‘corks’ avoid this problem, but do not have the same subtly imperfect hermeticity, and therefore cannot be matched as well with great reds.

So, that’s more than you may have wanted to know about cork.

There’s just one more piece of business today. A couple of weeks ago, some of you were impressed by Tao’s skills at breaking into kitchen cabinets. You will be interested to know that he has, since then, upped his game considerably.

To forestall any comments:

  1. Tao is entirely self-taught; he learnt this skill purely through observation.
  2. There are no caustic products in that cupboard. The washing powder and other products are home-made and not hazardous.

Nevertheless, I think we’ll be returning those child-proof locks and asking for our money back.

There’s Old….and Then There’s O-o-o-ld

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You find me in a dilemma. In recent months, I have, I hope, served well those of my readers who are happy to follow me along any whimsical byway. However, those who demand that I give at least a passing nod to my ostensible subject – Portugal (as is more than suggested by the blog’s witty title of Penamacorrespondent) – are, by this stage, probably feeling cheated. What am I to do?

My fund of anecdotes about personal encounters with Portugal is exhausted; until Bernice and I manage to get there again, I have only two choices. I can make stuff up (tempting, but rather risky, having already learnt the hard way what an erudite lot you are), or I can Google. So, this week’s post comes to you freshly but shamelessly milked from the internet; it will, of course, be filtered through the distorting lens of my particular and peculiar perspective.

Today’s basic fact, then, is that Portugal is old. I realise that this bald statement needs a little elaboration and context, so let’s talk about Montreal. When I started working as a technical writer, my first business trip abroad was to Montreal. When I mentioned this to friends and work colleagues, all the North Americans assured me that I would love Montreal because it was so old.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I certainly hadn’t thought this through, but, when I had a chance to look around the city a little, it wasn’t quite what I had been led to expect. There were a couple of charming corners, but it was mostly just a modern city. It was only when I had made several further trips across the Atlantic, and seen St Louis, Dallas, Seattle, Atlanta, and other cities, that I understood. For a North American city, Montreal is indeed unusually old. However, for a European who knows London, Paris or Budapest, Venice, Florence or Rome, Montreal is nothing very special. There’s old, and then there’s o-o-o-ld.

Since I count some ex-Montrealers (by birth or adoption) among my regular readers, I should hastily add that, over a number of later trips, I grew very fond of the city, resenting only the fact that on my winter trips (and, let’s face it, most trips to Montreal are winter trips, whenever you go), my eyebrows tended to freeze up.

It strikes me that different countries, different cities, wear their age differently. Almost all of my travel has been on business, to major cities, and my opportunities to explore have usually been restricted to one Sunday, or sometimes just one evening. This means that I have a snapshot of each city. Let me share some of those subjective, undoubtedly extremely incomplete, snapshots with you, and see how many other readers I can antagonize.

First, the difference between Athens and Rome. Athens was, for me, an unexceptional, shabby city, with rundown neighbourhoods apparently inhabited by men in vests and stray dogs. The Acropolis feels completely divorced from the city. However, I must say that, even though when I climbed it I discovered the Parthenon clad, mid-renovation, in scaffolding, I still found it to be a magical place that transported me back two and a half millenia, and allowed me to completely forget the city beneath.

On the other hand, the thread of Rome’s history is woven into the very fabric of the modern city. If you walk the city at night, every time you turn a corner you discover another church, or fountain, or ruin, stunningly but tastefully lit; you have a sense of a beautiful city that had a continuous and long-running historical importance.

Then there is Dublin, where you find isolated pockets of Georgian architectural splendour, single magnificent buildings or entire elegant streets: all memorials to the brief period at the end of the 18th Century when Ireland enjoyed prosperity. Of the centuries of poverty and obscurity on either side of that brief period, nothing much remains. From 1800, the city appears to have leapt to the 1990s, and a brief period of EU prosperity and expansion.

Of course, there is also London, where there are a mere handful of national treasures from before the Great Fire of 1666 – including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and Guildhall – but a wealth of glorious architecture from every period since 1666, starting with Wren’s churches. There are streets in Central London that you can walk down and view fine examples of architecture from every century from the 17th to the 21st. Whether you regard that as a ghastly mishmash or a glorious riotous celebration is a matter of taste.

Which brings me to Jerusalem, and Israel in general. London’s divider, 1666, is a very thin line; Israel’s is a great swathe. In Israel, if you find anything more than 120 years old, it will almost certainly be more than 2000 years old. The presence of the distant past is inescapable. Scarcely can a road be laid or an underground carpark built without some archaeological find being uncovered. Just in the last few weeks, a prehistoric copperworks has been unearthed, which may contain the earliest known example of a smelting furnace in the world. So far as distinctive city architecture is concerned, Israel’s World Heritage masterpiece is the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, Israel’s first modern city.

Ah! I was supposed to be writing about Portugal, wasn’t I?

While Portugal cannot compete with Rome, or Jerusalem, it is old. As you explore its towns and cities, you can see buildings, intact or in ruins, that reflect the centuries of its history. As I have written earlier, Penamacor itself shows evidence of the last 900 years of occupation. Indeed, there is an important archaeological dig going on there at the moment.

Portugal is the oldest nation-state in Europe, in the sense that it has had the same borders since 1139, when Alfonso Henriques was proclaimed the first King of Portugal. England could have been a contender for this title; sadly it has been, in contrast to Portugal, unable to sit still over the last 400 years; instead it has been fiddling around, adding Wales and Scotland here, Ireland there, and then losing most of Ireland again. Throughout all of these upheavals, Portugal has remained constant and unchanging.

When you’ve been around that long, you acquire some other age records along the way. The English first gave military aid to Portugal in 1147, during the Siege of Lisbon, which ended with Portugal taking Lisbon from the Moors. After thinking about it for over 200 years, the two countries eventually signed the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in 1373. Since then, they have been coming to each other’s aid against such common enemies as Spain, France and Germany. Even in the Second World War, when Portugal carefully maintained neutrality, it offered significant humanitarian assistance to Allied civilians and some logistic assistance to Allied military forces. The Alliance still stands, and is the oldest extant diplomatic alliance in the world.

Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon is the oldest bookstore in the world. It has been trading since 1732 (beating the Moravian Bookshop in Pennsylvania by 13 years). Of course, Bertrand has not been in the same premises all that time: It was forced to move in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, and has only been in its current premises since 1755.

And, finally, Portugal was the world’s first genuinely global empire. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas gave Portugal the eastern half of the New World, including Brazil and parts of Africa and Asia. Portugal’s empire actually lasted from 1415, when Cueta, a port on the Northern coast of Morocco, was captured, until 1999, when Macau was handed over to China.

The more I read about Portugal, the more it seems to have in common with Britain. There’s even the explanation of how Portuguese Jewish exiles brought fried fish to England (via Holland). The breadcrumb batter served to make palatable the fish that was fried on Friday to be eaten cold on shabbat.

The Doting Grandfather

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You can’t say I’m not giving you fair warning this week, with that heading.

One of the things on which Bernice and I agree to differ is competitiveness. She used to remonstrate: ‘It’s only a game!’, until she realized that I had no understanding of what the word ‘only’ meant in that sentence. In the early years of our marriage, when we had no children and boundless energy (and I had two working hips), we used to play badminton regularly. However, it was never an entirely satisfying experience for either of us, because I couldn’t ‘enjoy’ the game in the way she wanted, and she couldn’t take the game as seriously as I wanted.

Those of you who don’t hail from Britain may be unfamiliar with the observation of Bill Shankly, a very successful football (soccer) managers of the 1960s, who said (or, my research suggests, didn’t exactly say, but it’s a great quote, genuine or not): ‘Some people say that football’s a matter of life and death, but it’s much more important than that.’ Well, I don’t actually agree about football, which has always left me cold, but I applaud the sentiment as applied to competitive sport in general, and, indeed, competition of any kind.

One measure of the magnitude of Bernice’s devotion to family is the fact that, after both of our kids had inherited my competitive gene (‘I’m more competitive than you!’ ‘No, you’re not! I’m much more competitive than you!’), she participated with scarcely a word of complaint in years and years of board games, charades and trivia quizzes. Indeed, even through those stormy teenage years (mine lasted until well into my forties), we were always the family that would play together to stay together.

I’ve always had a fairly good general knowledge, or at least I did have until I put it down somewhere, and now for the life of me I can’t remember where. I’ve also always been interested in finding out the answers to things I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember. These days, to do that all you need is an internet connection and a nose for distinguishing between fake news and fact; where (and when) I come from, you needed a good reference library.

Of course, I realise now that distortion, misrepresentation, and pure invention did not start with the internet. I was for several years the proud owner of a handsome volume entitled The Commonwealth Annual 1963, full of informative articles about the far-flung islands of civilization that Britain had established among the barabarians. When, a few years ago, I revisited this book for the first time in 40 years, I turned into the deeply ashamed owner of it, with its colonial condescension and cancelling of indigenous culture…and then I binned it.

Fortunately, for us the importance of a good reference library has not been completely eclipsed by Google. If you are Shabbat-observant, then none of those thorny questions that arise over the Shabbat dinner table can be resolved on the spot online. Your only options are to wait until after Shabbat (and you probably don’t need me to tell you that the challenge then is to remember what the hell it was that you didn’t know six hours previously) or to refer to your reference library in real time. Among my favourite volumes in our particular library is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, whose every entry is a miniature enlightenment. Here’s the entry on tawdry, for example:

A corruption of St Audrey. At the annual fair of St Audrey, in the Isle of Ely, cheap jewellery and showy lace called St Audrey’s lace was sold; hence tawdry, which is applied to anything gaudy, in bad taste, and of little value.

Many’s the time that I’ve been able to satisfy our curiosity as to the origin of, say, raining cats and dogs, which, by the way, has nothing to do with household pets being washed out of their beds in the thatched eaves of a medieval dwelling.

Let me attempt to steer this ramshackle carriage back towards my intended subject. I remember Micha’el telling me a few years ago that he still remembered the shock he felt when he first discovered that I didn’t know everything. Knowing me, I would have expected that to be a humiliating moment for me. And yet, it was a moment that gave me immense pleasure: recognizing that your parents don’t know everything is an important step on a child’s journey to autonomy.

In a similar vein, I fought as hard as I could to win any game I played with the children; nobody could ever accuse me of throwing a match in order to let my kids feel good. What that meant, and what I wanted it to mean, was that when they did beat me for the first time, at tennis, or chess, or snakes and ladders, or uno, they knew that they had beaten me on equal terms. These are the only contests where I have accepted defeat with equanimity, and even delight. To be outstripped by your children, it seems to me, is one of the great pleasures of parenthood.

These days, of course, I have long since ceased to be a worthy opponent: here I am, a physical wreck, whose knowledge of popular culture ended in the early 1980s, and whose grasp of academic subjects ended much earlier. Good grief: the school I went to didn’t even teach biology; the only ‘respectable’ sciences were physics and chemistry. These days, I know that Micha’el’s grasp of quantum mechanics far outstrips mine. (To be honest, I don’t actually have a grasp of quantum mechanics.) We knew Esther had left us behind when she started her master’s in Glocal Development, and we gently told her there was no such word as glocal.

However (and here we reach today’s subject), I had thought I would have a bit of time before I needed to be worried about being outsmarted by Tao. Our grandson is, after all, not quite 19 months old. And yet…

For Bernice and I, the highlight of our week is a video chat via WhatsApp with the kids every Thursday. As well as catching up with any news, it also gives us a chance to spend time with Tao. In the last few months, his engagement has grown, and he is now a very active, and pro-active, participant in the conversation, even though he is not at all verbal: vocal, yes, with a variety of animal sounds and a few sounds of letters, but, for the moment, he substitutes grunts for words.

He also has a limited repertoire of songs of which he is excessively fond. On Thursday, almost as soon as we started our chat, he ‘said’: ‘I wonder if you would mind singing for me: The wheels on the bus.’ Rather than me trying to describe just how he conveyed that message, Tao kindly agreed to demonstrate for you.

Just in case this is a song that has slipped under your radar, its primary thrust is: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round…’You get the idea!

Of course, like the doting grandparents we are, we obliged. This was doubly satisfying. Not only did Tao reward us with a generous round of applause when we finished, but we also earned Micha’el’s gratitude, since every time we sing it is one less time that he has to sing it that day.

We carried on our conversation and, a couple of minutes later, Tao rolled his arms again to indicate that he would like a reprise. How could we say no?

When he asked for a fourth time, I decided to apply some of that clever child psychology that I have learnt from my wife, who has a T-shirt with the totally accurate slogan: I’m a kindergarten teacher. What’s your superpower? I ignored his hand signals, and asked him whether he would like to show us a book or a toy. As he instantly turned and trotted off to his book cupboard, I allowed myself a moment of self-satisfaction. I have spent the last 25 or so years behaving like a matchbox – Keep away from small children – and here I was managing Tao like a pro.

When Tao came back and placed himself in front of the screen again, he had one of his favourite books, a Hebrew word and picture book. Without hesitation, he turned to the page with a picture of a lorry (truck), and pointed, pointedly, to the wheels. There I was, sucker-punched by a child just over a year and a half old; paradoxically, I couldn’t have felt prouder. Needless to say, Bernice and I treated him to a 5-star rendition, with 4 verses and harmonies, which, in fairness to Tao, earned us a big smile and another generous round of applause.

Grandparenthood: the dote to which there is no known antidote.

Temporarily Permanent or Permanently Temporary?

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I had intended to try to dredge up online something illuminating to say about Portugal, to satisfy those of you who claim to find an outsider’s view of Portugal more interesting than an insider’s view of my mind. However….

I am sitting writing this in my sukkah. If I’ve lost you already (my readership being to some extent heterogeneous), then you can get a quick background on the sukkah by reading the first four paragraphs here.

It’s noon on Sunday, so I’m feeling much less pressured than last week, and anyway sitting out under my schach and decorations feels very relaxing. Mind you, since many of my weeks at the moment consist of sitting outside doing very little it’s not easy to understand why this feels different. To explain why, let me tell you the history of our sukkot.

For our first year in Israel, we used the wood of our shipping crate to construct a sukkah on the balcony of our apartment on the absorption centre.

When we moved to a ground-floor apartment in Jerusalem, we bought a metal-frame, material-wall sukkah, three metres by two, which we erected on the grassed area outside our salon window. Until we put in French windows, accessing the sukkah involved negotiating kitchen steps placed on each side of the salon window, but it was all good fun…and we were much younger then.

Mind you, climbing through a modest salon window while holding a pot of hot soup or a tray of stuffed vegetables was a skill you had to start practising around four weeks before in order to be able to carry it off with aplomb on the night itself, all the while with a white linen serviette draped over your left forearm.

Now, in Maale Adumim, we are blessed with a backyard that is about five metres by four, walled on all four sides; it is therefore fairly well protected from the wind and outside noise. We are further blessed with a climate that allows us to eat outside for most of the year: in summer, breakfast and dinner; for some of the rest of the year, lunch.

Not long after we moved to Maale Adumim, we acquired a second sukkah, identical to the first. I then bought a couple of T-junction uprights, which enabled us to combine the two into a single four-metre-by-three sukkah, which fitted our backyard very nicely. In the years after the kids left home, erecting the sukkah became more of a challenge with each passing year, involving as it did bringing heavy rolls of bamboo schach down from Micha’el’s bedroom, and also taking the sukkah and schach-retaining planks down from their chest-high cradle in the backyard, then, after Sukkot, performing a weightlifting clean and aborted jerk to get them back into the cradle.

And so, two summers ago, when we were having the backyard turned into more of a garden, we decided to install a pergola. Not only would this give us much needed shade that would significantly extend the hours we could spend outside, but it could also double as a sukkah, solving the problem of what we were going to do when, at some point in the next fifty years, erecting a frame sukkah became too much for me.

The pergola extends over all but a metre-wide strip of the far end of the backyward; the existing walls act as the minimum three walls required for a kosher sukkah, and the wooden slats of the pergola act as schach. As an added bonus, there are no material walls blocking the light from the garden, so I now no longer need to rig up cables for lighting inside the sukkah.

These days, ‘building a sukkah’ means, for me, going up a ladder, lifting and replacing one slat from each row of slats across the entire width of the sukkah. This year, that took me 4 minutes, not counting decorating the sukkah.

Except, of course, that you have to count the decorating. Let me tell you about our decorations. Most of our friends decorate their sukkah modestly, showing impeccable taste. We have always favoured a style of decoration that I like to think of as Rococo-Gaudi. This is largely attributable to two of Bernice’s trademark characteristics. She is a sentimentalist hoarder when it comes to the children’s artwork, and she adores anything like the Blackpool illuminations. As a result, when the kids were young and came home from kindergarten every year with another one or more artwork decorations for the sukkah, these had to be added to our existing stock. Every year we would also buy another paper ball, or pomegranate, or other bauble.

I was once on business in Atlanta in early December, and found, in a Walmart, coloured, flashing Christmas lights. As I took them to the cash desk, an assistant manager came over to me, leant in, and said quietly: ‘Perfect for the sukkah.’ When I presented them to Bernice on my return home, her eyes lit up more brightly than the strings of bulbs.

One Sukkot in Jerusalem, a freak storm on the first night completely soaked our sukkah, and quite a lot of the kids’ artwork was lost. (It’s fair to say that this upset some of us less than others.) Since then, our decorations have been a little more sparse, but the untrained eye would probably not detect the difference.

A few years ago, Bernice finally allowed some further rationalization, and we put aside a lot of the decorations. However, we still have more than enough, and, to be honest, I am glad that we do. Now that we have a pergola, the only thing that distinguishes Sukkot – that makes our sukkah different from our pergola – is the decorations. We come into Sukkot having eaten under the pergola all summer; we need the decorations to make this week special.

Putting the decorations up under the pergola has presented a new challenge. We like to have paper chains and rows of small flags spanning the sukkah. I have drilled hooks into the walls at just over two metres above the ground, so that I can easily hook on the decoration strings while standing on a kitchen stool. However, with that long a span, the decorations sag in the middle. Since our pergola roof is unusually high, at 3.2 metres, I cannot attach decorations directly to the roof.

This year, I came up with a typically Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg) solution. I tied two equal lengths of nylon fishing line onto a metal washer, which I then ‘cast’ out of an upstairs window so that it landed on the roof of the pergola close to the centre. I then climbed a ladder, screwed an eye into the central roof strut in the centre, retrieved the nylon lines, untied them from the washer, threaded them through the eye and reattached them to the washer. With the line fully extended, it dangled at an accessible height above the ground. As I put up each span of decorations, I threaded it through this loop. When all was finished, I went back upstairs and reeled in the line, until the washer reached the eye, through which it was unable to pass.

At the end of sukkot, I will let down the line, unthread the decorations, and reel the line in again, so that, for all of the rest of the year, there will be a small eye and washer on the underside of the pergola roof, which would be unnoticed by anyone if I could only resist the temptation to point them out in order to demonstrate how clever I am. The photo gives you an idea of the final effect, and also gives you a view of Micha’el’s 28-year-old, rain-damaged, hand-drawn Israeli flags.

All of which explains, I hope, why I am unsure whether to regard our pergola-sukkah as permanently temporary or temporarily permanent.

Speaking of temporary permanence, Micha’el and Tslil have posted a new video on their YouTube channel documenting the erection of their tipi (which, when I was at school, was called a teepee). You may want to view, like, comment, share, subscribe, or all of the above.

Time for a meanwhile, I think. Looks like by this time next year Tao will be ready to go up the ladder for me, although I may suggest to him that he try it without holding a corn cracker.

Days of Awe…and Reflection

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What more appropriate way to start my first blog after Yom Kippur than by asking for your forgiveness! Or, perhaps, ‘What less appropriate…’, since I was required to ask forgiveness for all of my sins against my fellow man before the Gates of Heaven closed at sunset last night.

Be that as it may, my apologies to those of my faithful readers who, always to my astonishment, open my blog within 15 minutes of my posting it, ideally every Tuesday at 09:00 Israel, or 06:00 UTC.

Incidentally, what does UTC stand for? Universal Time Coordinated, or, if you prefer Universel Temps Coordonné. And just what is that supposed to be? Universal Time Coordinated is bad English; it should be Coordinated Univeral Time, or CUT. Equally, Universel Temps Coordonné is bad French; it should be Temps Universel Coordonné, or TUC. The explanation for ‘UTC’ lies in that word equally. When the International Communications Union decided to adopt UTC as the time standard to be used throughout the world, they wanted to avoid confusion by having one single set of initials adopted globally. They could not adopt CUT, or the Francophones would have been furious; they rejected TUC, because the Anglophones would have sent a gunboat. So they decided on a compromise which made equally little sense in French and English, and UTC it is. (Things were much easier when Britannia ruled the waves and we called it GMT.)

I can offer you an explanation for the delay in this post, although you may feel it is the equivalent of ‘The dog ate my homework’ or, as schoolchildren probably say in this corona world, ‘Our internet was down’.

Before Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) 11 days ago, when severe restrictions were imposed on maximum numbers allowed in synagogues, a neighbouring family volunteered their spacious backyard for a small minyan (prayer quorum). Bernice and I had previously decided that we were not going to shul; despite the extremely hard work done in preparation by the shul officials, it would, we felt, be very difficult to impose the restrictions on a congregation that, at this time of year, usually includes many who have no affiliation to the shul, and we anticipated some unpleasant arguments. (I’m delighted to say that, from what I have heard, everything passed peacefully.)

We had been planning to daven (pray) at home, which seemed, in prospect, to offer both swings – being able to daven at a pace that suited you individually, rather than being driven by the pace of the leader of prayers – and roundabouts – the New Year services include very many wonderful tunes, and being part of a 200-strong congregation all singing enthusiastically certainly enhances the atmosphere of the day.

In the event, we were able to attend a ‘shul’ just down the road. I have never lived less than a 15-minute walk from the shul I daven in – and always an uphill walk – so to leave the house four minutes before the service begins and still arrive a minute early is wonderful. (Mind you, I have never wanted to live round the corner from shul, since that usually means that you are the person the rabbi calls at 6 AM when they are one short of a minyan of 10 men for the morning service.)

Services over Rosh Hashana, Shabbat and Yom Kippur have been very special. On Yom Kippur morning, we began at 6:00, in the cool of early morning and cut many of the optional piyyutim (liturgical poems) that are usually sung. This enabled us to finish the morning and additional services at 9:40, and be back home before the real heat of the day. For comparison, our shul usually starts at 7:00 and finishes around 3:00. There has been considerable talk of whether, post-corona, when things get back to normal(!), we should aim to keep this streamlined davening. I suspect there will be advocates on both sides of the argument.

I must say that davening outside is a different and refreshing experience. Davening the closing service of Yom Kipper as the light dwindled and the air cooled certainly reinforced the sense of squeezing everything out of the last moments of the day, the last opportunity to make our voice heard on High.

The make-up of the minyan is also very interesting. The core, from our shul, is five or six men strong, and our numbers have been augmented by another five or six locals who are not only not members of our shul, but are Sephardi rather than Ashkenazi Jews. The differences in the liturgy are significant: on Shabbat, less so, but on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, more so. For most modern orthodox Israelis, this is not daunting: many Ashkenazi communities daven in a Sephardi-lite style, and the average person, through school, army, and workplace minyanim will have been exposed fairly often to both liturgies.

On the other hand, growing up in Britain, I scarcely knew what a Sephardi was. I had an aunt who had married a Sephardi, and I seem to remember that we attended my cousin’s barmitzvah at Bevis Marks Sephardi shul in London. This was, I should point out, in the Spanish-Portuguese tradition, as brought to England largely from Holland, whereas in Israel most Sephardi families are Mizrachi, coming from Arab countries in the early years of the State. So there are differences within the Sephardi world. I mean no offence in suggesting that the Spanish-Portuguese tradition is more High Church, and the Mizrachi tradition is Low Church.

Of that one service in Bevis Marks I remember nothing – although, in my defence, let me say that my cousin Ian is seven years older than me, which seemed a much greater difference on his thirteenth birthday, when I was not yet six, than it does now.

Apart from that, the extent of my first-hand experience of Sephardi liturgy before we came on aliya was hearing two Sephardi cousins in my brother’s community recite the longer, Sephardi, text of the mourner’s kaddish.

I still vividly remember our first shabbat on the absorption centre where we lived for the first 18 months after coming on aliya. I had heard that there was a minyan in a shelter on the absorption centre, so I looked no further. I walked in on Friday late afternoon, with my Ashkenazi prayer book, and found myself a seat just as the service was about to start. I didn’t recognize what was being recited, so I waited for the first words of Ashrei, with which I was expecting the service to begin. By the time Ashrei came, I had almost given up hope, and was wondering whether these people were Jewish at all. I had not known that, in the Mizrachi Sephardi tradition, Song of Songs is recited in full before the afternoon service.

To return to our neighbourhood minyan. While many men can capably lead the daily and shabbat services, leading the services on festivals, and especially on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, is more of a specialist role. Luckily, the host of our minyan is a wonderful leader of prayer, and I was anticipating very enjoyable services. A couple of days before, he approached me, pointing out that, of the congregants, only he and I had any experience of leading these services. He is a regular leader in our shul, and, at various times since we came to Maale Adumim, I have led services: the shorter evening and afternoon services on Rosh Hashana, and, when we were short of real experts, I have even tackled the longer and more demanding morning services.

However, I was younger then, arguably less riddled with self-doubt, and felt that I was among friends. Nevertheless, when our host asked if I would share the load with him, how could I refuse? So on Rosh Hashana I led the evening service both days (the one service I am most comfortable leading), and also the afternoon service, which required more homework, but not too much. All went well, so I’m told.

However, I had made it clear to him that on Yom Kippur, I was prepared to lead the afternoon service, but not the evening. This evening service includes the famous Kol Nidrei and is, in addition, a longer and far more complex service than any other evening service. At the end of Shabbat, he took me aside and said, quite reasonably, that he felt the burden of leading the evening and morning prayers would be too much for him, especially since we would be continuing into the heat of the day. I felt that I could not say no, much as I wanted to. Bernice assures me that I have once led this service in shul, but I’m not sure whether she just wanted me to feel less sick.

Having agreed on Saturday evening, I then had to devote all of Sunday to locating demonstration videos on YouTube, to refresh my memory of the liturgy and the tunes. As Sunday went on, I felt less and less sure of myself, and more and more queasy. To my relief, it was, so I’m told, ‘alright on the night’.

All of which explains why I was unable to write my blog on Sunday, as I had planned, and instead I am writing it on Tuesday morning/noon, with Yom Kippur behind us for another year.

While we have all been breaking out and exiting, to pray outdoors, our outdoors grandson seems more intent on breaking and entering. It’s never too early to learn a good trade!

Crossing the Border

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Over the last two days we have been celebrating the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashana – which naturally invites what is called in Hebrew a cheshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting. This can take many forms, partly depending on whether you are religious, and partly depending, it seems to me, on how far you are along life’s road.

This was, for Bernice and myself, a rather sobering Rosh Hashana, because of some very sad news that we heard on Friday, as we were preparing for the festival: a very good friend of many, many years, after a year of fighting cancer, had died. I have been wondering over the last couple of days just why this death, more than some others, has moved me so deeply. I think I have identified a few reasons, which I would like to share with you today.

Andy Golstein, of blessed memory, was one of that fairly small circle of friends whom we have known forever (55 years for me, 60 for Bernice) and whom we have stayed in contact with, more or less unbrokenly, for all of that time. She and Steve, her husband, were already an ‘item’ at Hanoar Hatzioni winter camp when I first knew them. We were very close until they came on aliya in the late 60’s. In the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur war in ‘73, Bernice and I volunteered for three months on the kibbutz where they then lived. When we holidayed in Israel in 1983, we met up with them. In the 34 years since our own aliya, we have seen them fairly regularly at parties, barmitzva celebrations, weddings, milestone birthday celebrations. Andy was one of a small group of people that, for us, had always been part of our personal landscape.

Andy was extraordinary, without being in the least exceptional. She was, quite simply, a lovely person: always smiling, always completely engaged with whoever she was speaking with, generous of her time and her hospitality, gentle and cheerful; I counted her as a very close and special friend, and I suspect that many, many others did as well, because that was how she made you feel. The world without Andy is a poorer, greyer, duller place.

She was also, in the deepest sense, a life partner of her husband. I never knew either of them without the other, and how Steve will cope with the loss I cannot imagine. Our sadness at our loss is compounded by our sadness at his loss.

There is, I think, another reason, more to do with myself than with Andy, and it was this that I really wanted to explore today. This is not the first time a close friend of mine has died. In 1968–69, I spent a year in Israel on a Zionist leadership programme, and became friends with another extraordinary person, a Canadian, Lyle Isaacs of blessed memory. This was a very intense year, and we spent a great deal of time together and became incredibly close.

As I reread my description of Andy above, I see that every element of that description fits Lyle as well. In addition, to quote from the Canadian Young Judea website, “To many of us, Lyle had the most to offer of all the human beings we knew in this world”. Those of you who did not have the privilege of knowing him will have to take my word for it that this is no exaggeration. The summer a year after we all returned from Israel, he died in a traffic accident. The news reached me at Summer Camp, where I was Camp Director, and the gaping hole I felt in my life was all the more painful because there was no one with whom I could share this loss: nobody else at camp had met Lyle. I felt utterly alone, and was devastated and not really able to function for the rest of that day.

And yet, Lyle’s untimely and senseless death did not cause me to reflect on my own mortality.

Twenty years later, a film, TV and stage actor called David Rappaport took his own life in California. You may well remember him from his starring role as the leader of the dwarves in Terry Gilliam’s film Time Bandits or in regular guest appearances as a criminal lawyer in LA Law. I had grown up with David, of blessed memory, and for a couple of years we were fairly constant companions at Hebrew classes in Ilford three times a week.

David was born with a form of dwarfism, and by age 10 or 11 was already markedly shorter than his contemporaries. However, I can honestly say that, in his company, I was never aware that he was different, and that is overwhelmingly because David himself seemed completely unconcerned by his dwarfism. I remember a very funny, very creative, very energetic boy, and, the last time I saw him, a very powerful Mosca playing opposite Paul Scofield’s Volpone on the London stage.

When I heard the news of David’s death, I was shocked, because of my memories of him being apparently at peace with himself, and because of his very successful subsequent career. However, again, possibly because of my age at the time (40), and possibly because of the circumstances of his death, I did not consider how his death reflected on my life.

Andy’s death has affected me in a completely different way. I suddenly realised that Bernice and I are now at a stage in our lives when we are much less likely to be making new friends, and much more likely to be losing old ones. This is a very sobering thought. Fortunately, we have several close friends who are younger than we are, and we can therefore expect (once we get to the other side of corona) to be celebrating with them, God willing, several more weddings.

However, the realistic expectation is that we will increasingly meet at funerals and shiva houses. I remember a friend of my late mother, of blessed memory, a woman who was blessed with a wicked sense of humour, remarking that she now knew more people in the Waltham Abbey Jewish cemetery than outside it.

A synagogue is a good place to see this natural development in action. The children of shul members who played outside when we moved to Maale Adumim 24 years ago are now married with children of their own, and when we reach the point in the service where mourners say kaddish, whereas 24 years ago there might be nobody to recite it, today there is usually a chorus.

So, I understand that this is part of the natural rhythm of life; however, that is a less uncomfortable fact to be aware of when you are at the beginning of the cycle than as you approach the end. I expect that I will, in time, adjust to this new (or, at least, newly realised) reality, but, for the moment, I can take comfort only from my mother’s mantra when people commiserated with her ill health: “Beats the alternative!”

The penultimate word, today, I leave to Ogden Nash. I couldn’t remember the title or exact wording of this piece of verse, so I looked through the 508 pages of his Collected Verse to find it, only to discover that it is, appropriately, the very last poem in the collection.

Crossing the Border

Senescence begins
And middle age ends
When your descendants
Outnumber your friends.

I take comfort from the fact that I still have more than three friends (assuming that those four people would agree that we are friends), while I only have three descendants. Fortunately, you can count descendants in quality as well as quantity, using which method Bernice and I have a whole world of descendants.

My Love Affair with the Fourth Estate

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That deep sigh of relief that you may be able to hear is me celebrating the fact that the latest edition of our synagogue magazine, has been edited, set, proofread and printed. As I write these words, it is being distributed in time for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, next weekend. I was ‘volunteered’ to edit this edition, and, while it was a stimulating and ultimately very satisfying experience, I can’t say I’m sorry that it’s over.

The bar had been set very high by the previous editor, and I was concerned about letting the side down (PC-speak for I was damned if I was going to have anyone say that I didn’t do a better job). We had some anxious moments, as, I’m sure, is always the case when people who want to ‘just buff up that aphorism a little, and maybe add another curlicue in the corner there’ bump up against a non-negotiable deadline like The Day of Judgement.

However, in the end, everything fell into place, and I’m actually very pleased with the result. Of course, when your synagogue membership includes several talented writers with something interesting to say, as well as a professional graphic designer, the editor’s job is made much simpler.

I find myself thinking back to my other three roles as editor, all over 50 years ago. In my youth, I thought about becoming a journalist. My mother arranged for me to meet a friend of hers who worked for (if I remember rightly) one of the London evening newspapers. I remember he said: ‘Well, the best thing you can do if you really want to be a journalist is sit down every day, start writing, and don’t stand up until you have written 2000 words. It doesn’t matter what you write about, but 2000 words, at one sitting, every day.’ Those of you who knew me aged 14 or 15 will realise that that was the day my journalistic ambitions died. It sounded way too much like hard work and iron discipline.

The irony, of course, is that, for the last 44 weeks (well, someone has to keep count, and I bet you haven’t been) I have sat down at the keyboard every Sunday morning and produced 1500 words, give or take. Perhaps it’s not too late for me to start a new career. I could buy a notepad, and learn Pitman’s during the second lockdown we are threatened with starting on Friday. I already have a fawn trenchcoat and a trilby.

My career as co-editor, co-writer, co-everything began when I was ten years old, when Peter, my very bestest friend in the world, and I decided to write a magazine to give out to our classmates. I can no longer remember the details of production, although I am guessing we might have drafted in my mother to type the copy up on Gestetner skins (if you’re under 50, you can google it), then beg to use the school’s duplicator to ‘run them off’. What I do remember is that the content of our magazine was (not even very loosely) modelled on the comics our parents allowed us to read.

So, not the Dandy or Beano, whose pages were populated by very naughty boys with catapults and grubby knees who either went around in gangs – The Bash Street Kids – or operated as loners – Denis the Menace.

Oh no; we were raised on the saintly trinity of The Swift, The Robin and The Eagle, in which chisel-featured Dan Dare, the Pilot of the Future, flew to Venus, and football captains rallied their team to an against-all-odds 11th-hour victory, while, at the turn of a page, plucky Cockney privates helped pipe-smoking RAF officers devise plans for escaping from a Nazi stalag. I particularly remember that we fashioned just such a hero, with his trusty companion. (We never discussed it, but I’m sure Peter and I each saw ourselves as the tall, handsome leader, and each saw the other as the slightly overweight sidekick.)

The details of the storyline are lost in the mists of antiquity, but I know that the intrepid duo were behind enemy lines, on a saboteur mission that would, if successful, change the course of the war overnight. Each week, we wrote our heroes into a tight corner from which there appeared to be no escape, and we went to press with no idea how we would extricate them; each following week, we managed to find a way. It was a real adrenaline rush, I can tell you.

If I make it sound as though this magazine ran for years, I apologise. I have a horrible feeling it folded after two issues. I do know that I would love to see a copy again, and, if Peter is reading this, I hope he has proved to be a better hoarder than I am.

My next venture into the world of Hearst, Beaverbrook and Murdoch was as the editor of the Hanoar Hatzioni newsletter, Batnua (Hebrew for ‘In the Movement’). Since we tried to produce this every month (with a national circulation that included groups as widespread as Liverpool, Swansea, Bournemouth, Middlesbrough), editorship involved a considerable amount of article-writing as well. I very much enjoyed both roles, except for the moment at which my hubris led to my downfall. Eager to flaunt what I thought of as my extraordinarily rich vocabulary, I wrote about ‘a plethora of opportunities’. Unfortunately, I thought ‘plethora’ meant, not an abundance, but a scarcity. I still blush at the memory, but at least I learnt early on to double-check in the dictionary before committing myself to print.

My last role as editor in my youth was of the school magazine, Chronicles. Let me assure you, this was a magazine that did what it said on the tin. (Incidentally, ‘It does what it says on the tin’ is an idiom that I assumed was fairly old, but I discovered a couple of weeks ago that it dates from 1995 only, when it was devised as an advertising slogan for Ronseal waterproof sealant.) Chronicles. Could there be a more leaden, self-important, stodgy title than that? (Incidentally, I just checked, and, 53 years on, my old school magazine is still published under the same magical name – if it’s always been broke, why fix it?) Faced with that title on the front cover, who would want even to glance inside? With its reports of school sporting achievements, comings and goings of staff, acquisition of equipment or new buildings, it said precious little that was not already known  by its readers, and even less that most of its readers would want to know.

However, the position of editor was quite a prestigious one, and would certainly look good on my final school report, and so I gladly accepted the position, which meant working, with a co-editor, under the close supervision of the Head of English, a teacher whom I respected and liked. The technical process of editing, and particularly the proof-reading of the galleys, I thoroughly enjoyed. I was at last working with a professional printer, who produced galley proofs on paper with wide margins for corrections and emendations, and with several pages printed beneath each other on long sheets of uncut paper.

However, what makes this experience really stick in my memory is what happened with my co-editor, John Fleming, a tall, soft-spoken and undemonstrative youth with whom I studied English and who I was friendly enough with, if only as a classmate. He wrote for the magazine a poem that was certainly of its time (the time being 1967), reflecting the then-current dalliance with Eastern cultures. The poem, of which I am sure I did not understand all the allusions, included a line that referred to ‘Buddha contemplating his navel’. On first reading this, our overseer, the Head of English, stepped in and stated categorically that the school magazine could not possible include as racy a word as ‘navel’, and he invited John to rewrite the line. (I swear to you that I am not making a word of this up, although I appreciate it may be hard to believe in 2020, when not an edition of the Times of London can appear, it seems, without one or other columnist writing ‘f***’ – albeit with the asterisks, but nevertheless.)

What makes this story even more worth retelling is that John, who had, up to this point, seemed to me the least swinging sixties of our entire cohort (even including myself), refused to accept the editorial decision. When he saw that the powers that be’d were unbudgeable, he withdrew the poem from the magazine, resigned his position as co-editor, walked out of school, never to return, left home and, as far as we were concerned, disappeared off the face of the earth. Over the next year or so rumours circulated that he had found a job writing for Private Eye, the scurrilously satirical magazine that was just about as cutting-edge as one could get in 1967, but we couldn’t quite manage to believe that.

Over the next 45 years, I occasionally found myself wondering where he had actually ended up, until, eventually, the internet developed to the point where even I could locate him. A single email ‘I saw your name and wondered if you could possibly be…’ sufficed to confirm that he was, in fact, a leading writer, producer, sponsor, promoter and chronicler and analyst of alternative comedy. His website gives a brief bio, which I only point you to so that you can appreciate that, while Renaissance European giant Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches (you may remember him from my post of Feb 4 this year) makes me feel like an under-achiever, at least he wasn’t in my class at school, and getting no higher marks than me for English. However, I certainly don’t begrudge John his achievement; it couldn’t have happened to a nicer, or more unexpected, guy.

Which leaves me, editing a synagogue magazine, and imagining myself as Clark Gable getting to share a room with Claudette Colbert, or possibly Robert Redford (listen, if I’m going to fantasize, then I’m hardly going to choose to be Dustin Hoffman, am I!) meeting Deep Throat in a dimly-lit underground car park.

Meanwhile (and you know what that means) here’s ‘Hold the Front Page’ Tao, rushing his copy to the editor. Dirty business, journalism, evidently.

My Madeleine

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An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory

For those of you who have difficulty recognizing this not in the original French, it is a quotation from À la recherche du temps perdu, (known in English translation as In Search of Lost Time (which sounds a bit like a Rider Haggard novel) or, more poetically, as Remembrance of Things Past (which, I have only just discovered, is a quotation from Skespeare’s Sonnet XXX). DON’T PANIC! THIS IS GUARANTEED TO BE THE ONLY MENTION OF THE S-WORD IN THIS WEEK’S POST.  We’re kicking off with a dollop of Proust today because I wanted to tell you about my own recherche for a particular temps perdu.

Just to refresh your memory, the passage above captures a moment of what Proust calls involuntary memory, in this case a moment when, biting into a madeleine (a shell-shaped small sponge cake), he remembers, in his childhood, being given a taste of his aunt’s madeleine dipped in tea every Sunday morning. The sight of the madeleine had evoked no memories, but the very first taste transports him instantly back.

Our story today actually begins deep in the countryside of rural West England (if my memory serves me correctly), in August 1965. I am, for the first time, a madrich (group leader) at Hanoar Hatzioni Zionist Youth summer camp, and it is Open Day (traditionally, the middle Sunday of camp). My parents, of course, are not there: my father has a kosher delicatessen and grocery store, and Sunday (his half-day!) begins around 5AM and ends around 3PM. However, the parents of one of my friends from Ilford are there, and they come over to me with a bulging brown paper bag. Inside, lovingly and individually wrapped in aluminium foil, are a dozen perfect, smooth, glossy baigels (which you can spell and pronounce any way you like, but, if you come from East London, they are spelt ‘bai…’ and pronounced ‘buy’), cut, buttered, and spread with the best smoked salmon in London. (Among his many skills, my father was a master slicer of smoked salmon. When we buy smoked salmon from the supermarket here, and I open the packet and see the great thick wedges of fish, I want to cry!) In a separate plastic bag are half-a-dozen smallish pickled cucumbers (pickled in a style we called new green). I like to flatter myself that my popularity at camp was due to my (then) sunny personality, quick wit and boyish charm; however, in all honesty, I was never more popular than on that day and on subsequent Open Days.

I have always been a sucker for a smoked salmon baigel. Of course, I had no idea, growing up, that smoked salmon was a luxury. In our household, smoked salmon was what was always there when there was nothing else in the fridge. Anyway (and here we start to approach my subject this week), one of the very, very few things that I miss in Israel is, ridiculously, the Jewish breads I grew up with. In additional to baigels, this includes platzels (which are almost – but not quite – identical to what are known in Israel as bagels), brown bread – or, more accurately – bra-a-hn bread (by which I mean, confusingly, rye bread with carraway seeds), and, to a lesser extent, black bread (which I suspect is identical to some breeds of pumpernickel).

And so, when I started baking my own bread, I set myself the challenge of finding recipes for, and reproducing, the baigels and platzels and brown bread of my youth. It was, I must confess, a long journey, including a number of blind alleys. I learnt the mysteries of lye, which some recipes recommend as the way to achieve the crisp crust of the baigel. However, I tend to be a little put off by any food recipe that includes the instruction: Now put on your goggles and protective gloves, and that points out that if you don’t boil in a stainless steel pot, the lye may react to create a poison. After several disappointments, and one or two very near misses, I found a recipe from Les Saidel, which made my hopes rise, and I was not disappointed.

A word about Les Saidel. I believe he is a biochemist by profession, but, having come on aliya from South Africa, he decided to pursue his passion for baking, ordered a brick oven from overseas, and opened an artisan bakery. His first serious venture was Rambam bread, using ingredients and techniques recommended by the Medieval Jewish scholar Rambam (Maimonides), who was also a physician and polymath, and who understood the importance of a healthy, balanced diet. Over the years, Saidel has expanded his business and now offers a range of hands-on workshops geared for the whole family, including Breads of the Temple, French bread, and Italian bread and pasta baking. His enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject are boundless, and the vast majority of the bread I bake is from his recipes.

To cut to the chase: the first time I followed Saidel’s recipe for platzels, I knew that I had struck gold. Over the next couple of months, some tweaking of the ratio of bread flour to whole grain flour brought me to the point where I felt I had recreated the texture and flavour I grew up with.

Using the same dough, but boiling in water, and baking for slightly longer, produced the baigels that I was looking for, which only left rye bread.

I must have tried seven or eight recipes, one of which was very tasty; but none was Proustian or madeleinish enough. Finally, in his occasional column in The Jerusalem Post, Saidel published a recipe for rye bread with caraway seeds. On the first baking, this hit the bulls eye. I was a happy man.

And then, as tends to happen, the seasons changed. Fortunately, by this time I had a sense of the correct consistency for the dough, so I was able to adjust the mixture, adding a little water or a little flour as needed, and shortening or lengthening the rising time, depending on how close our kitchen was to the old-fashioned airing cupboard where the immersion heater lived.  Of course, this sometimes means adding a little too much flour, followed by just a little too much water to compensate, and so on in a process that is almost the exact opposite of trying to even up a table by sawing a little off one of the legs.

Last week, I must confess, things went horribly wrong. We are currently in the grip of a horrendous heatwave; Jerusalem recorded its highest temperature since records began 78 years ago. I failed to make sufficient adjustment for that, and ended with a baigel dough that was too dry. This had two results. I roll the baigel dough into a shortish cylinder, then fold it over my palm and seal the two ends together. However, on this occasion, the dough was too dry to make a strong enough seal; in the boiling water, most of my baigels came unstuck. In addition, the dry dough puckered and rucked in the boiling water.

The finished baigels, while they taste fairly good, look very strange: if I painted them dark brown, they would look exactly like the fake ‘dog doings’ that joke shops used to sell.

I am still hunting for the perfect black bread. I have read that some pumpernickels use flour made from spent grains; these are the grains that are used in beer-making, the first stage of which involves putting grain in a muslin bag and immersing it in water heated to 70o C for 20 minutes. After that time, you remove the grains, drain them, and either feed them to your chickens (of which we have none now, and, even when we did have, we bought them dead, plucked, gutted and with their legs in the air), or put them in your compost-bin (which we don’t have), or dump in the rubbish. I always do that, but it seems a shame, and, when I read that you can bake with flour ground from spent grain, I was very excited. I then spent 15 minutes squeezing all moisture of the grain, two hours drying it in a very low oven, raking it every 20 minutes, and then another half-an-hour grinding it in the food processor (since we don’t have a coffee grinder or flour mill) until it reached a point where I was able to kid myself that it was coarse flour, rather than fine grain). To discover at the end of all this that I had only two cups of flour was rather a disappointment. I must say that it added a nutty complexity to the loaf I used it in, and a very ‘artisan’ texture; however, the game didn’t quite seem worth the candle. Nevertheless, when I next brew a stout,I might grind those darker, maltier grains, and steal a little of the liquid malt I use in my beer (which should darken the colour of the bread and add some sweetness) and see whether I get close to a black bread.

If all the above sounds like a long, often disappointing struggle, I should add that every one of the unsuccessful attempts to recreate my youth produced a bread that was perfectly edible, often very enjoyable and always preferable to any non-sourdough shop bread; its only fault was that it wasn’t my madeleine.

And finally, at this point in writing my blog, I usually ask Micha’el to send one or two up-to-date photos. My telepathic son (I never reveal to him the subject of the blog) sent this.

These Are a Few of My Favourite…

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Exciting change of format today. We’re going to start with a quiz. There are two questions: one which is impossibly difficult, except perhaps for any people I share a bed with; the other is not totally unreasonable, if novels are your thing.

But first a philosophical question. If asked: ‘Who is your favourite novelist?’, the philosopher CEM Joad would probably have replied: ‘It all depends what you mean by favourite.’ Joad was a regular panelist on that very British, indeed very BBC, institution – The Brains Trust. Each week in the 1940s on radio, and the 1950s on television, a panel of intellectuals would respond to questions submitted by listeners. There was the occasional slightly flippant question, but for the most part this resembled what I have always fondly imagined Cambridge University common-room conversation might be like: very bright, in some cases conceited, minds struggling to reach eternal truths while scoring intellectual points off each other. (In fact, I suspect Cambridge University common-room conversation, even then, was as much about which horse you fancied in the 3:30 at Kempton Park racecourse.) The panel were given no prior view of the questions, and there was much to admire in their ability to think on their feet. Please don’t think that I was some kind of wunderkind following the discussion at the age of 5; I have childhood memories of the programme, but I have also been enjoying the wonders of YouTube, to refresh my memory.

So, just what does favourite mean in reference to a novelist. There are several authors whose novels I enjoy very much whenever I come across them – and, perhaps interestingly, most of these are women. However, there is a small group of authors for whom I make a conscious effort to read their every book. So, here’s the impossible question: can you guess what almost all of my favourite authors (by this definition) have in common?

Give up? Well, they are all called John. I know: ridiculous, isn’t it? I swear that it was not a deliberate choice; it was something that only dawned on me a few years ago. A slight clarification: this is more a record of the authors each of whom, at different ages, have been my favourite author: some I have grown out of; others, I suspect, may have grown out of me; drifting apart is quite a common experience in many long-term relationships.

Question 2, and much easier, is: How many of the Johns (there are seven of them, incidentally) can you name? To help you, here they all are.

Starting at the top right, we have John Steinbeck, who, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, swept me off my feet in my mid-teens. His portrayals of the dignity and aspirations of the little man, and of the ways in which everyday life challenges us to be heroic, were a celebration of the ordinary that allowed my adolescent self to daydream extravagantly.

A little later, I started reading science fiction, attracted by the intellectual questions and mental games authors like Asimov posed and played. I was particularly attracted to first John Wyndham and then John Christopher (top left and centre, respectively), both of whom took our world and tweaked one element, then placed some hapless man in the street (never a woman, as I didn’t notice then) in the centre of this potentially earth-shattering scenario and explored how he adjusted to, coped with, and eventually defeated the threat. If I had managed to visualise myself as Tom Joad, the dirt-poor dust-belt 1930s migrant farm-worker whose story is told in Grapes of Wrath, then identifying with Richard Gayford, the educated, middle-class, English narrator of The Midwich Cuckoos, required scarcely any imagination. At the time, I was already annoyed by the attitude that science fiction was not ‘real’ literature. I argued then, and I still would, that distorting one aspect of our world often allows an author to place social and moral issues under the microscope. Certainly, much of science fiction is genre writing, but John Wyndham, devoured as a teenager, repays a closer and more nuanced reading as an adult. For a more detailed analysis of his work, here’s a review from the Guardian. (Recommending an article from The Grauniad? What’s got into me?)

At bottom left sits a pensive, apparently ill-at-ease David Cornwell, who earns his place on this list through his pen-name of John le Carre. He has been the author whose books I have had to read soon after they are published (well, soon after they are published in paperback, anyway) since I first encountered The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in the cinema, with Richard Burton giving such a nuanced and understated performance. If labelling science fiction as just a genre annoys me, then dismissing le Carre as a writer of spy novels enrages me. To my mind, what le Carre has done, throughout his 58-and-counting-year career, and in almost all of his 25 novels, is to use the world of the spy to consider the contemporary human condition. Placing his characters in this world has allowed le Carre to explore all of the lies, deceptions, betrayals, moral ambiguities and uncertainties of the modern world, in an environment where all of these things are intensified. Certainly, I relish le Carre’s descriptions of the craft of spycraft, the skills, techniques, tricks of the dark arts; I am under the spell of his wonderful plotting and control of the narrative flow, the unexpected twists and turns of the story. What singles him out for me, however, is the brilliance with which he uses espionage as a metaphor for modern life.

One of the pleasures of accompanying le Carre for 52 of those 58 years has been to see how his themes broaden out to embrace whatever issues occupy us in the ‘real’ world in the period when he is writing. Another pleasure has been the company of George Smiley, who is a character in nine of the novels, and who I regard as an avuncular friend, whether in print, or as recreated brilliantly by Alec Guiness in a TV adaptation or equally brilliantly by Simon Russell Beale on radio.

I was delighted to see that William Boyd feels much as I do (perhaps that should be other way round) about le Carre’s place in English literature.  You can read his appraisal here.

In my early twenties, it was time to cross the Pond again, for a very long love affair with John Updike (second from the left in the bottom row, and probably the most easily recognisable of the seven). If you are reading this, Jackie Factor, then thank you for lending me The Centaur, and introducing me to the first of many urban and small-town middle-class communities of friends, with interlocking relationships that embrace friendship, rivalry, sexual attraction, adultery. We stayed together through the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, with its so richly discontent protagonist, and for some time after. Updike has a lyric tone that invests his characters’ lives with poetry; in a very different way from Steinbeck, Updike celebrates the ordinary. We parted company with The Witches of Eastwick, which seems to me written by someone other than Updike.

Staying in the States, third from the left at the bottom is John Irving. In many ways he is difficult to categorise. His novels are wide-ranging thematically and in their setting. However, you do know you are always going to get an elephant, a circus and some wrestling. How does Irving manage to make their appearance in every novel not laughable but completely natural? I have no idea. Irving is one of the funniest and most serious of novelists. Like Steinbeck, he celebrates the extraordinariness of the ordinary person.

Irving’s technique for writing a novel is unusual, to say the least. As he himself has explained it: I write endings first. I write last sentences – sometimes last paragraphs – first. I know where I am going. I write collision course stories. He claims that he would have no idea how to begin a story if he did not know exactly where it was going. There are at least two effects of this writing method. There is almost always a lot of foreshadowing in an Irving novel: incidents occur whose significance only becomes apparent much later in the novel. Sometimes, this foreshadowing becomes a leitmotif, a refrain that runs through the entire book and gives it an intensity and integrity. An Irving novel has tremendous drive and sense of purpose. If you haven’t read A Prayer for Owen Meany, please stop reading this twaddle now, get yourself a copy, and read it. It is a novel that drives relentlessly to a sledgehammer conclusion; if the last sentence does not move you to tears, then perhaps you should reconsider reading fiction. If the pleasure of starting a new le Carre novel lies in the anticipation of the analysis of the human condition (and the intellectual pleasure of wrestling with a conundrum), then starting a new John Irving is like climbing into your seat on a roller coaster: you don’t know what lies ahead, but you know that it will be exhilarating, and that at no time will your car leave the tracks for even a second: it feels as if you are free-falling, but you are actually firmly anchored to a preset route.

Last (bottom right) – and double points if you recognized him – is John Banville, Irish novelist and short story writer. I cannot charcaterise the themes or settings of his work, which includes a trilogy imagining the lives of, respectively, Kepler, Newton and Copernicus, as well as novels on the work of art and the artist. What does characterise all his work is a quality more commonly found in short stories than novels: he writes prose of such elegance and clarity that it could be poetry. He is a flawless stylist, while never sounding forced. I read The Blue Guitar to Bernice a couple of months ago, and the shape of the words in my mouth was, for me, a rich pleasure. Banville also has the distinction of being the only author to whom I have sent a fan email. (Incidentally, I got a very nice reply from his publisher, explaining that while Banville was grateful for my email, the publisher was sure I wouldn’t want the author to take time replying to me himself when he could be penning his next novel – which I indeed wouldn’t.) Banville has been described as ‘the heir to Proust, via Nabokov’, although he usually writes much slimmer volumes than Proust. He is also often brilliantly funny. He is quoted as saying that he loathes all of his books, which, I suspect, places him in a minority of one.

And there you have them, my seven Johns. Do let me know if you think I have missed any, and if any of the above nudges you towards someone you haven’t yet read, then so much the better. Happy reading.

No up-to-date photo this week; instead, a glimpse of a budding reader, many months ago!

Five weeks ago, I gave a light-hearted account of the kids’ trials and tribulations in releasing their lift from the port and getting the container delivered to the land. For a heart-wrenching portrayal of what it felt like actually living through that, you can watch Micha’el’s latest vlogumentary on their YouTube site. (Note: liking and subscribing are not discouraged.)

Still No Circuses

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Almost exactly eight months ago, in a post that dealt with our preparations for our first shabbat in Penamacor, I wrote about baking challah, and added: ‘From challah, I have gradually moved (with subtle but effective nudging from various members of the family) to baking all of our bread. The full story of what that means will have to wait for another post’. To those of you who have been scanning each week’s post since then in eager anticipation, I apologise for keeping you waiting so long. Today, your patience is finally rewarded.

Some time after I took over from Bernice in baking challah every week, my children bought me (which in our family means Esther decided to buy me, told Micha’el, and he agreed that it was an excellent idea) a book of bread recipes from around the world. This was a dual-purpose birthday present. Although it was first published in English, they thought it would be more amusing to buy it in Hebrew, thereby ensuring that before I could confront the challenge of understanding the concepts and techniques of breadmaking, I had to wrestle with the mere language on the page. Of course, ultimately, this greatly enhanced the satisfaction of producing an edible loaf of bread, but there was a fair bit of ground to travel before reaching that ‘ultimately’.

The journey, nevertheless, was well worth it. Since we all started locking down, I know that many more people have discovered for themselves the pleasures of baking bread, so I imagine more than a few of you will already have experienced much of what I have to say about the mystical experience of breadmaking.

In many cultures, bread is regarded as the staple food. In Judaism, the inclusion of bread turns eating into a meal. The blessing we recite before eating bread is very puzzling: Blessed are you O Lord, our God, the King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the land. At first sight, this seems to make no sense. In what way is it possible to regard God as the one who produces bread from the ground? Bread doesn’t come out of the ground; it is, rather, a very refined and processed food. Even worse, it is not God who performs all of that refining and processing, but Man. It is as if Dr Franz Schoenfeld were to claim the credit for Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Dr Schoenfeld, having been awarded his Ph D in Heidelberg in 1849, went on to focus on science. Eventually, he joined his father’s art supplies shop, and began applying his knowledge to the production of oil paints. In the 1870s and 1880s, van Gogh obtained some of his colours from Dr Schoenfeld’s paint factory. This did not make Schoenfeld the creator of Starry Night.

So what is going on here? Let’s consider first the process of breadmaking. You sow grain seeds, reap the wheat, rye or whatever, thresh the stalks to separate the grain, winnow the grain to get rid of the chaff, grind the seeds to produce flour, mix the flour with water, feed it for a few days until you have an active sourdough starter, take more flour and water, add the starter to it, add some salt, mix well, knead it to activate the gluten so that the dough will expand and the bread will be aerated and light, leave it to rise, punch it down, shape it and leave it to rise again, then bake it in a hot oven, leave it to cool, slice and enjoy. Every time I make bread I marvel at how this process was ever developed. At every point of the process, each step seems counter-productive, or at best not constructive, unless you already know where the process is leading. Not only that: while most cooking involves mixing ingredients that basically retain their essential character, breadmaking is a kind of alchemy. Measure out your flour and water; look at them; taste them. Who would ever imagine that flour is something you would choose to eat? Flour and water are nothing like dough. But when you put them together in a bowl, and mix them, there is a magical moment at which they start to come together. Just when you are wondering whether the flour will ever be absorbed, the scale tips, an invisible line is crossed, and you have…dough. Taste it and you will wonder why you put so much effort into creating this still indigestible, characterless, lump.

Breadmaking is a tribute to the ingenuity, the curiosity, the taste for experimentation, the technological skill, the patience, the imagination, the wit of man. For a believing Jew, all of these are gifts from God. Bread is our staple because it expresses, perhaps better than any other basic food, the partnership between the Creator and his creation, in continuing to create the world. Judaism celebrates two types of creation. The first, the fundamental, is the creation of ‘there is’ from ‘there isn’t’, of something from nothing, which only God can perform, and which is recorded in the creation account at the beginning of Bereishit, Genesis. Once that has taken place, the creation of something from something becomes possible, an ability with which God endowed Man. God created grain, and then created Man, and endowed him with the wherewithal to create, from that grain, bread. We recite the blessing to remind ourselves that it is not through our own unaided efforts, but through the abilities given to us by God, that we have made this bread.When I make bread, I feel myself a privileged player in that partnership. At the deepest level, it is indeed God who brings forth bread from the land. To say that making bread is a religious experience sounds like a wild claim, and not one I would expect a rationalist like myself to make, but there you are. Sometimes the experience trumps the experiencer.

I briefly mentioned sourdough starter earlier; this deserves a post all to itself. A huge mystique has grown up around starters. The internet is full of instructive articles that make growing a starter sound slightly more nerve-wracking than tightrope-walking across Niagara Falls; they describe the feeder and tender’s role as being less like a zookeeper’s and more like an ICU nurse’s. My own experience is that sourdough starters are quicker to develop, and more tolerant of neglect, than usually described.

An active starter is one of those symbiotic miracles of nature. To make a sourdough starter, you mix flour and water together in a jar and leave it out, uncovered or loosely covered. Half a day later, you pour half of the mixture away and add flour and water to replace what you poured away. You carry on doing this until you find the mixture starting to bubble and expand. As this activity increases, it can be a little unnerving, particularly if you are a fan of cheap science fiction. What is actually happening is that the bacteria and yeasts that are all around us in the atmosphere are gathering to graze on the pasture you have prepared for them, and to multiply. The bubbles, as Michael Pollan explains in Cooked*, are simply the manifestation of these micro-organisms breaking wind after a good meal.

The starter, after it has been pre-digested by these organisms, is much more palatable and beneficial to us. The gluten has been broken down so that it is more easily digested; I have been told by mildly gluten-intolerant friends that they have no reaction from sourdough bread. Vitamin B has been added by the micro-organisms. Lactic and acetic acid have been produced; this not only adds depth to the flavour of the bread; it also keeps it fresh longer. My astute readership will have realised that, if the bubbles are wind produced by the organisms, then all of these other beneficial substances are their excretions. That we still can’t wait to eat sourdough bread even after we know how it is produced is testament to its astonishing qualities! For a clear and simple account of the science of sourdough starters, and a no-nonsense explanation of how to grow one, you can watch this 9-minute video.

Because I do not bake bread every day, or even every week, I keep my starter in the fridge. This basically causes the bacteria to hibernate. When I want to bake, I first have to wake the starter up by frequent feedings. While my starter is a bit more listless than I would like, it still delivers flavour and rise to the dough and spring to the bread I bake with it.

At the end of our first trip to Portugal, I decided to conduct an experiment. Not wanting to burden Micha’el and Tslil with having to remember to feed the starter, I took a small quantity, mixed more flour in to make a very dry mix, then froze half, and kept the other half in the fridge. When we returned 3 months later, I brought the refrigerated starter up to room temperature, fed it for a couple of days, and it was then ready to use again. (I think the other half is still in the freezer.) All of this suggests that the recently emergent starter ‘kennels’ or ‘hotels’ may be a scam: starter owners who are going on holiday can take their starter to be looked after in these establishments by skilled handlers. The owners can give specific instructions about storage temperature and feeding regimen.

The revival of artisan sourdough bread owes much to the community of breadmakers in San Francisco. There are stories of sourdough starters that were brought across to America by immigrants 150 years ago, and have been kept alive since. Because a starter attracts organism from the environment, starters in different areas are reputed to develop different aromas and flavours, and the San Francisco strain is very highly regarded. Unfortunately, I will never have a venerable starter to hand on to my children, because of Pesach. Let me explain. Observing Pesach requires us to surrender ownership of all leavened goods for the duration of the festival. Where destroying these goods, throwing them away, or giving them away to a non-Jew does not incur considerable financial loss, this is what is done. For those of us, on the other hand, who have the odd bottle of single malt, a typically subtle solution has been developed; we sell these goods to a non-Jew, and, at the end of the festival, we buy them back. This arrangement is organised in Israel at the national level. Individuals appoint a rabbi as their agent, and a hierarchy leads up to the Chief Rabbi, who sells the entire stock of leaven owned by Jews in Israel to a single non-Jew, payment to be made after Pesach. After Pesach, the non-Jew changes his mind and withdraws from the deal (or at least has done every year so far). However, since a sourdough starter has little monetary value, and since it is about the most leavened thing imaginable, it cannot be included in this arrangement, and must be disposed of. Every year after Pesach, I start again from scratch, and there is a hiatus of 3 or 4 days before I can bake again.

It is widely believed that it was the cultivation of grain that first turned our nomadic ancestors into farmers. To finish, here is our own nomadic hunter-gatherer at work. (Didn’t see the segue coming, did you?)

* A word about Cooked. If there is anyone out there who has not yet encountered this wonderful book (and slightly less wonderful 4-part series on Netflix), then I strongly urge you to read it. If you are at all interested in biochemistry, anthropology, sociology, prehistory, barbecue, pickling, alcohol, cheese, or, indeed, any food or drink, then you owe it to yourself to allow Michael Pollan to wrap you in his enthusiasm. I even found the chapter on roasting a whole pig, while of no practical value to me, absolutely fascinating.