As I baked and cooked and kept making mistakes because I was distracted by the newspaper I really wanted to sit down and read, I remembered my mother’s warning, “The food of a cook who sits on her ass, stinks.”
instead of making me get up and baste the chicken, I started looking up a song in Yiddish from my mother’s nostalgia.
one reference – and the versions were in Hebrew, and they were censored. The song is a mother-daughter dialogue, common to many languages. Where have you been, daughter dear. But this is about the socialist-zionist movement in Poland, and the daughter was in a camp in preparation for joining a kibbutz.
in yiddish the girl tells about eating ‘burnt kasha’ and i almost burnt the kasha today. but it doesn’t exist in hebrew. the best part is the last verse. Where did you sleep, my dear daughter? In the loft in the hay, with two halutzim. Mother, it was greaat.
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