Yiddish fest highlights comfort of knish crafting

For Sara Kasdan, the author of the mid-century ethnic best-seller Love and Knishes, the titular dough pocket was a pathway to everlasting romance via the stomach, assured to get the cook’s name into a man’s heart “faster … and stay longer.”

For Harriet Zaidman, the knish’s starting point — an opaque knob of dough to be stretched translucent-thin — is a doorway to a different kind of love, and a reminder of her family’s lasting immigrant roots.

“I’ve had all my life this vision of my baba taking that small knob and stretching it thinly across the table, draping down over the side. You could see the table through it,” says Zaidman, a Garden City-based author who has posted more than 450 recipes to her blog, North End Nosh, since 2017.

When she gets the dough and its fillings — usually potato or kasha (buckwheat) — ready, Zaidman can just about hear her baba Goldie knocking on her family’s Smithfield Avenue door with a weekly delivery of haimishe cooking.

But despite this deeply felt connection, Zaidman was scared for most of her life to try making knishes by hand.

“So I decided to face my fear this year,” she says: she kneaded to try.

Her first attempts went so well that on Sunday, the retired teacher-librarian taught 30 first-timers how to craft knishes as the opening event of this year’s Put A Yid On It, a festival of new Yiddish culture running at the Rady JCC.

Zaidman demonstrated how to stretch the dough, which can also be used as the basis for a strudel, how to use the back of the hand to nudge it and develop elasticity.

“It’s quite a labour-intensive process,” she says.

Her participants included young couples in their 20s and 30s, as well as a 79-year-old woman, each of whom told the instructor about their own babas’ culinary prowess.

“Some people said they’d never made them, but watched their grandmothers, so they didn’t follow my method; it was like some muscle memory took over and they did it as their babas did it,” says Zaidman, whose own granddaughter is set to graduate from high school this week.

The 30 participants made between 12 and 18 knishes each, meaning about 450 knishes were prepared in the Rady’s multi-purpose room. Sunday was a very geschmachteh — delicious, delightful — day.

Though she delivered the lesson in English, Zaidman — a member of the North End Jewish Folk Choir who attends weekly English-language lectures about Yiddish culture by University of Manitoba professor Itay Zutra — says the culinary tradition of making knishes helps to preserve “the memory of our families, our origins, and the history of what they went through in life.”

“That’s what formed us,” says Zaidman, whose first historical novel, the 1919-set City on Strike, depicted an event that two of her Eastern European Jewish grandparents participated in.

“Yiddish has a very rich history worth preserving, and part of that is excellent food.”

Organized by Shira Newman, Put A Yid On It continues to Saturday. Tonight, the Yiddish-language film I Have Sinned (Al Khet) — directed in 1936 in Poland by Aleksander Marten — screens at 7:30 p.m. Set against the First World War, the film — restored by the National Centre for Jewish Film with English subtitles — follows Esther (Rachel Holzer), who, after being impregnated by a German Jewish officer, flees to the U.S.

On Thursday, a 2010 feature by American director Eve Annenberg studies a Brooklyn grad student tasked with translating Shakespeare’s most famous romance into the mamaloshen (mother tongue). Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish was shot with non-professional actors.

On Saturday, Grammy-winning ensemble the Klezmatics bring their latest album, We Were Made For These Times, to the Crescent Arts Centre, marking the 40th anniversary of the group, which has collaborated with Itzhak Perlman, Arlo Guthrie and Allen Ginsberg, among others. Tickets for all events are available at radyjcc.com.

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