Spice Box
NOTES & NEWS "Sweeter Than Honey to my Mouth"* Can maple syrup be treij? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Turning sap into syrup involves boiling out water from the sap, a process that may take...
...In a Luxembourg night club an elegant lady looked at my Celto-Lancastrian nose and said clearly: 'II est juif sans doute.' Holidaying or vanguard Germans at a neighboring table turned with interest...
...The Landes would like to sell their syrup mostly to Jews, since they are the only distributors they know of who make kosher syrup...
...But now there is maple syrup with kashrut certification, thanks to Jane and Eric Lande of Johnson, Vermont...
...Turning sap into syrup involves boiling out water from the sap, a process that may take days...
...They began producing kosher maple syrup four years ago under the supervision of Rabbi Yitzchak Y. Raskin of Burlington Vermont who represents the Jewish Community Council of Montreal...
...They have done some advertising among Montreal's Jewish community, and a recent short piece about their syrup that appeared in The New York Times brought them new Jewish customers...
...You're supposed to process the sap right away...
...The Landes produced about * Psalms 119:103 "How sweet are thy words to my palate, sweeter than honey to my mouth...
...Where is the Jewishness?' It stuck out a mile, they shuddered...
...That,' I then said, 'is from the Reformation Symphony by Mendelssohn...
...At the age of nine, Warshaw wrote a tone poem, "In the Beginning," based on the story of Creation...
...Take the music of Mendelssohn: you can hear Jewishness in every note...
...They believed that a barking bigoted failed architect was a divine avatar...
...Ah, no, not altogether, I was told...
...Lard and cream are commonly used fats in maple syrup production...
...Rosenthal doubts that the Jews will go back to Nicaragua, even if the synagogue is returned, unless their personal assets are also returned and they can resume their occupations...
...It was about what precisely a Jew was...
...Swim, Said the Mama Fishy In his recently published autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), the English novelist (A Clockwork Orange) and literary critic Anthony Burgess describes a trip through Europe during the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II...
...Before leaving I told them that the English equivalent oiheil was 'sod' and had them crying: 'Sod Hitler.' It was a small triumph...
...The Landes boil their syrup with Crisco, which is kosher, and they are careful not to bring any food into the "sugar house," the building where the syrup is manufactured...
...A Jew therefore, I suggested, had to be defined in terms of the national ethos into which he was deemed an intruder...
...2 in E flat...
...Warshaw's mother is a concert pianist and has been Dalia's only teacher...
...One could not...
...It seemed I was acceptable as a Jew on Luxembourgeois territory— for the time being, anyway...
...says that the government "is looking into the matter" and that there is "some problem about turning the building over to the Jewish community" since no Jews presently reside in Nicaragua...
...They could embrace Anglo-American culture from Jefferson and John Locke down to the song about the mammy fishy, but they could still believe that Jewish blood was demonstrably different from Aryan...
...One could at least perhaps argue rationally about the inadvisability of basing a political system on mystical racialism and the cult of a personality...
...To deny that I was a Jew would have seemed an endorsement of Nazi anti-Semitism...
...Sandinistas to Return Synagogue to Jews Nicaragua's entire Jewish community lives "in exile...
...It's hard not to allow anyone to eat or drink in the sugar house...
...They were cultivated men who spoke fine English...
...In a letter to the Nicaraguan ambassador, Luft asked the government to restore the synagogue to its original condition...
...The Nicaraguan Jews are forming a corporate entity to take title of the synagogue...
...Conductor Zubin Mehta, introducing the piece to an audience in New York, said: "I want you to know [Dalia] wrote all the parts for the musicians herself, and [also] the score from which I conduct...
...People come and visit with you whileyou're boiling...
...The synagogue was firebombed in an attack by Sandinistas while the congregants were praying in 1978, shortly before the Sandinistas took power...
...They were clearly Germans who were schizoid...
...There's a whole social life connected with sugaring," says Jane Lande...
...In order to keep the sap from boiling over, a small amount of fat must be added to the liquid...
...Finally it was affirmed, on the evidence of Hitler's Christologists, that Jesus Christ was the son ofa Hittite woman and a Roman legionary...
...They could accept the term 'Aryan' as a legitimate racial denominator while knowing from their philological studies that it could only apply to a group of languages...
...A Musical Prodigy At three years she began piano lessons, by seven she had composed a suite for orchestra, and now, at age thirteen, Dalia Paz Warshaw has had six of her compositions performed by major symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic...
...Now they feel that the Arias peace plan has created a ' 'different and more optimistic environment," and Luft says the congregants "now foresee the possibility of the resumption of Jewish communal life in Nicaragua...
...So I said: 'Oui, comme Jesus Christ.' There followed a very amicable discussion in bad French with the Germans...
...there was a certain unteutonic oleagi-nousness or Schmierigkeit...
...The country's only synagogue was confiscated by the new government, and members of the congregation fled the country because of anti-Semitic harassment and because their assets and personal property were confiscated...
...The 70 people who constituted the Jewish population of Nicaragua left the country after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979...
...They had just returned from America and knew all the latest American songs...
...The following incidents occurred in Belgium and Luxembourg: "On the road to Liege two kind Germans gave us a lift in their Mercedes-Benz...
...500 gallons of kosher syrup this year, and if the weather cooperates they say that they will have twice that next year...
...As a Jew in Germany I would have to suffer expropriation and, perhaps, eventually, liquidation...
...According to a story in The New Tork Times, this child of an American father and an Israeli mother displayed prodigious talent from the age of one, when she heard a record of Israeli songs and sang them back on pitch, remembering most of the words...
...One of them sang 'Three little fishes in an itty bitty pool': Swim, said the mama fishy, swim if you can, And they swam and they swam right over the dam . . . They both sang: 'What goes up must come down, and baby you've been flying too high.' To such men, humorous and cosmopolitan, it seemed one could say rude things about Hitler...
...The car stopped and we were politely told to get out...
...The club trio was taking a break, so I went to the piano and played part of the second movement of Elgar's Symphony No...
...Two years ago, the Sandinistas offered to return the synagogue to the Jews, but the congregation declined the offer because of the "prevailing political environment," according to Fred Luft, secretary of the Congregacion Israelita de Nicaragua...
...It was a dirty experience...
...The Sandinistas say that the synagogue has been restored to good condition...
...The government has promised that the synagogue will be exempt from taxes and confiscation in the future...
...One could not...
...Also, in accordance with the laws of kashrut, the Landes do not make syrup on Shabbat or Jewish holidays...
...However, some visitors to Nicaragua, including New York City's mayor Ed Koch, reported that the synagogue was in a state of disrepair and squatters were living in it...
...We can't work on the Sabbath, and this is difficult with syrup...
...There was such a thing as Jewish-ness...
...Their brains were split...
...Since accepting the ofTer in November, the Jews of Nicaragua have not heard from the Sandinista government, according to Rabbi Morton M. Rosenthal, director of the Latin American affairs department of the ADL...
...A spokesperson at the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, D.C...
...I then told them who the composer was, and they said that he must be a Jew and that they did not like this English Jewish cheating, especially when Jewish England was das Land ohne Musik...
...if we have to wait until after the Sabbath we might lose some, or it might come out a slightly lower grade...
Vol. 13 • July 1988 • No. 5
