MORE than ever, at this time of year of Sukkot, I think of Eli and Juliet. Oh, I actually think of them often. Like when I am sick, and I remember Juliet coming over and ceremoniously pouring me tea from high up into a little tea cup, in the style of her French Moroccan culture. Freshly brewed nana, spearmint, soaked and boiled with a lot of sugar and some water in a large silver Moroccan teapot.
Or, whenever I hear a wild tale of some sort, it makes me think of Juliet, too. Juliet, so young and beautiful, with her perfect China doll face and waist long mane of wavy black tresses bound together as a long beautiful pony tail.
Well, actually, I never saw Juliet in her long hair, but she had it in ponytail form clipped at each end, saved in a box, from her youth.
From time to time Juliet would bring it out from the treasured box and we, my sister and I, together with her daughters Sondra, Kati and Bette (all pronounced in proper French accent and French flair, of course!) would ooh and ahh over it.
By the time I knew Juliet she was a married devout woman and she covered her hair in pops of color with classy feminine French millinery.
BUT about those wild tales.
Juliet regaled us with tales about her French childhood. Her father was the tailor for the king, so it went, and so, as would befit the tailor of the king, she, together with her family, lived on the royal grounds.
One day Juliet, a little girl, was wandering the private jungle on the kings royal grounds when she found herself eye to eye with a real live lion, staring at her with his mouth wide open.
As we sat there, jaws dropped, breath sucked in, eyes wide in terror, Juliet would tell us how she was saved and spared from the jaws of the lion at the very last moment.
There were many such French, Arabian Knights-style tales of Juliets childhood that she shared with us.
WE were the Ashkenazi neighbors. The ruling class of Israel at the time. There was tension and resentment between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Of course, at the time I was a little girl totally oblivious to all that and what it meant. But being neighbors with (almost family, actually) the Malouls, I grew up with an acute sense of the Sephardim vs. Ashkenazim tension.
Juliet would often sigh and emote things like, but you guys are different, you are not really Ashkenazim, or she might cathartically, but zingingly, talk about something she was really upset about perpetrated by the Ashkenazim, like her daughters not being admitted to the religious schools she had hoped they would attend. But she would then seal the conversation with a refrain like but you know, even though they are Ashkenazim, we are all Jews and that is all that matters without a trace of conviction in her voice whatsoever. So even I, little girl that I was, picked up on there being somethin goin on between The Sephardim and The Ashkenazim.
JULIET was the best cook. I mean, The Best! Often on Fridays she would send over her routine Shabbat fair of piping hot loaves of sesame sprinkled yeast dough rolls oozing with gooey warm chocolate.
The colorful salads she would prepare were endless. Juliet had a variety of at least 10 salads, or salatim, as she called them, ranging from tomato to cabbage to olive to avocado to cucumber to orange and fennel and on and on.
Each week, Juliet rolled tens of flaky dough cigars, both sweet nutty syrupy ones, as well as the savory meaty ones. There was home cooked fish. Baklava pastries, and the roasted brown eggs in her chamin cholent.
To be fair, I’ll tell you that was the one thing I never liked. The 24-hour cooked egg always wierded me out. It took me years to build up the courage to finally taste it.
These were the tastings Juliet would send over on Fridays. Each week was something different. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
But Sukkot. Sukkot was different. Eli would build the biggest sukkah in the neighborhood and Juliet cooked and cooked. Baked and baked. The Malouls sukkah was huge. And it was a party in there every night.
I can still hear the bursts of delightful laughter coming out of their sukkah, floating in the air all the way to ours, which was in truth just a few feet away.
We always knew when a stray cat had run through their sukkah between one of the feet of the unsuspecting dinner guests when we heard the shout; and they in turn knew who the next victims of this cat assault were when they would hear one of us give the shout.
We would talk to each other loudly, from our sukkah to the Malouls, as my mother passed the steaming bowls of our Ashkenazi chicken soup through my tiny bedroom window into the sukkah, as a shortcut to leaving the apartment and walking all around the building to the high grassy back, where our sukkot were nestled.
We would sing our European style niggunim late into the night, all the while competing with the more Arabic rhythms of the Malouls.
THROUGHOUT the year, our apartments, ours and the Malouls, were like one, divided only by the thinnest wall down the middle of our kitchens. Often, I could hear Juliet talking or Eli sometimes reprimanding. And I always, but always, heard Bette, who was one year older than I, practicing at the top of her lungs her childhood fantasy of being a future singer mimicking then popular artist Ofra Chazas song El-kai.
All year, as close as our families were, there was still a formal division between our apartments and homes. A doorway to pass through. But on Sukkot, we and the Malouls, the French Moroccan family and the American one, The Sephardim and The Ashkenazim, were literally one, united by the star studded sky above us.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
