Mizrahi Women in America: Stories of Food and Identity

You mean you’re Jewish? And you don’t know about gefilte fish? . . . What kind of Jew are you? —Joyce Zonana, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey (2008)

In Jessica Soffer’s novel Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (2013), Victoria and Joseph, Iraqi immigrants to the United States, learn to speak English, eat Pop-Tarts, and mark their lives by events with American significance, like where they were the day JFK was shot. “Even in our home, on quiet evenings alone on our couch, we insisted on being Americans,” Victoria relates, explaining, “We made latkes for Hannukah.” In the United States, Victoria and Joseph are free to be Jewish; in Iraq, Victoria’s father was hanged for it. Still, they make not sambousak or zengoula, the Iraqi dishes popular on the holiday, but rather latkes, the favored fare from Eastern Europe. Both latkes and zengoula are Jewish foods, but only one fits into the new national setting. Ashkenazi, as far as Victoria can tell, is American; Mizrahi is not.

Mizrahim—Jews from the Middle East and North Africa—comprise half the Jewish population of Israel and are significant contributors to cultural, political, and literary life there. In the United States, however, the Jewish population is primarily European; it was from eastern Europe that Jews came in large numbers during the great wave of immigration in the late nineteenth through early twentieth century and again after the Holocaust. Mizrahim in the United States are a minority within a minority. So, for the most part, Victoria is not wrong: in America, Jewish food is chicken soup and matzah balls, not fuul medames; the Jewish language is Yiddish, not Ladino; the “Old Country” refers to Poland or Russia, not Iran [ . . . ] 

Literature has played a significant role in popularizing Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the United States. The explosion of Ashkenazi American writing at the turn-of-the-twentieth century began a trend of Jewish writing that continued through the next generation and then the next. [ . . . ] Mizrahi writing complicates ideas about “Jewish American literature.” For instance, Ashkenazi literature traditionally foregrounded the United States as a promised land, a desired lover, a fresh beginning, while for Mizrahi writers, the country often serves as the place of exile. “We’ve been [in Iran] two thousand years,” says a Jewish character in Dalia Sofer’s Man of My Time (2020); even her Muslim boyfriend refers to Jews as “[Queen] Esther’s children” suggesting the whole country’s recognition of Jews’ place in Iranian national history. [ . . . ] Once in America, memoirist Lucette Lagnado writes in The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), her father “preferred being an old Egyptian to a new American. He had, in short, no desire whatsoever to assimilate.” Coming to the United States is rarely represented as a triumph for the characters of Mizrahi literature.

Over the last two decades, Mizrahi women have been writing stories that look back over the centuries, tell of rituals passed down from mother to daughter, revive lost languages, [and] delve into regional Jewish cuisine.

[From the conversation:]

Karen Skinazi: [ . . . ] You write extensively about food in your books and include recipes for your readers. Joyce [Zonana], you link the art of cooking to that of writing [in Dream Homes]: “For several years now,” you write after detailing the process of making stuffed grape leaves, “I have been piecing together this memoir, assembling the fragments of my story and the story of my family, attempting to roll them together into tidy packets, letting them simmer in the juice of my imagination.” Jessica [Soffer], throughout Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, we not only learn about the lives of three generations of foodies, but more significantly, food becomes a metaphor for almost every thought, character, and action. It seems to me that food links the generations and allows you to offer a truly sensuous experience for your readers as you render the smells, tastes, and textures of traditional foods; it also works as an emotional experience. Could you tell me about what you see as the role of food in your writing? [ . . . ]

Jessica: [ . . . ] I teach a food writing class, and one of the first things that we do is we talk about our first memories, and it’s probably unsurprising that nine out of ten people’s first memory is tied up with food. So of course food is sort of the most . . . the most. At least for me! A lot of religion fell away when my dad came to the US because it was too painful to revisit religion in the way that it had been engaged with when he was in Iraq. When he came to the US, food became, culturally, his religion. So there was so much about maintaining these recipes that had been in his family for many years.

My strongest memories are from being at my aunt’s house, my dad’s sister’s house, in Roslyn, Long Island, and eating the delicious food of their culture. It just felt like if I were going to write about his culture, I would have to write about it through food. In certain ways, it’s the easiest writing that I know. [ . . . ] 

Joyce: I don’t know why food played such a big role in my book. Certainly, it played a big role in my life. My mother was an extraordinary cook, and we did have these amazing Egyptian feasts. Food—and language—was for them the primary ways of staying connected to their culture, to their lives in Egypt.

My relationship with food was a conflicted one because when I was growing up, I refused to learn how to cook. I didn’t want to cook because cooking would mean living a life like my mother’s, and I didn’t want to live that life.

There was this crazy irony: when I was in my twenties, I got hired to write a cookbook. [ . . . ] As for the recipes at the end of the book [ . . . ] I did not want them there. The publisher wanted the recipes in the book [ . . . ] They persuaded me to do it, and [ . . . ] I now turn to the book for the recipes because they’re my mother’s recipes, and I forget them. So I open up the book, and I make them.