Welcome to Rootless Cosmopolitan, the substack edition. Long before I was on Facebook or Twitter, I posted regular musings on geopolitics, politics, food and football - among other things - on my personal web site, Rootless Cosmopolitan — h/t Joseph Stalin for the name…
That was from around 2006 until early 2011, a period during which I was a senior editor at TIME — one of the many reasons I needed an outlet to share what I really thought!
I’ve been a bit busy in the intervening years, including spells as the Editorial head of the short-lived but glorious web site of Al Jazeera America and more recently, as editorial head of AJ+ — but this project is a personal one, testing the proposition that I have a few insights to share based on my various obsessions, my decade as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, my three decades of progressive-oriented journalism, my work in the kitchen, and more. So, as should be obvious, all opinions expressed in this newsletter are my own, not those of my employer. Rootless Cosmopolitan won’t be published on any kind of schedule; I’ll send it out when I have something to say (which is often the case…) — to keep you reading (or scrolling) to the end, I’ll try and share a recipe or food observation each time — those of you who follow me on Facebook or Twitter know #therootlesscosmopolitancookbook is an idea, rather than a thing, but let’s do dinner sometime…
Oh, so where’s the promised recipe, you ask? Well, I’m not going to bother with a recipe on this one, but having cited Stalin’s anti-Semitism, perhaps this mysterious little gefilte-fish-in-Stalingrad vignette from Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Fate” will have to do.
Not a taste any of us should go to the mat for, of course. As the doyen of Jewish food writers, Aleppo-born Claudia Rodan, so archly observed: “… for most Sephardic émigrés the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe were an almost mythically bewildering people — ‘peasants’ who raised carp in bathtubs for a tasteless dish called gefilte fish and didn’t know a cardamom pod from a coriander seed, or, worse, the sort of intellectuals who had brought Zionism to a Middle East where, in the émigrés’ wishful imagination, everybody had got along.”
No question, Arab Jews got all the cuisine. Still, gefilte fish, as tasteless as it may be, is a weirdly powerful symbol. So what work is it doing in Grossman’s anecdote, here? (Answers on a postcard etc.)
In what struck them as a particularly unpleasant tone, Byerozkin said: 'So where's this five-kilo pike-perch, comrade Movshovich? The whole division's talking of nothing else.'
With the same sad look, Movshovich ordered: 'Cook, show him the fish please.'
The cook, the only man present to have been carrying out his duties, explained: 'The comrade captain wanted it stuffed in the Jewish manner. I've got some pepper and bay-leaves, but I haven't any white bread or horse-radish…'
'I see,' said Byerozkin. 'I once had one done like that in Bobruysk, at the house of one Sara Aronovna – though, to be quite frank, I didn't think much of it.'
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