5764: The Year of the Horseradish Vodka

(Here is a Passover Story, which was sent to Great Plotnik World Headquarters by Douglas A. Konecky, who writes one of these every year. You may remember that in last year's episode, "5763: Three and a Half Jews," Konecky was whining about how the youngest person at their Passover Table was 52 years old so the matzo had to be hidden in plain sight. A year has passed.)

5764: The Year of the Horseradish Vodka

We didn’t rent a six year old. Sarah was the youngest again, but she and Sam got caught in a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge, so by the time they got to the seder the leader had knocked back several horseradish vodkas.

A few years ago Barb and I hung out with Dan and Staci in a Polish bar on 2nd St. and 2nd Avenue in the East Village. They brought us vodka laced with horseradish root and it was so good we swore we’d do it ourselves some day.

So last week I peeled several pieces of horseradish root, cut them up and put them in a measuring cup with a quart of vodka. The question was for how long? We tried two days. The correct answer was ten minutes.

That pure two day horseradish vodka elixir could have fueled the rocket for a Jewish space launch and it desperately needed to be diluted. We tried several different blends, until we came to the one where only one eyebrow was on fire, and that was 3 to 1 straight vodka to vodka elixir. We settled on that one, poured it back into the blue Skyy Vodka bottle and offered some to everyone as soon as they walked in the door to the seder.

But the thing is, strong as it was, it got better the more you drank. So by the time the seder actually started, I was having far too much fun for a Jewish event.

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Passover is always fun. For one thing, every Jew or Jew Lite, Sephardi or Ashkenazi, in the largest city in America or the tiniest village in Baluchistan, celebrates on this same night and tells the same story. It’s an amazing feeling to be part of this tradition. It has nothing to do with religion, or it has everything to with religion, that’s up to you but is never the important part. The important part is you do it and your Uncle Irving does it and your Cousin Doris does it and they don’t ever agree about anything, except this.

There are lots of other Jewish holidays, but they are minor league. Hanukkah comes close, but everybody knows it’s a holiday of convenience, like Kwaanza. Kwaanza was made up by African Americans to give them an ethnocentric holiday to compete with Christmas, just as Hanukkah was invented by American Jewish merchants to compete with Christians for holiday sales. There is nothing historical about Hanukkah (though several FINE Hanukkah songs have been written about it.)

Hanukkah should be called JESUS: NOT.

Outside of Passover and Hanukkah, there really aren’t any other mainstream Jewish holidays. You have to be fairly religious, or be sending your kid to the Jewish Community Center (where they tend to celebrate EVERY Jewish holiday, even the Class D-Great Lakes League previously invisible ones, like Jewish Parking Meter Day) to know anything at all about them. Of these, three are the most popular: Purim, Succot and That Other Holiday Whose Name I Can Never Remember.

Purim is fun. Kids dress up in costumes, the food is good and everybody drinks a lot. Purim comes up earlier in the spring than Passover. It’s not Pharoah this time, it’s King Nebuchadnezzar and his evil counselor Haman, and not Egypt but Babylonia, and the hero is Queen Esther, not Moses, but once again the Jews escape from evil oppression and later commemorate with the help of a yummy little foodstuff.

At Purim we eat Hamantaschen, savory, yeasty pastries in the shape of the evil Haman’s tri-cornered hat. Hamantaschen are filled with apricot jam or poppy seed paste or sometimes even chocolate. They are ‘way better than Passover fake cake made out of matzo meal.

It has been written somewhere that Hasidic Jews are required to drink themselves silly on Purim, because God said so, or one of their rabbis says God said so. It’s never a pretty sight – young, gangly Yeshivah boys and ancient white bearded black-hatted rabbis, kind of mosh-pitting on a dance floor and jumping up and down in their heavy black shoes, prayer shawls slapping themselves silly, pale faces red under those medieval whiskers, as they knock back schnapps after schnapps and try to calculate how much fun they are having. The Jew Lite on the bandstand is always terrified one of them will grab the microphone and try to sing "My Way."

Succot has to do with harvest. You build these little huts out of reeds and you stand inside them, eating nothing all that memorable and waiting for somebody’s child to finish some poem so you can go home.

The Other Holiday Whose Name I Can Never Remember is about as much fun as Succot.

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As our seder started I wasn’t tipsy, but I wasn’t summer-morning mountain fresh either, and it was getting late and the food was ready to eat. My Stepdad, the Chief, could do a seder in less time than anyone else, but Barb says I broke his record this year. We did the Four Questions, and all ten plagues, in fact we did them twice, once in English and once in Hebrew, because they are my favorite part, and then somebody mentioned we hadn’t sung Dayenu yet, but too bad, it was time for soup. I must have skipped a lot of pages. That horseradish vodka is something else.

Once again, Sarah’s matzoballs were transcendental and French, if you can imagine the French actually eating Jewish food instead of turning Jews in to the Gestapo. OK, bad form. Let’s just say the French didn’t show any more compassion than anybody else did in those days but it could have been nothing more than profound wine snobbery. The French revere their cabernets, their carrignans, their Bourdeauxs and their sauternes. They would not know what to do with Manischewitz Concord Grape.

Sarah was the youngest last year, and the same people came this year, so she was still the youngest. She had no problem finding the hidden affikomen, or the middle matzo from the ceremonial stack of three, removed and placed in a napkin and hidden by Barbara in a place where an aging child with weakening eyesight would have no trouble locating it.

But you really need a kid to do this right. Sarah’s heart is in the right place, but she knows where Barb has hidden the matzo, because Barb says “Sarah, look on the pool table.” It’s this gentile sisterhood thing, I think. So Sarah stands up, walks obediently to the pool table, retrieves the matzo and brings it back.

She hasn’t been to enough seders and she hasn’t watched enough Larry David. Kids go crazy when searching for the affikomen. They are like drunk yeshivah boys on Purim. And when they find it they want CASH.

When Sarah returned with the affikomen to the head of the table it just so happens that I was unable to find the bright shiny Susan B. Anthony dollar coin I had put away for her. I had placed it on top of the dinner table, but it wasn’t there. So she got stiffed.

Any Jewish kid under ten who is worth his salt would have been outraged! “What!? What??” he’d have said. “Where’s my freaking five bucks!”

“Watch your language, Jacob,” the child’s father would say, but he’d be furious too. Not paying for finding the affikomen is like the eleventh plague. (I’m thinking we’ll add that one in next year.)

And maybe I'll add another answer to the First Question too. Why is this night different than all other nights? Because we get to do this, that's why. Because the Jews, long before they were even called Jews, escaped from Egypt, because they got across the water and because somebody thought to write it all down. And here we are, 3,300 years later, still talking about it.

In the course of writing this story I have discovered two things. One, brisket sounds like briss. But it still tastes great.

Two, the last four letters of Ashkenazi are, to say the least, ironic.