Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin Read Free Book Online

raised,” he says. “It’s a wonderful reunion.” Like so many others I spoke to, Spielberg recalls being young and impatient at the seder table. “It’s a shame you can’t eat first, and then have Passover,” he says. “When you’re a kid, all you want to do is get to the food; so the grown-ups could not pray any faster.”
    His family kept kosher for several years when they lived in Cincinnati with his kosher grandparents. But after leaving for Camden, New Jersey, and later for Phoenix, the Spielbergs were kosher only when grandparents came to town. “My parents would never say, ‘Dada or Mama are coming to visit,’ Spielberg explains. “I just heard the clanking of glass against glass and knew that
treyf
was being thrown away. I’d go into the kitchen and sure enough, my mom would be cleaning out the refrigerator, cleaning out the cupboards of all of her favorite delicacies—caviar, shellfish, cherrystone clams—which you could get in Arizona in those days because Flying Tiger Airlines was shipping them into restaurants from Maine. All the
treyf
was on its way out. And then my grandparents would come and we would be kosher for a week. We went kosher for either side of the family.”
    When either grandmother visited, Spielberg’s mother, Leah, reverted easily to their kosher dictates, but chafed at their cooking. “I remember great clashes in the kitchen about how much schmaltz to put in the chopped liver,” Spielberg says. “My father’s mother had a special way of making chopped liver which was contrary to the way my mother always prepared it, and they used to fight over how much minced onions and schmaltz go in the mix. I would just sit there and watch these two ladies fight. My mom only knew English, so she’d hurl invectives at my grandmother in English. My grandmother would become so flustered, she’d start screaming at my mother in Russian and Yiddish. Most of the Yiddish I learned was during these conflicts in the kitchen.”
    His family’s impious taste for seafood was nearly discovered one evening in their New Jersey home, when their family rabbi decided to pay a surprise visit. “Maybe this was God very carefully watching our sweet hypocrisy about being kosher and nonkosher, but my mom had just come back from the fish market and she had just brought in four live lobsters for dinner. Lobsters, as you know, are just behind pork as
sin food
. As she’s taking the live lobsters out of the bag and putting them on the counter, Rabbi Greenberg pulls into the driveway, unannounced. I remember my mom screamed, ‘Quick! Hide these things!’ She throws them in my arms. Luckily their claws are wrapped with rubber bands, and I run into my bedroom and put them on the bed.
    â€œWell, the rabbi sometimes liked to come to our rooms and see how we were all doing; he would knock on our doors, and just say, ‘How’s school and how are you feeling? Any problems?’ We had a wonderful rabbi. This particular night, I could hear his footsteps coming because my mom never uncovered the shag carpet from the clear plastic covering—only when special company came did we get to actually feel shag on our bare feet—we walked on plastic most of our lives. So I heard his squeaky Florsheims against the plastic coming down the hallway, and I took all the lobsters and stuffed them under my bed, and the second I put them under the bed, the knock came on my door.” Spielberg raps on the conference table. “‘Shmuel?’ the rabbi says. (He called me Shmuel.) And I said, ‘Yes, come in.’ He comes in and sits next to me on the bed with his feet on the floor and he’s asking, ‘So how’s school? How are things?’ and suddenly I notice—but he doesn’t—that two of the lobsters are crawling out from under the bed next to his left shoe. Two more lobsters are