The Matzo Ball Heiress by Laurie Gwen Shapiro Read Free Book Online Page A

“I have a matzo joke if you’d like to hear it.” Jake always tells a matzo joke to loosen his guests up, and I try to do the same thing when I’m giving important tours.
    “Yeah?” says Steve.
    “The one about the man who eats his matzo in the park.”
    “I don’t know that one,” Steve says.
    “I’m going to have the camera on you,” Jared forewarns. “No tripod, handheld.”
    Jared’s filming this joke? “It’s dumb. You probably don’t want to broadcast it.”
    “Go on,” Steve insists. “We can make sure Jared’s camera is working properly. He just got it back from our repair department.”
    I look toward Jared’s camera. “A man sits down on a bench and begins eating a sheet of Greenblotz matzo in the park. A little while later a blind man sits next to him. Feeling like a Good Samaritan, the Jewish man passes half the sheet of matzo to the blind man who holds it for a few minutes, looks puzzled and finally says, ‘Who wrote this garbage?’”
    “Funny,” Steve says without a laugh. Maybe he doesn’t get that matzo is covered with pinprick-size airholes so the matzo doesn’t leaven while baking—holes that look and feel like braille—or his Food Channel editor doesn’t like him to laugh while they’re taping so it’s easier in the editing room to cut and paste voice snippets. Or maybe he thinks I’m dopey.
    I can just make out that Jared is grinning behind the camera, though. “Camera’s hunky-dory,” he says.
    I tug a loose piece of thread inside my skirt pocket. “I hope you three have comfortable walking shoes on, because this place is huge. We have five floors here. The factory is actually four conjoined buildings.”
    “How many square feet?” Steve prods, as we start walking out of the office and into the factory.
    “Well, each building is twenty-five by a thousand. There’s four of them. So that’s five hundred thousand square feet because it’s twenty-five thousand times five floors times four—”
    “Five floors? Why do you need so many floors?”
    “Izzy figured out that the easiest way to set up a matzo factory was to have it gravity fed. The flour is dumped from the top and moves on down, the way they pour concrete in a foundry. It’s one of the reasons we could never move. We’d have to figure out our business from scratch, we wouldn’t have a clue how to do what we do in a one-story building.”
    “So interesting,” Steve says with an on-camera, very enthusiastic nod.
    I start walking and talking: “Long before the Jewish people fled Egypt, Passover was an ancient springtime ceremony of renewal. There was a pagan early-harvest feast and a pagan feast of unleavened bread. Somehow both got swallowed up into Judaic tradition.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, but, wait, can I start again? You shouldn’t put that last bit on air. Jews get worked up if you tell them a version of this holiday existed way before Moses.”
    Jared laughs loudly behind his viewfinder.
    “Tell us again, without the pagan stuff,” Steve says neutrally.
    “Long ago, matzo was very thick, and each piece was baked by three women—one to knead, one to roll and one to bake. It had to be made fresh daily. During the Middle Ages, the thickness of matzo was limited to the width of one finger, and it became thinner and crisper as time went on. Thin, crisp matzo could be prepared in advance for the entire Passover celebration. Then, a little over a hundred years ago, matzo machinery was invented.” When I talk about matzo I can sound as if I went to an orthodox Jewish day school. But ask me about anything else in Judaism, like why there’s a huge party when boys get circumcised, or why a Jewish groom stomps on a glass at a Jewish wedding, and I’d just be making it up.
    “Tell us more about the matzo machines,” Steve says.
    “There isn’t a magical do-it-all machine like the one in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that will produce a chewing gum that tastes like a five-course dinner.