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

We need nine machines to make our matzos, because there are nine steps to production, ten if you count shipment.”
    “Walk me through them, one step at a time,” Steve says.
    Dad taught me the ten steps before I knew how to read. I take a theatrical breath: “Well, in step one, we start with flour, two we add water, three we mix, four flatten, five stipple, six cut to size, seven goes on conveyors for eight, the cooking. Then, eight, bake in the oven at 910 degrees for fifteen minutes and twenty seconds. Nine, package it and ten we ship it out to the world.”
    I’m done explaining the matzo-making steps by the time we reach the oldest machine in my family’s factory, the oven, which is connected to cutting devices. I love to start tours here because with its many knobs and motors from the turn of the century, the machine looks straight out of a Jules Verne novel.
    “Tell us about this one,” Steve asks.
    “This is the oven, the most important piece of machinery in our factory. The matzo comes out of the oven in huge prescored squares, which will make eight sheets in a packaged box. Because they are prescored, workers can break them by hand. It’s as easy as tearing perforated pages from a notebook.”
    “How come I can never break them evenly by hand?” Jared asks in the background. Steve looks annoyed that his cameraman is asking questions, even rhetorical ones. I would be annoyed too. It’s a big no-no for anyone other than the designated producer to ask away, but the question was not only a cute one, but also quite valid. Even though the matzo you eat at home has lines of dots on it like graph paper, if you try to break a sheet in a straight line along the dots, you end up with jagged pieces. According to my father, it’s one of the great mysteries of Judaism.
    “The perforations must run deeper on the megasheets,” I answer in Jared’s direction. “I never even thought about that.” Steve motions for me to look back at him and away from Jared.
    Now I’m certain that Jared is Jewish, or in the tribe, as Jake likes to say. Not that I factor in religion when I want to hook up with an attractive guy. I’d put available and funny over Jewish any day. I’m agnostic to the bone, but oddly, I do daydream about landing myself a nice Jewish hipster. He’s someone who knows all the latest foreign flicks but who can also guide me through the parts of my religion I don’t have the foggiest idea about. I can never see my fantasy man’s face, but he’s hugging me in public after our first son’s bris and we’re feasting on potato salad and corned beef with his parents, who are alternating bites of celebratory deli with beams of approval at their newest “daughter,” and their newly circumcised grandson. Where this embarrassing reverie comes from mystifies me. But I have it a lot, as much as some people fantasize about a thousand bucks on a horse with impossible odds.
    Jared isn’t done. “You know that matzo joke about an aerospace engineer who—well, that joke is really long.”
    “Stop the camera,” Steve says in exasperation. “Go ahead, Jared, you obviously want to tell it. We’ll pick up after you’re finished.”
    “You sure?” Jared asks sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.”
    “Yes. Tell us,” Steve says.
    “It’s long. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”
    “Go ahead already.”
    “Well, my uncle tells it the best, but I’ll give it a go.”
    “Begin the damn matzo joke already, for Christ’s sakes,” Steve demands, although it’s obvious from his face that he’s not really mad, and that these two guys have a friendship outside of work.
    “This guy Avrum is a gifted Israeli aeronautical engineer who launches a company in Tel Aviv to build jets. Everything looks terrific on paper, but when he has a pilot test the new jet, disaster strikes. The wings can’t take the strain, and they break clean off the fuselage.”
    “So the pilot is dead?” Tonia interrupts.