Ancestor Bread
It all started, as most good things do, in the kitchen.
On Friday mornings we bake bread, and the alchemy of yeast and honey fills the air with its heady smell. While we knead the dough, our hands sticky and thick with flour, my daughter turns to me and asks, “Did you also make challah with your mom when you were little?”
She’s four years old and she wants stories of me when I was younger. She loves magic, and there is nothing more deliciously impossible than a story that shrinks her powerful mother down to a mischievous child, a character who breaks the rules instead of sets them.
I look at her as I move the dough slowly back and forth between my hands. “Yes. And my mom made challah with her mother too, and her savta.”
She shakes her head. “Your mom is savta. What do you mean, her savta?” I brush the floury hair out of my face and say, “Maybe it will be easier if I use their names. All of the children in our family made challah with their mothers on Fridays, back as far as I know. You’re Maya, daughter of Orli, daughter of Aliya, daughter of Arona, daughter of Anna, daughter of Rose, and they all made challah.”
She loves this, and asks me to say the names again slowly, again and again, until she learns to repeat it in the swaying rhythm of a nursery rhyme.
“Maya, daughter of Orli, daughter of Aliya, daughter of Arona, daughter of Anna, daughter of Rose.” Then she asks me, “Who came before Rose?”
In every family there’s one person whose job it is to carry the stories. I’m that person, wearing our history like a heavy sweater with too many pockets. I can tell you about my grandmother’s peach tree that never bore fruit, or the way my violin-playing great grandfather crossed the ocean to America alone as a teenager by pretending to be a member of a traveling orchestra. In black and white photographs, I can identify the faces and names of ancestors I’ve never met. But that known lineage stops at my great-great-grandmother Rose.
I ask my mother who came before Rose, but she doesn’t know. My aunt tracks down a distant cousin in her nineties who knows the name of Rose’s mother: Mildred.
My daughter and I add another name to the chain: Maya, daughter of Orli, daughter of Aliya, daughter of Arona, daughter of Anna, daughter of Rose, daughter of Mildred.
It becomes an incantation which rises like the dough, calling us back through the tunnel of women who have made us. Every time we make the challah, she says to me, “Can we do Daughter of? And together, we recite the names of all the ones who made the bread before us.
One day she asks: “Who came before Mildred? Why don’t you know her name?”
I want to tell her how rare it is, in this world, to know the real names of anything, of anyone, especially seven generations back. And that even a name is not an anchor, it only ties us, like spider silk – tenuous and thin – to a history that we can never read.
To my daughter, the names are stepping stones that she can put her full weight on, pressing back into the past. I wish I could make them three dimensional people for her, because I want her to be a carrier of our history too – but also because I can’t bear the thought of both of us someday being nothing more than names, of all our stories evaporating into air.
Maya daughter of Orli daughter of Aliya daughter of Arona daughter of Anna daughter of Rose daughter of Mildred…
There, as we say it, is my grandmother who has been gone nearly 30 years. I see her admiring her garden, clipping articles from Readers Digest, her sad round eyes thinking of her long-ago stillborn child. There is my great grandmother with elegant loopy handwriting, Boston accent and a smile as wide as the sky. My great-great-grandmother staring into the camera with her shiny silk shirt and ironed straight hair. Here is a lifetime reduced to a photograph, a handful of stories that we eat like crumbs.
Before phones, before cars, before electricity, there was a time when their hearts beat with the peaceful monotony of their daily chores – when they stood in their kitchens, making the bread.
There, in my mind, across an ocean, across a century, is the one before Mildred, whose name I don’t know. She’s standing there, shaping the dough.
Maybe she smiles as she shifts the baby on her hip, brushing the floury hair away from her eyes.
Maybe she looks out the window, and the buds are blooming on the trees, and spring has come.
There she is, staring at the new leaves, and she sings a song softly to herself. So softly that only she can hear the words.
