Borscht Belt

When I went to Israel after high school, to study in a Yeshiva (a Jewish theological seminary), one of the things I did soon after my arrival was to make contact with my Israeli relatives. The relation was not close -- you had to go back about 4 generations to establish the connection. Invariably, they would invite me to spend a Sabbath with them.

I often stayed with elderly relatives who lived in the modest town of Hadera, about midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. They were very hospitable, and I ended up staying with them many times, over the two and a half years I spent in Israel.

On the first such visit, I arrived on a Friday afternoon. My hostess, being a good Jewish mother, immediately served me a tasty lunch. With one notable exception.

Have you ever drank borscht? If you are of the Russian persuasion, your answer may well be da. Borscht is a beet-red cold drink, which is hardly surprising, given that it is made from beets, and actually contains beets. And we are not talking tiny pieces of beets, like pulp in orange juice, but rather prodigious hunks of the plant. I recall my father occasionally downing a glass of borscht at my grandmother's home. In many, many ways, I am my father's son, but if paternity were determined based on the borscht-loving gene, such a test would indicate that I was adopted.

This, however, was the first occasion in which I was directly confronted with a glass -- a tall glass, mind you -- of borscht that had my name on it. I did not wish to be rude and leave the glass untouched, so I braced myself. I don't think I had ever actually tasted borscht, but as bad as the mental image I had formed of the taste of the stuff, the actual brutal reality of the experience left my imagination far behind, trailing in its dust.

I tried my usual trick of blocking my nasal passages by breathing through my mouth, but to no avail. Among other things, this strategy did not help with those colossal pieces of beet, with their unpleasant rubbery-like consistency. In desperation, I lighted upon the idea of eating bread with each bit of borscht I imbibed. The taste and consistency of the bread neutralized those of the borscht -- not completely, mind you, but sufficiently to get by.

Now the amount of bread required to achieve the neutralization effect was considerable. I must have eaten an entire loaf of bread in order to get down that glass of borscht. Every five minutes, I would psych myself up for the next round, as one might for a root canal, and would down another teaspoon of borscht, chased down with another slice of bread. They say that an optimist looks and sees a half-full glass, while the pessimist looks and sees a half-empty glass. But when the glass staring you in the face is half-full of borscht, there is no room for optimism or pessimism -- a primal survival instinct eclipses all other emotions.

An hour later, in front of me was a blessedly empty glass of borscht. Just at that precise moment, my hostess returned to the kitchen. "Oh! You finished the entire glass! I'm so glad you enjoyed it!" and proceeded to pour me another brimming glass of borscht.

I leave it to the reader's imagination to fill in what happened next. And by the way, today I love beets -- but I have not yet encountered another glass of borscht.