Grandma Ethnography : Matzo Balls & Culture

The suburbs of New Jersey are not the ideal place to conduct your average fieldwork. Its surroundings are painfully familiar and banal. The minutia of culture here reveal themselves only after a careful examination of routine, values, and aesthetics. One does not have the luxury of exoticism in a setting like this. On highly ritualized days, not unlike the Jewish High Holiday of Yom Kipper, things do become a little bit clearer through those three pieces of the pie- routine, values, and aesthetics.

The routine of the ritual of Yom Kipper has not changed for my grandma for many years (with the exception that my grandfather is no longer here to share it with her.). She always spends the holiday with the family, her son, my father, and her daughter, my aunt. She can always be counted on to prepare the staple dishes for the breaking of the fast, which almost always include the following: matzo ball soup, brisket, egg salad, tuna salad and green beans. She makes the soup even though it is not the proper holiday to enjoy it (which is Passover). These foods hold special significance to my family because of their status as a staple on the table. She also completes the lighting of the candles ritual with such routinized precision that she doesn't even know what each component means anymore.

Grandmas are the bedrock of the family unit. They represent where the family has been and act as the cement of the younger members. Her values and understandings of the holiday are what is transmitted most strongly through her tales of the past and interpretation of the religious literature. Grandma represents integrity and positionally which is to be celebrated and respected. She also passes these along through her kin by rewarding good behavior with treats and the like.

Her view of aesthetics and what looks right for the occasion also speak volumes. Her use of her finer clothes indicate the serious nature of what is going on and that it is different from other days of the year. The way her food is presented on the table and then attacked buffet style creates a familial mood that is nearly impossible to recreate. The good china is used, a table cloth is spread, and thin wine glasses are filled. This is no ordinary night.

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