Rolled Cabbage to Osceola

Rolled Cabbage to Osceola

 

On the night that I first make rolled cabbage, we don’t get to eating until eleven o’clock. Nine fading guests and five empty bottles of wine; we are steeped in hunger and exhausted from an Uno deck that has been re-shuffled too many times. Frustration festers as the apartment slowly fills with the scent of simmering tomato sauce, roasting meat, and crumbled gingersnaps scrumptiously caramelizing. “So much for eight o’clock,” one guest half-heartedly jokes. When it is finally done, we don’t let it cool; tempering the steam with cold mashed potatoes, sacrificing burned tongues for full bellies.

My entire life I’ve been told that rolled cabbage is an undertaking without ever quite believing these words to be true. On the night of my culinary endeavor, I call my grandma at six o’clock. She laughs and says, “You’re gonna be havin’ a late dinner.” I don’t bank on working past eight. After all, the recipe is rather short, a few inches in a family cookbook that contains more than one recipe based on yellow box-cake.

Yet by the next morning, the page marking “MeeMaw’s Rolled Cabbage,” carries that casualties of last night’s frantic cooking; globs of sauce and ruby-red fingerprints marking the places where I’ve had to stop and read again. This page certainly isn’t the only one hosting streaks and splatters. Flip a few forward and you’ll find my grandmother’s brownies garnished with gritty cocoa batter. Skim back and there’s the sunshine yellow of spilled grits, the custard remains of baked kugel. Translucent onion fingerprints draw one’s eyes to a favored latke recipe as if saying, “Pick me, this recipe has been loved.”

 

I have been fascinated by this cookbook my entire life—compiled by my grandmother but drawn from many familial sources. I am perplexed by a place where kugel co-exists with grits and gingersnaps are crumbled over rolled cabbage. Passover cookies sidle up next to North Carolina Pork Barbeque—these recipes are a far cry both from how I understand Jewish, and how I understand Southern.

I, myself, am half Jewish by blood. I was raised by an agnostic and an Episcopalian in the halls of Northeast academia. Religion lived in the peripheries of my childhood, never delving much deeper than one of Hanukah’s eight nights. And while my father’s roots run Southern, my interaction with the South has been restricted to scattered visits and tales of people I hardly know. How am I to reconcile Passover and pulled pork when I still find discomfort equally in a Seder as in a jar of Barbeque sauce? These are categories I barely understand distinctly, making their mingling all the more confusing.

It is this very intrigue that finds me Memphis-bound mere days after my rolled cabbage escapade. Southern and Jewish have always felt very vaguely present in my life; existing subtly in the occasional holiday or the faintest drawl in my father’s “y’all.” But I want to know more. I want to taste rolled cabbage and understand it. I want to understand my family’s history as Jews in the American South, in a small town near Memphis—Osceola, Arkansas. I want to see if I can find comfort in the conversation between Southern and Jewish. Who first crumbled gingersnaps over an Eastern European heritage, and why?

I remember Osceola in the unfocused way of the very young and, in truth, I know very little about it. My family is several generations elsewhere and often shake their heads, saying, “There’s just no one left.” What I do know is that this is where my paternal grandfather grew up, where my great-grandparents lived and died. I know that when you say you’re going, you’ve got to make the vowels long and lovely—“Oh-see-oh-la,” as singsong as can be. And I know that this is where my family ran a storefront that is now empty, attended a temple that no longer exists, and formed tight-knit circles of friends with people who are either long gone or have migrated since. Now, my great-aunt Lynn, my grandfather’s sister and the one remaining member of their immediate clean, has agreed to take me back.

 

Deplaning in Tennessee I am immediately faced with several large columns of red, white, and blue balloons flanking the gate. A nervous pit starts to fester in my stomach. I think back only hours earlier, packing with my friend Alex in a cramped New York bedroom.

“When was the last time you saw this part of your family?” he asks between mouthfuls of leftover cranberry pie.

I tick off ten years on my fingers, surprised to count so many.

“I’d sure be nervous if I were you,” he snorts.

I shrug it off, but rolling out into the heavy air, searching cars for faces I barely know, I start to get it. I’m wondering if it was smart to come alone. I see someone waving and breathe deep.

My Aunt Lynn’s daughter, Ginger, is picking me up. We exchange the requisite hellos of people who share blood but not much familiarity. It’s late and once we get home, we make the easy transition to bed, promising to catch up on the missing decade between us the next day.

And what better way to say a decades-delayed hello than an early trip to Corky’s? I’m not sure if it’s a Memphis institution or a family one, but it sure seems familiar to the fifteen or so relatives present at this morning reunion. They chat easily with the staff, the proprietor’s son lingering at the head of the table. I nervously wait for my aunt Lynn to arrive, picking half-heartedly at a mountain of thin onion rings.

Finally, from behind, I hear, “Well, hell-oh,” the “o” long as the time between us and as weighty as the humid Southern air. When Aunt Lynn enters a room you know it. She radiates warmth, heavy and full. Her eyes are stuck in permanent smile beneath cropped hair. Every word is an exclamation, loud and rising. We sit at the end of the table and she shows me how to eat rounds of scrumptious sausage with bites of soft cheese, to ditch the signature “curlicue” sauce for straight barbeque.

“This is the South,” she exclaims as we spear our bites with tiny toothpicks carrying Corky’s flags. She tells me how much it means that I’m here. I tell her how much it means to me. And we say these things many, many times, maybe without fully knowing what we mean by this quite yet. At one point she tells the waiter, “I app-ruh-ciate you,” every syllable saying, “I mean it.” We dig into our pulled pork and I have to laugh a little. Here I am reconnecting with my Jewish roots over a plate of pig.

 

Of course there’s pulled pork in my grandma’s cookbook as well, slow roasted over hickory chips, mere pages from the beef brisket that often graces our Hanukah dinner table. How did Jews in Osceola stray from kosher and develop a taste for pig? Dietary law doesn’t seem to cross any of my relative’s minds down here, and when I pry I’m not met with much. Of course they’re mostly Reform, as were their parents, and their parents’ parents at least.

Yet it wasn’t always so. It was a long-past relative, Annie Weinberg, who drew together Osceola’s first congregation in the mid-1890s. At this time, the congregation was much more conservative. Every week Annie made sure there were ten men to ensure a minyan, not counting herself or the other women. Religious life was more conservative for these newly arrived Russian émigrés and there was certainly no pulled pork on their southern tables.

We aren’t quite sure how Annie and her husband, Nathan, got to Osceola from Russia. But we do know that after they arrived, Nathan’s brother, Adolph, made his way down to the Delta after travelling from Russia to Liverpool and docking in Boston on the S.S. Michigan. And we also know that Nathan died in 1905, the same year that my great-grandfather was born, imparting his name upon him per Jewish tradition, and, decades later, upon my own brother.

Annie’s home-based congregation was eventually adopted into Temple Israel, located in nearby Blytheville, in the 1920s. Blytheville was a typical model of small-town Jewish life, drawing scattered groups from across the region. Osceola, which had fifty Jews living amongst its roughly 2,500 Gentiles by the year 1937, also fed into Blytheville religious life. When I first call home asking about this temple, my mother laughs, “I can still hear Aunt Mary,” she says, “‘Up the river in Bligh-ville.’” The “I” stretches as far as the picked over cotton plantations we now pass through, Osceola bound.

 

To get to Osceola you have to cross from Tennessee to Arkansas, passing over the state line on a bridge bound over the Mississippi. “It’s beautiful,” I say as we reach the apex, gazing out at the never-ending grey. As a Northeast native, I am always captivated by spaces big and wide. “It’s not beautiful,” says my grandmother from the seat next to me, “It’s muddy—the muddy Mississippi.”

There are four of us in the car today. It’s my grandma and me in the back, the same grandma who carefully compiled the family cookbook that has drawn me here. I call her Gigi. Gigi is a small woman, softer around the edges than Aunt Lynn, but with edges just the same. She is in her early seventies, with short, feathery brown hair and a smooth and quiet warmth to her occasionally sharp demeanor. Gigi was married to my grandfather, Aunt Lynn’s brother, and has visited Osceola many, many times, though not for years. Aunt Lynn sits in the passenger seat and Ginger drives.

As we fly down the highway, I am trying to wrap my head around the things that I know. Osceola is one town—our place of origin—but its story sometimes reads in clichéd ways, not unlike those of other small, Southern towns. In the mid-twentieth century, Osceola thrived with a Jewish merchant class, lived and breathed in a sea of cotton. Every year the harvest brought hordes of Mexican migrants, who came to Main Street with money in their pockets, cat-calling “Buenita, Juanita,” at my Aunt Lynn, or so she says.

After the advent of the mechanized cotton picker, this yearly migration waned. Small plantations became larger conglomerates, and at the end of the twentieth century, Walmart administered the final blow to a town already struggling. In one hundred years the Jewish population came and went, leaving for nearby cities like Memphis.

 

But today we are going to Osceola. We are on our way to meet an old classmate of Aunt Lynn’s, named Sylvia, at a place called The Hog Pen. No one in our party has been here before and we slow down a bit, carefully searching the empty horizon for our destination. “Why would you put a restaurant nowhere?” my Gigi asks. Finally we find it, maybe the lowest looking building I’ve ever seen, barely a full floor tall, sitting in a gravel driveway off the cotton highway. I think I see a Confederate flag gracing the roof, but upon closer look I realize it is only that of the state of Arkansas.

Sylvia is already waiting when we arrive, sitting alone in the dead quiet of the inside. It’s empty, save for a group of hunched over young men in baseball caps, silently chowing in the corner. One of them is Snapchatting portraits of himself with his sandwich. Sylvia is a short woman with bobbed gray hair and a surly look in her deep-set eyes. The first thing she says to me is, “It’s good to know ya.”

We order quick and get to reminiscing. I’m learning to speak in a new way down here. Conversation is characterized by the haphazard collection of stories, told as they are remembered, no thesis ahead. There’s the wandering accounting of people once known. Old favorites are pulled out—the time Uncle Scott doused my daddy’s dinner in hot sauce and he threw it up everywhere, the time “the help” had to call my Aunt Lynn at the salon ’cause the kids were throwing mud in the front lawn. We dip fluffy white bread in sweet, acidic sauce, tuck into baked beans ripe with that ever-present pulled pork.

My Gigi talks about her first dinner in Osceola, when she was engaged to my grandfather, many years ago. Gigi hails originally from St. Louis and describes how overwhelmed she was by the somewhat bourgeois tendencies of Osceola’s merchant class. She was especially intimidated by her new mother-in-law, my MeeMaw, the original source of the rolled cabbage recipe, who Gigi says was “the epitome of a lady.” In the confusion of utensils and good china, Gigi accidentally spooned a heaping portion of salt into her iced tea from the tiny silver bowls that graced each place setting. Aunt Lynn laughs, “We sure were ree-fined, weren’t we?”

This story makes me think of the first time my own mother met MeeMaw, who flew down to Dallas, where my Gigi now lives, for the engagement occasion. MeeMaw deplaned with a suitcase of wild ducks, my mother biting into her first buckshot over dinner.

 

Every part of these stories revels in seeming contradiction—refined and rural, Southern and Jewish; the vague presence of the help in these stories. What do we mean when we say “there is no one left” in Osceola? This statement leaves me vaguely unsettled because the truth is that there are people left. We’ve seen them today, walking Osceola’s desolate streets. Most of them are African American and, as my Aunt Lynn puts it, “lookin’ a little rough.” So I think when we say there is “no one left” what we really mean is that there is no one left who is like us. This is just one more statement that seems to start as a contradiction, but as we go on seems more and more like one more necessary complication of a complex place.

 

As we drive through Osceola, Aunt Lynn paints a picture over every vacant home. There’s the sagging yellow cottage where Aunt Mary and Uncle Hymie lived. There’s the magnolia tree that MeeMaw wanted to cut down when she got sick. There’s the church whose singsong bells woke Lynn and her brother on Sunday mornings; its dome now caved into the interior, an apocalyptic sight on an almost tidy street. I feel too shy to take a picture, as if asking to photograph the deceased.

On Main Street we pull over. There is not one other car in sight. Every storefront is empty. We cup our eyes to peer through empty windows as Aunt Lynn names various long-gone proprietors—Nichols and Silverstein, Uncle Hymie’s liquor store. My Gigi tells me to stand on the corner to get a full picture. “Show them,” she says, “What has happened to small town America.”

I have a thousand questions, many of them, for today, unaskable. Today we tell stories. And that is important because this history I am exploring—it has already happened, and standing on that corner, I am overcome with the feeling that if I don’t ask for these stories, they could easily disappear. For today at least, we will revel in memory—remember how my great-grandfather met his brother at the post office every morning to discuss business or just how much he loved this place, sitting in a rocking chair in the store window after he retired, keeping watch. We will smile at the thought of MeeMaw, ever the lady, walking around the block in her stockings and heels, serving rolled cabbage on the good china. We will mourn a little. For Aunt Lynn, it is true that there is no one left, none of the people that made her belong.

 

Back in New York, I return to the rolled cabbage recipe, run my fingers over the ruby-tinged page and think about trying it again. I never believed rolled cabbage to be such an undertaking, but by the end of this trip I’m learning to examine my preconceptions a bit more closely. Now I know that the reason this recipe seems so simple is only because the complexity of the instructions are not written down. Nowhere does it indicate that you will be boiling cabbage, peeling every layer. My Gigi has not indicated the proper way to roll the meatballs in the leaves—sides in first, like a burrito, as she tells me on our third phone call of the evening. There is no hint that the indicated hour and a half is an at least—that this recipe requires patience and a whole lot of determination.

Rolled cabbage may be Jewish in origin, but it is Southern at heart. It will take some scratching at the surface to tease the complications. I have gone to Memphis to look for a little understanding and I’ve come back with more questions than answers. So when I make rolled cabbage again, I will do it justice this time. I will shop a day ahead, wrap every parcel slow and steady, each rolling of the leaf a question, not close to done asking.

 
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