Eat, My Child, Eat

When Mother, my mother, for so many years would say, “Sergie, eat, take another
piece of chicken, cucumber, cantaloupe, cake” as, even more recently, she would say
to my own children, “Dvora, Jonathan, Noemi, eat,” was she perhaps all this time
really saying, “Take, my child. Let me give. Flesh of my flesh, I want to give, and
then give more, and then still more, for, would you but take, no end is there to the
source of my wish to give,” the food pressed upon me being a surrogate for
nourishment, for health, for life itself that, having given me, she would sustain
through the most tangible, demonstrable and practical of lifelines?
Perhaps the shortages experienced in homeless Russian exile during the war, the
loss, through disease, malnutrition and cold of one child and the near-loss of her
second, and to this day her last, ingrained in her an ineradicable strain of
over-weaning protectiveness and solicitude for her offspring. Perhaps there was
something of the tribal and the atavistic in all this, though such, given the
evidence, is not the preserve of the Jewish mother alone, however subject to
vaudevillian burlesque, caricature and mindless mockery she has in some.....