Different cultures, different generations, yet bonded by family ties and cooking lessons

We know people bond when they share meals together, be it on Shabbos or at dinner with friends. But people also bond when they prepare food together — even if they come from wildly different backgrounds.

Such was the case with my mother-in-law and me. We were so very different: She was an intelligent, proud, strong-willed woman who kept her home as spotless as a museum and believed that children should mostly be seen and not heard. I was an easygoing American who got married straight out of graduate-student life, where housekeeping was little more than a pesky footnote to the more compelling business of reading, writing, and teaching; I’d been raised with a permissive American approach to childrearing.

But four years after my marriage, my in-laws decided to spend the month of Tishrei with us, and suddenly my mother-in-law and I found ourselves spending long hours in the kitchen together preparing meals for the chagim.

Some Background

My in-laws traveled from Israel to Brooklyn on the heels of a family tragedy: My brother-in-law Jo had passed away at age 43, after suffering for years from a chronic illness. At the time, I was a week overdue with my third child.

With a baby imminent, my husband couldn’t go sit shivah with his family in Israel, so he sat at home, a sad and lonely affair. (I still remember struggling to get out of bed at 6:30 a.m. to waddle to the corner to buy bagels, cream cheese, and orange juice for the men who showed up for the morning minyan; Sephardim, unlike Ashkenazim, make a point of eating in a shivah house so they can make brachos l’ilui nishmas the niftar.)

I went into labor the morning my husband got up from sitting shivah. He took the ritual walk around the block and then drove me straight to the hospital, where I delivered a baby boy. Eight days later, the baby received his deceased uncle’s name at the bris.

A couple of months later, my in-laws decided to come spend Tishrei with us. After losing their beloved oldest son, they needed a change of scenery, and meeting the new grandson who bore his name was an additional draw.

I hadn’t spent all that much time together with my in-laws until then. They’d come in for our wedding, but I was a busy kallah, and my mother-in-law, ever occupied with cooking for the family, always shooed me out of the kitchen. We’d spent a Pesach together in France, where she and my sisters-in-law cooked while I chased after two toddlers.

My mother-in-law, whom we called Mamy Gisele, and I came from very different worlds and generations. I always suspected she might have enjoyed an easier connection to a girl of her own background. Now we were almost haphazardly tied together by my husband and children.