Ich bin ein Berliner
On June 26, 1963 Jack Kennedy spoke four words of German during a speech in Berlin, "Ich bin ein Berliner," and drew a large line in the sand in front of the Communist menace. What JFK mean to say was, "I am Berliner," of course. For years I went about my business believing a common misconception that although well intended, what Jack's words had actually meant was "I am a jelly-filled donut." You see, a 'berliner' is a particular type of German pastry similar in many ways to American jelly-filled donuts. As it turns out, there are some exquisitely precise and pedantic rules in the German language (insert your own joke on German national stereotypes) dealing with who gets to say "Ich bin Berliner" (an actual Berliner) and who should say, like Kennedy did, "Ich bin ein Berliner," (everyone else) meaning, "I'm not a real Berliner but I'm saying that I am in solidarity with you."
You are what you eat
If it's true that you are what you eat, then during the Hanukkah season most Israelis should say with JFK, "I am a Berliner." The only difference is that we call our berliners "sufganiot."
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| Traditional Jelly-filled Hannukah Donuts (Sufganiot) |
Holiday-specific foods figure large in Israeli culture and Hanukkah is no exception. If you're not familiar with the Hannukah myth, it goes something like this (and I'm oversimplifying things here greatly):
- Greeks conquer Israel, use the Temple for... whatever.
- After rebelling against the Greeks (Syrians really, but let's not get into that just now), the Maccabees decide that they should rededicate the temple. Sorry, the Temple.
- To do this, they needed a special kind of oil to light candles for eight days. Problem is, they can't find the right kind of oil anywhere. After much searching they do find one container of oil, good for maybe one day of light.
- Undeterred, the decide to use the oil and light the lights.
- When they go and check on the empty oil container the next day... a miracle! It still holds enough oil for one (extra) day!
- This business with the oil goes on for eight more days until extra quantities of suitable hydrocarbons can be found or manufactured.
- Ta-dah, the Festival of Lights is born.
Fast forward roughly twenty-two hundred years and the way we celebrate the festival of lights is by eating as many oily foods as we can cram into our bodies. Deep-fried hash browns? Bring them on. Deep-fried 'Berliners'? Let me have a dozen. Per family member. Per day.
The Higgs Boson
Hanukkah is the time of year when cardiologists go on high alert (think CPAs on April 14th) and hospitals stock up on industrial grade degreasing agents. I don't want to overstate matters, but these donuts are not your run-of-the-mill jelly-filled poseurs. The obscenities that you can buy at any Krispy Kreme are a light and fluffy souffle by comparison.
Let me put it another way. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have been hard at work looking for something called a Higgs boson, which is the subatomic particle that actually confers mass to everything. Just last week we heard from them that they thought that they had found evidence for the boson but that it wasn't quite conclusive yet.
Silly, silly, physicists with IQs in the high 190s. If you are going to look for the particle that makes up mass, shouldn't you be looking for it in something well, massive? All you have to do to find the boson is ship some of our donuts from Israel to Geneva and stick them into your accelerator. Results guaranteed.
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| CERN, looking for bosons in all the wrong places. |
Darwin Wept
When I came to live in Israel in the late 90s, it was easy to escape the torture-by-fritter that sufganiot embody. Back then, all sufganiot were filled with some sort of reddish jelly (strawberry or raspberry, it was difficult to tell from the flavor alone). Large, oily, and hardly fresh, they were easy to avoid. I'm sure that they were enticing to kids, but having even one during the eight days of Hannukah was more than enough.
And then they mutated. In a display of adaptability that would have made Darwin weep with joy, the donuts became smaller and started adding flavors and textures. It started out slow. For a couple of years a limited number chocolate-filled donuts appeared, still large but you could tell at a glance that these were not your grandpa's donuts. Then they subdivided like single-cell organisms and became smaller; more flavors started showing up at the bakery: dulce de leche made its entrance, then vanilla, then coconut, halvah a couple of years later.
And now we're surrounded, there is no escape.
To make matters worse, they're only here for the Hannukah season and then they're gone. Get them now or make do without them for a year. Damn.
Did I mention they're delicious?
Happy holidays everyone!
