Dove's Eye View: A Sephardic Lunch in Oakland

December 26, 2004

A Sephardic Lunch in Oakland

My dear friend Julie F., whose last name is entirely Ashkenazi, is the daughter of a Syrian Jewish-American from Brooklyn, the lovely Judy F. of Los Angeles. When I first met Julie she told me her grandparents were from Syria - one was from Beirut, one from Aleppo. At the time they emigrated to America, all of Lebanon was part of Syria, so anybody from Beirut was a Syrian. Julie knows a couple of choice Arabic phrases she learned from her grandmother, who would insult her grandfather in Arabic when she got really mad. I found this intriguing - I knew there had been Jews in Lebanon up until the mid 1970s, and I'd met a few Syrian-American Jews when I lived in New York, but I hadn't been close friends with someone from this community before.

My father met Judy, Julie's mom, several years ago and got the family name of her grandmother: Politti. Well, my father said - everybody knows that the Polittis are not from Beirut, they're from Sidon. They only moved to Beirut later. "I went to high school with Clement Politti" he said. "Clement moved to Beirut after 1948, when things got unpleasant after the establishment of Israel. Then I heard he moved to Brazil, and I don't know what happened to him after."

My father decided from this that Julie's ancestors are buried in his hometown (a suburb of Sidon). When I was there in 2000, he showed me the Politti family linen shop by the Christian gate to Sidon's souk, near where we Christians always park our cars when shopping. His latest thing is that his ancestors sold Judy's ancestors olives. Because of stories like this, Judy and my dad completely hit it off, and we now have a tradition of spending Christmas with Julie's family every year.

This year Julie hosted us for a Boxing Day lunch at her new apartment, and for the first time, she and her mom cooked for us. Wow. It was Arab home cooking day. Julie told us the names of most items in Arabic: kusa bi jibneh and mjaddarah (zucchini cheese casserole, caramelized onions and lentils with rice), plus a stew she calls "green bean and meat stew." My dad made tabbouli and brought home cured olives from fruit he'd harvested from street trees in Alameda. As condiments for the mjaddarah, Julie served diced cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and a dish of yogurt garnished with mint.

I was delighted to find that my dear friend of 9 years can cook the same food my Lebanese relatives made for me. She grew up on the same flavors I did! The zucchini casserole is much more typical of Sephardim than of my village, but something about it tasted familiar. Claudia Roden includes a version of it in her Middle Eastern Cookbook as well as The Book of Jewish Food.

I cannot find internet sources about the Jews of Sidon, but you can read about the Jews of Aleppo and the Central Synagogue in Aleppo. An article in the Daily Star of Beirut talks about the history of the Jewish community in Lebanon - I cannot vouch for its accuracy.

Borre Ludvigsen of Al Mashriq photographed the Synagogue of Wadi BuJmil in Beirut in the 1990s. He also documented the Jewish cemetery there.

However intractable the current conflict seems, this sort of personal connection reminds us that the problem is not age-old nor inevitable. Arabs and Jews lived together for centuries before the establishment of the state of Israel. It is possible for us to do so again. Outsiders tend to forget this, as do people from each community who have been cut off for several generations. Here in America, where we are all equal citizens with the same rights and privileges, we have the freedom to be friends. May this freedom flourish in the Middle East one day - in my lifetime, insha'allah.