Kiddush

In Mary Antin's memoir The Promised Land, Kiddush — the blessing over wine that sanctifies the Sabbath — appears not as a theological abstraction but as the organizing ritual of the Polotzk household, the moment each week when the family's piety, hierarchy, and hospitality became visible at the table. The ceremony is recalled through the precise material details that surrounded it: the spotless linen and china, the Sabbath loaf covered with a crocheted doily at the father's place, the wine flask and the kiddush cup of gold or silver beside it, and the long row of brass candlesticks polished to perfection, with the heavy silver candlesticks in a shorter row in front, because the mother and grandmother were very pious and each used a number of candles, while the children and the maids had one apiece. The scene is one of strict order and reverent silence, and it is the father who presides over it, standing at the head of the table while the blessing is said, reproving with a stern look any child who whispered or nudged another, and beginning again from the beginning until the words were properly spoken. Only after he had cut the consecrated loaf and distributed the slices were the children at liberty to talk and ask questions — unless a guest was present, in which case a polite silence was maintained. The ritual thus established the father as the spiritual authority of the home, the children as disciplined participants in a sacred order, and the table itself as the altar on which that order was renewed week after week.

The Sabbath Table as a Scene of Piety and Charity

The Kiddush ceremony was embedded in a larger Sabbath evening ritual that began on Friday afternoons, when the parents came home early to wash and dress and remove from their persons every sign of labor. The great keys of the store were put away out of sight, the money bag was hidden in the featherbeds, the father put on his best coat and silk skull-cap, and the mother replaced the cotton kerchief with the well-brushed wig. While the women and girls assembled in the living room for candle prayer, the father and brother went to the synagogue, and when the men returned, the father's greeting of "Good Sabbath!" was answered in kind by the whole family. If he brought with him a Sabbath guest from the synagogue — some poor man without a home — the stranger was welcomed and invited in and placed in the seat of honor next to the father, so that the Kiddush table became an instrument of communal charity as well as domestic piety. The ritual's power to bind the family together was also expressed in the figure of Yakub the choreman, who slept on a bunk built over the entrance door and waited each Friday evening for his cue, which was the breaking-out of table talk after the blessing of the bread. Then Yakub would begin to clear his throat and keep on working at it until the father called to him to come down and have a glass of vodka, and sometimes the father pretended not to hear him while the family smiled at one another around the table and Yakub's throat grew worse and worse, until the father let him come down and poured him a brimming glass of whiskey, which Yakub dedicated to all their healths and tossed off to his own comfort. The Kiddush table, in this way, was the stage on which the household's piety, its charity toward the poor, and even its affectionate humor toward the simple choreman were all enacted together.

The Ritual's Place in the Larger Sabbath Observance

The Kiddush was one element in a web of Sabbath practices that marked the week's sacred peak and gave the children their most vivid experience of Jewish life. The Sabbath was the one time the mother, confined to the store all week, had a chance to get acquainted with her children, and the family looked forward to these days of enjoined rest. On Friday afternoons the children bustled around their parents asking favors in the name of the Sabbath — to wear new shoes in honor of the day, or to be taken across the bridge — while the grandmother superintended the sealing of the oven, the maids washed the sweat from their faces, and the dvornik scraped his feet at the door. The Sabbath evenings at the end of long walks were among the liveliest of the narrator's memories, and she confesses without apology that she would sooner give up some of her delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than lose her images of suppers eaten on those evenings. The Kiddush, as the blessing that opened the festive meal, was thus the hinge between the sacred silence of the ceremony and the licensed talk and eating that followed, and its memory remained bound up with the thick cheese cakes of Polotzk, whose immortal flavor she could dream away a half-hour on, and which she insists could never be reproduced by any American cook because it takes history to make such a cake — the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the Vall, the sweetness of Dvina water, the richness of newly turned earth, the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place, the fragrance of all her childhood's summers.

The Kiddush as a Measure of Americanization

The remembered Kiddush table became, in the American chapters of the memoir, the implicit standard against which the narrator measured her own transformation, and the contrast was dramatized most sharply at Miss Dillingham's tea, her first meal at a Gentile — yes, a Christian — board. She came in much trepidation, all eyes and ears, proceeding cautiously with her spoons and forks, cunning enough to be just a little bit slow so that she did not get to any given spoon until the others at table had shown her which it was. All went well until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was strange to her, and some mischievous instinct told her it was ham — forbidden food — and she, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it. She had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt, but she helped herself to a slice of ham nevertheless and hung her head over her plate to hide her confusion, furious with herself for her weakness, she who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought. She began to reduce her ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table, but she learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk, and she ate with a squirming, a protesting of the inner man, an exquisite abhorrence of herself that only a newly abnegated Jew could understand. The Kiddush, which had once sanctified the food on her father's table, was the unspoken opposite of this scene: where the blessing had made eating an act of communion with God and family, the ham was eaten as an act of self-assertion against the very tradition the Kiddush embodied, and the physical revulsion she felt revealed how deeply that tradition had been inscribed in her body, not merely her beliefs.

The Persistence of the Sacred in Memory

The fate of the Kiddush in America was not simply erasure but transformation into memory, and the memoir repeatedly shows the narrator recovering the sacred through the senses of taste and smell rather than through observance. Eating ripe red American strawberries one day, she suddenly experienced the very flavor and aroma of some strawberries she had eaten perhaps twenty years before, and started as from a shock, sitting still for she did not know how long, breathless with amazement, compressed in a brief interval of gustatory perception back into the child she had been, wandering about Polotzk with large questioning eyes, riding the Atlantic in an emigrant ship, taking possession of the New World, sitting at the feet of renowned professors. The Kiddush, like the cheese cake, could not be reproduced in America — the mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, had forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery and did not practise it, and the narrator was the richer in memories for her omissions. The ritual's power thus survived not in the synagogue or at any American table but in the involuntary returns of memory, when the flavor of a fruit or the sight of scarlet cherries at cherry time could suddenly restore the whole world of the Sabbath table, the consecrated loaf, the wine flask, and the stern paternal look that had once disciplined a whispering child. The Kiddush, in this reading, is the emblem of a holiness that could not be transported to the New World but could not be destroyed either, persisting as the deepest layer of the narrator's identity, the standard of the sacred against which her American freedoms — including the freedom to eat ham — were always, and ambivalently, measured.