Jen Karetnick
Babka
“What they lacked in richness they made up for ‘with the delightful swirls,’ and the inclusion of
chocolate was a mid-twentieth century American Jewish invention.”
https://food52.com/blog/18792-the-babka-you-ve-seen-everywhere-isn-t-really-babka-after-all
Matriarchal fertility cake named for grandmothers,
it’s more than an excuse for sixteenth-century
panettone. It’s the heaven we only colloquially
have faith in, thanks to Poland’s Queen Sforza
and Ukrainian Jews, the peasantry of pleated
skirts that its creased, tucked sides smack of.
I built it with my own progenitors, the dough
first sometimes frozen overnight for uniform
rolling, lined up like winter puddles. They never
used expensive ingredients, only bouquets of jellies,
sometimes the chewy ghosts of the fruit of the vine
they blessed, fingers covering pupils like lenses,
along with the candles that they waved hands over
three times inwards to signify the gathering of flesh,
mind, and soul. The same for rugelach and Euclidean
hamentashen—marked with their Ashkenazi prints.
With the extracting palm of hand and judicious squint
of eye is how they calculated, a language of signs
and signals interpreted by heat, translated by hours.
The question is how did exotic chocolate become
the default filling and cinnamon the streusel topping
when the ancestral Italian version contained candied
orange, citron, and lemon zest? Historians judge it
as Sephardic influence at play, but it’s plain old
luxury politics: Why use just sweet when rich will
do? For my predecessors, no such verve or zing. Only
the investment for the week’s end, gestures for energy
to return from where it dwelled in the scrubbing of floors,
feeding of children, endless brewing of coffee to go along
with the smokes their spouses quit too eleventh-hour to live on.
The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, July 2024). The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has forthcoming work in Cold Mountain Review, Harpur Palate, Plume Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, and South Dakota Review. See https://jkaretnick.com/