A year ago, the Kitchen Table opened in Mountain View, and shortly thereafter I wrote a column about how I was not only enamored with the restaurant’s lamb BLT, but also fascinated by the mere idea of “kosher bacon.” It was a pretty funny column, if I do say so myself, and my long-lost cousin, who apparently scours the Internet for offbeat Jewish articles, happened to find it and read it.
We were so unknown to one another that she had to e-mail another cousin of mine, Marty Fruchtman in Toronto. She copied and pasted my column into her e-mail and asked, “Is that Eddie’s boy?” Eddie (my father, known to me only as Edward or Ed, but that’s another story) is their cousin. Marty replied in the affirmative and included my Yahoo address.
“Dear Andy,” began the out-of-the-blue e-mail I received. “By way of introduction, I am your cousin (once removed) Linda Rosen Sterling, and have wanted to reach you since reading your review! It made me smile, salivate and sing along with the wonderful cadence of your writing.” Wow, maybe more family members should read my stuff.
We began trading e-mails, two virtual strangers on opposite coasts. I had met Linda only once, and that was 35 years ago, when I was just 12. No way did I remember her. She barely remembered me. But in our exchanges, some of the pieces — many of them Jewish — began to fall into place.
She’s an educator at the Jewish Museum in New York, visits her daughter Fannie in Israel four times a year, has a grandson in the Israel Defense Forces and just got a big award, along with her husband, Howard, from their synagogue. At the ceremony, she gave a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation on the history of U.S. synagogue architecture.
As fate would have it, my wife, Stacey, and I had been planning an eight-day vacation to New York City. And now, of course, it was going to include seeing my cousin.
While in New York in February, Stacey and I did all kinds of Jewish things: toured the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side; ate smoked fish at the legendary Barney Greengrass deli on the Upper West Side; devoured a to-die-for Montreal smoked-meat sandwich at the new Mile End Deli in Brooklyn; walked around Crown Heights; and even “visited” Rebecca (such a doll! literally, and Jewish, too) at the American Girl Store on Fifth Avenue.
We even saw two Israeli movies in Greenwich Village, and of course ate bagels at every opportunity.
But the most rewarding times were spent with cousin Linda and Howard. One place they took us, the 2nd Avenue Deli (now on East 33rd Street), you can definitely skip these days. But if you’ve never been to Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House (just off Delancey Street), you’ve got to go for an old-style, Jewish meal you’ve probably never experienced before. A disc jockey plays klezmer music, everyone gets up and dances, egg creams are made tableside and on each table are bottles of shmaltz.
We also joined Linda for a morning at the Jewish Museum, tagging along as she took a group of docents-in-training on an educational tour. What a treat! Then she used her pass to get us into the Guggenheim for free. Double treat!
In one of her first e-mails to me, Linda noted that she was working to launch an exhibit at the Jewish Museum titled “Reinventing Ritual.” It ended the day before we arrived, but then two months later opened in my backyard, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (there through Oct. 3).
Last week, Linda let me know that she and Howard are off again for Israel, where they are going to attend the Verdi opera “Nabucco” performed outdoors at Masada. Last fall, she told me about hiking the Burma Road, the 15-mile road the Israelis built in 1948 to link Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Funny how life works sometimes. Linda and I were well on our way to living our entire lives in separate spheres. Then I write a column about lamb BLTs. Two Jewish relatives reunited thanks to bacon — who’d have thunk it?
Andy Altman-Ohr lives in Oakland. Reach him at [email protected].