Free Sheer Gall by Michael A. Kahn

narrow cookie, whose Italian cousin, biscotti , became fashionable in the early nineties. Well, my mother’s kamishbroit makes the finest biscotti taste like stale Wonder bread. I don’t say that just because I love my brilliant, eccentric, and often exasperating mother, which I dearly do. I say it because it’s true. Sarah Gold happens to be an extraordinary cook, and her mastery extends from traditional Jewish cuisine (including knishes to die for and a cholent that deserves the Irving Thalberg Award at the next Oscars) to the latest in organic vegetarian cookery (including a vegetable stew that’s become a winter special at a local health food restaurant, where the menu lists it as Sarah’s West African Groundnut Stew).
    â€œYou’ll have some more compote, sweetie pie?”
    I smiled in surrender. “Okay, Mom, but just a little.”
    â€œSo,” she said as she started spooning the fruit compote into my bowl, “when are they going to be here?”
    I glanced at the kitchen clock. “About ten minutes. Whoa, Mom, that’s plenty.”
    â€œI’ll make tea for them.”
    â€œDon’t bother. You’re not the hostess. I’m the one doing them a favor.”
    â€œIt’s no big deal,” she said as she got up and walked over to the stove for the teakettle. “In my own house I can at least offer a person tea.” She paused for a moment, giving me a severe look. “Even if he murdered his wife and deserves to die in the sewer like a rat.”
    I held my tongue—as always, the incurably liberal daughter of a mother who believes in capital punishment for murderers, castration for rapists, and slow medieval torture for child molesters.
    My mother is the least sentimental woman I know. She has ample reason. She came to America from Lithuania at the age of three, having escaped with her mother and baby sister after the Nazis killed her father. Fate remained cruel. My mother, a woman who reveres books and learning, was forced to drop out of high school and go to work when her mother (after whom I am named) was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. Rachel Linowitz died a year later, leaving her two daughters, Sarah and Becky, orphans at the ages of seventeen and fifteen.
    Two years later, at the age of nineteen, my mother married a shy, cuddly bookkeeper ten years her senior named Seymour Gold. My father was totally smitten by his feisty wife and remained so until the day he died. He was the sentimental one, the one whose eyes quickly welled with tears whether he was listening in the den to one of his Italian operas or reading The Velveteen Rabbit to me in bed or saying a prayer of thanks at the beginning of our Friday-night Sabbath dinner.
    I remember bringing home The Great Gatsby during winter break of my sophomore year of college. He read it in one sitting, spellbound and deeply moved. With some hesitation, he offered it to my mother, a voracious reader of nonfiction who viewed novels with disdain. (“With all my real problems,” she says, “who’s got time to fret over pretend ones?”) She read as far as that wonderful scene where Jay Gatsby, taking Daisy on a tour of his Long Island mansion, throws open his large dressing bureaus to display a rainbow of custom-made shirts. As he tosses them onto the bed, the brightly colored pile of fabrics growing ever higher, Daisy is overcome. “It makes me sad,” she sobs, “because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” At that point in the novel, my mother slammed it closed with a snort of disgust and stood up. “I’ve got no use,” she grumbled as she headed toward the kitchen, “for rich people who cry over shirts.”
    Like her mother before her, my mother had two daughters, me and my younger sister Ann. Although Ann was allowed to be the prissy girl of the family, my mother put me to bed every night with fairy tales about