By Hannah Reich Berman

It is well known that at the Passover Seder, the youngest family member will ask the Four Questions. A lesser-known fact is that the holiday inspires far more questions from the mother of the house. In addition to questions, mothers have lists. There are guest lists, shopping lists, menu lists, and clothing lists. One might think that as the years roll by, all of this would get easier. Maybe it should, but it does not.

How many guests will be at each Seder? How much wine do we need? What types of wine? And how many of our guests include young children who need to stick with grape juice? How much regular matzah will we need and how much shemurah matzah? Are the Pesach-kitchen supplies complete? Mom has to remember if she ever bought that second potato peeler; one is not enough if she will have help in the kitchen. And when Pesach was over last year, did we buy a new matzah cover to replace the one that got so badly stained with wine? If not, that has to go on the list of non-food purchases.

Next come the wardrobe questions as women consider what they need in the way of new clothing: a new hat and new shoes? Those questions about fashion considerations are of particular importance to those who will be going away. But the good news for them is that these are their only questions, since none of the others apply.

A hostess considers how many chickens she should buy and how many potatoes and eggs she will need–eggs, chicken, and potatoes being the basics of most meals. Eggs take over the house since not all meals are fleishig. Each day there is breakfast and lunch to consider. The logistics of it all are important, as this is an eight-day holiday.

While all of the above questions have answers, the following one may not: without help, is everyone able to pay for the food? Shemurah matzah is pricey, and one has to keep in mind that in every box that is opened, there are inevitably broken ones that are unusable for the Seder. The question for those who are not in need of assistance is how much they can contribute to people who need the financial help.

Given all of these facts, it is not hard to understand why there is stress associated with Passover. Some of us get stressed the day after Purim, when Passover items appear on supermarket shelves. But for seniors, a helpful stress reliever might be to recall what our mothers went through. Every year at this time, memories come flooding back to me. Our mothers had to kosher their own chickens; at that time, butchers did not do it for them. It was quite a job–and then some!

That was not all. Housewives made everything themselves. They made their own applesauce and gefilte fish. Frozen gefilte-fish logs were not available back then, and there were few stores where one could buy prepared foods. Paper goods and disposable pans were a thing of the future. We had three full sets of dishes and three full sets of flatware for Pesach only. Three sets were necessary because one set was for fleishig, one for milchig, and one set was our fancy fleishig that we used just for the Seder. And every year, a week before the holiday, my dad established an assembly line for us to pass all those dishes, silverware, glasses, and huge pots from one to the other until everything had been brought up from the basement. Everything had to be washed and dried and then stored in an old, ugly metal cabinet that my father had brought up earlier in the week.

There were no granite countertops back then, so our counters had to be koshered for Pesach and then covered. In our house, covering counters was a major production. We did not have those thin sheets of white plastic that are available today. My father brought home sheets of cardboard and rolls of heavy-gauge plastic. He also schlepped large boards of plywood into the house. These materials were for kitchen countertops and tabletops. By the time Dad finished all that layering, the tabletops were several inches higher and small children had a hard time seeing over them. No wonder there was so much spilling!

Why all this was necessary remains a mystery. After all the cleaning and scrubbing that had been done, and after those surfaces had been covered, did my parents think that a single crumb of chametz had been left behind and might emerge to find its way onto the counter or table?

On the last few days before yom tov, my sister and I had to eat all of our meals outside. If we were lucky, the weather cooperated. But it mattered little, because if it was cold we simply wore our winter jackets. We sat on the back steps just outside the kitchen and munched away at whatever chametz was left in the house. My mother was inside cooking and baking, but, despite that, she was totally vigilant. She stood guard in our kitchen in a fashion that would put the guards at Buckingham Palace to shame. The only thing missing was a red jacket and a tall black fur hat with a chinstrap. Her uniform was an apron and sensible black shoes.

That was the scenario in our house in the 1940s and early ’50s, and unless one has witnessed all of this meshugas, it must be hard to imagine. But it is etched into the memories of many of us seniors. Now and then I wonder how my mother survived that holiday each year. She worked hard all day and evening and rarely got more than an hour or two of sleep each night in the days before the first Seder. But survive it she did. All the housewives did. And they went through that same routine every year.

Still, even with those memories, some of us kvetch about the hard work of preparing for Pesach. That’s just the way it is–and probably the way it will always be.

Hannah Berman lives in Woodmere and gives private small-group lessons in mah-jongg and canasta. She can be reached at Savtahannah@aol.com or 516-902-3733.

 

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