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Sarah's Life: The Charms of the New Caucasus | Israel today

2021-05-02T17:50:44.813Z


The Abramov family cooks memories from the Caucasus, and in the dough, mother Sarah and son Arthur fold a story about violence, love, laughter and forgiveness | You sat down


In the Abramov family's kitchen, memories from the Caucasus are cooked • In the dough, between the flour and the water, mother Sarah and son Arthur fold a story about violence and forgiveness, and the power of laughter and love

A great smell fills

the apartment The small apartment of the Abramov family. In the dough pockets cooked in the kitchen are folded memories from the Caucasus, from where they arrived in December 1992, leaving behind the beautiful Derbent, a city between mountains and the Caspian Sea, in the Republic of Dagestan. 



Mother Sarah, Father Reuben and the three children, Arthur, David and Esther, came here from there. Little Sigal was already born in the apartment in Or Akiva, the city that in the early 1990s was filled with immigrants from the Commonwealth of Nations. Many of them could then be found working in the archeological excavations in Caesarea, where the couple were also sent. New immigrants who find in the land pieces of the past from the land where the present threatens to collapse world orders they knew, undermine hierarchies between men and women, between young and old, make life in a tiny apartment apartment unbearable.



Inside this house, in 2012, Arthur, the eldest, began documenting his mother, which years later became "No Sentiments," an intimate documentary that allows a rare and complex glimpse into the Caucasian family. The one in which life, along with a deep foreignness in the new land, fled him after high school to Manhattan, where he lived for six years and where he found his Israeli identity. 



When he returned to Israel, armed with a camera, he enrolled in film studies at Manshar, and this film, which dared to challenge where and in front of who washes the dirty laundry, won the Jury Prize in Dokaviv 2020. Like "Denji", his first film released in 2017, also Produced by Osnat Trabelsi, who owns the rights to the work, who insists on looking directly at places where Israeli society prefers not to look.



From the film, in which Sarah's laughter - a gifted cook who moves between kitchen work in catering to a pizzeria in Binyamina and the home kitchen - is what composes the words, a tough story of absorption and longing for the world left behind grows. Between pictures around a dining table laden with dishes from the old homeland, dances and landscapes from a visit to it, where mother Sarah tries to find her way back to a place she knew was quiet but he is no longer there, the story of Dad's alcoholism is revealed. 



A story about physical and verbal violence that was Sarah's part, climbing into a dark stairwell at the end of a work day and soon opening the door, and inshallah Reuben is already asleep. The closed man, the love of her youth, who did not raise a hand against the children, but sat in jail after turning her life into hell. 



Sarah, who, like her son, dreams of emigrating to America.

In front of a small window in Or Akiva, where the green is sparse, she dreams of a life in Manhattan that will erase the past and bring an easy livelihood.

Sarah who wants to go and fails, that her mother who lives nearby urges her to leave, that her daughters assure her that they do not want to be like her, but she decides to stay.

* * *

For the premiere of the film last summer, in which father Reuven is also filmed, without knowing exactly why, he did not come. Even some of the family, who were angry about the exposure, did not come. "There were those who asked if I was not ashamed, but I wanted them to get under my clothes, to see how I raised the children. That other women in my situation would also dare to open up. And I wanted him to see me."



And Reuben saw. Watched the film when it was shown on TV, kept silent and only asked if she meant what she said. If she really suffered with him for 22 years. "Yes," she replied, and since then, she says, life at home has changed. Where the sitting failed in jail, the intervention of family members and the conversations with the social workers, the film succeeded, which allowed him a glimpse of what he had perpetrated. 



"For several years he has not raised a hand, and if he says something when he is drunk, I have learned not to relate. We have seven grandchildren who stay to sleep on the weekends and he is crazy about them, buys them everything he needs, sometimes plays me some new song that came out, hugs me at night and not "He's leaving until the morning. I know he's proud of me being his wife, proud of our kids. He can not do without me and probably not me without him," she says, and my heart shakes.



"It's not that I offer every battered woman to stay with her man. Absolutely not. It's each one and her story. When I saw Shira Iscove I burst into tears, because I too was a battered woman, even though it never reached those levels," she breathes for a moment. The thought, and continues. "I forgave everything that was and today I no longer regret anything. Not for this marriage, which gave me four wonderful children, and not for immigration." 

She was 15 and he was 18 when they met, at a wedding party. All evening they danced and talked. Knowing he was going to the army, she promised to wait and they wrote letters. "I got married out of love," she says, and there is still a kind of pride in the words of one who has chosen for herself, not married in a matchmaking. "Please. Your love," she was slapped years later. 



They lived in Reuben's family home, sharing it with his parents, about whom she says she would stay to live with them all her life. When Reuven's brother returned from years in Tashkent, claiming the house for himself, they returned to the house where she grew up, which stood empty after her mother immigrated to Israel.



Her mouth still remembers the taste of cheeses and pirushki stuffed with potatoes, which her mother would serve there for breakfast. She was 15, the third of six children. Four brothers and two daughters. "Mother was a great cook, who did not let me and my sister enter the kitchen. In the Caucasus a bride after the wedding does everything in her husband's house. She knew we would have enough time." 



Standing under the canopy she knew how to make only elongated dumplings stuffed with meat, the ones the Bukharans call Monty, but Sarah insists on the name Dushfra, which for the Bukharans is something else altogether.

"After the wedding, everything I saw with my mother came out of my hands. Cooking is my love, not just a must. A work that gives me joy and strength."



How nicely she talks about her Derbant kitchen, which she left "because her parents and siblings were already in the country, and only my sister stayed there. The Soviets decided on a democracy that spawned tensions between Jews and Muslims, there were many kidnappings of children for ransom, until my sister said 'come on travelers' ". 

* * *

On the marble surface in the house she rolls dough for khinkal. With strong hands she holds the tiracho, as the Johori, the Caucasian dialect that still resonates within the walls of the house, is called, to a long wooden rolling pin. 



The dough obeys the hands, who have known it since they were born 57 years ago, getting thinner and thinner as the stories about its dribbling swell. On the treasures of nature, on the night of the ethnic groups, on the 14 official languages ​​that drowned into the Russian, which was used by all, on the courtyard of Mother.



A yard where a wood stove stood, vegetables grew in the garden and tasted heavenly, chickens laid eggs. In the basement of the house, where everything is set for long days of snowy winter, lay pickle barrels containing green tomatoes, cucumbers, sauerkraut with carrots and beets, alongside jars of jam and salt-dried fish. 



There was also a sheep, whose name she does not remember, who lived with them for years and was eaten just before the aliyah. "She had a sad taste," she laughs again at the harshest words. 



"Joy is her weapon," Arthur would later tell me, who, like his brother David, also married a Caucasian woman in front of whom he was trying to pave the way for a different relationship than he knew at home. Overcome a basic rule in Caucasian education that a man does not touch on housework. 



Arthur, who has signed on to the "Unfiltered" project in which he documents in front of the camera large, exposed women, seeks to touch on female empowerment liberated from Western concepts of beauty, looking for a new way inside his home. 



"Dad was always closed, but never raised a voice. If he had something to say he did it through Mom. She is a lioness, a strong woman who fights. She will give everything for her family to be healthy and whole and stand together. The joy she brings is the joy that comes. In this house. "



In honor of one extraordinary woman, in honor of boys who are tired of her daily routine and lifted a camera with the intention of creating a new reality, in honor of lands that remain far away but continue to exist within the walls of the house, and in honor of one prayer that insists on nesting, that Sarah's story has an end. Recipes from her wonderful cuisine. 

Hinkal

A simple and delicious soup, in which floats of dough float, and are eaten accompanied by garlic in vinegar.

You can also add meat ragout on top, which in a meeting with the dough brings a Caucasian answer to the bolognese.

The quantity is nice for ten diners.

Ingredients for the dough:



√ 500 grams of flour



√ one egg



√ a disposable cup of water

For the soup:



√ 1 whole chicken 



√ 5 liters of water



√ 1 tablespoon salted salt



√ 1/2 teaspoon pepper



√ 2 - 3 cloves crushed garlic



√ 4 tablespoons wine vinegar

First prepare the dough.

Stack the flour, make a hole in which to place the egg and pour the water.

Put in the dough and let it rest, when covered, for two hours and in the heat of the room.

Roll out as many thin and cut into cubes the size of centimeters. 



While the dough is resting cook the chicken in half an hour semi-covered, season the flour and pepper, taste and adjust seasoning. Remove the chicken and cook the dough liquid chicken. 



Serve the soup accompanied by a dish of which 3-2 Crushed garlic cloves seasoned with four tablespoons of wine vinegar.Each diner takes a little of the garlic and vinegar to season the soup, whose simplicity of ingredients does not indicate the richness it brings to the mouth.

Chudu 

Stuffed dough pockets that are eaten immediately after coming off the hot pan and smeared with butter.

The amount is good for ten diners, with each of the fillings suitable for the entire amount of dough.

Ingredients for the dough:



√ 500 g flour



√ 1 egg



√ a pinch of salt



√ a glass of tap water



√ 100 g melted butter for serving

For the pumpkin filling:



√ 1 large onion finely chopped



√ 2 tablespoons sunflower oil



√ 200 g peeled pumpkin grated on a coarse grater



√ 1 cup disposable walnuts



√ 1/2 bunch finely chopped coriander



√ 1 teaspoon ground salt



√ 1 teaspoon ground pepper

For vegetable filling:



√ 1 large onion finely chopped



√ 2 tablespoons sunflower oil



√ Bundle of washed and dried Turkish spinach leaves, finely chopped



√ Bundle of finely chopped coriander



√ 7-6

fresh

green onions, finely chopped



√ 1 teaspoon salt



√ 1 teaspoon ground black pepper

Begin by preparing the dough. Mix all the ingredients except the butter, put until a flexible dough is obtained, cover and let it rest for half an hour. Divide into balls the size of a plum and a tennis ball, cover - and free to make the filling.



To fill the pumpkin, fry the onion in a pan over a low heat until it becomes translucent, and cool slightly. Grate the pumpkin on a coarse grater. In a food processor, mash the walnuts in a pulse, mix all the ingredients, taste and season.



To fill the vegetable, fry the onion in the same way, mix the rest of the ingredients, season, taste and season if necessary.



To make the dumplings, flour a work surface and roll each ball of dough into a thin circle about 20 cm in diameter. Place 2 tablespoons of the filling, close for half a month and pinch the edges of the dough, tighten well. 



Heat a pan over medium heat, place two dumplings on top of each other, and when slightly browned, turn over.

Brush the top side with butter and remove, without the butter touching the pan.

Stack the dumplings so that except for the first, the butter will lubricate the side that touched the pan.

Serve immediately. 

hillaal1@gmail.com

Source: israelhayom

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