Sacred Stories of the Shuk
The Shuk, Storytelling, and Adeena Sussman
I never feel more at home — or more like a tourist — than when I’m in the Shuk in Jerusalem. It’s the true centre of Jerusalem for me, my religious experience; forget the Old City and the Kotel, if you really want to know the real Jerusalem, spend one hour in the market. And if you really want to test your sanity and your personal space requirements? Make that hour on a Friday morning, when you’re hemmed in between hundreds of people searching for the perfect produce, halva, cheese, meat or snack for their Shabbat (or Friday night) tables, and everyone (from Ultra-Orthodox ballaboostas to Arab men) shoving their way past you to get to the freshest produce.
I am not the first to turn my back on the Old City as the centre; at the end of the 19th century, while Jerusalem was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, Jews, Christians and Muslims began to create settlements outside of the Old City walls. One of those neighbourhoods was “Machane Yehuda,” named after the brother of one of the founders (Joseph Navon). At the turn of the century, an informal market sprung up there, but sanitary conditions quickly became problematic; under the British Mandate (established in 1920), it was formalized with more permanent stalls and even some overhead structures to keep out the weather. Even as it evolved, much remained the same. There was one addition to it prior to the declaration of the State of Israel, when in the 1930s, Iraqi-Jewish merchants set up an additional area for themselves, an off-shoot still colloquially known as the Iraqi shuk. Note: you need to go there and try Marak Kubbeh Adom, an Iraqi semolina-dumpling soup in a beet broth, but be prepared to meet your maker when you do, because guaranteed you will die and go to heaven.
While attempts have been made over the years to modernize it, the fact that it’s never truly been gentrified is most of its charm. Its patina of ancient grime, mixed with food smells (from the divine to the noxious), the floor that is just somehow always wet (no matter the season), the lack of personal space and all of the shoving and arguments in both Hebrew and Arabic — that is what truly makes it the special place that it is. At night, the stalls close, the metal shutters are drawn down (replete with graffitied portraits of famous people from Moses to Malala) and it turns into a bar and hooka scene, where you can get second-hand high from meandering too long down one of the aisles. (Note: 10/10, would strongly recommend.)
And it’s the stories of these varied people that I spoke to the wonderful Adeena Sussman about. Sussman, who writes cookbooks, centres all of her books around a narrative or storyline that she hopes to tell, and her favourite of mine, Sababa, is a love letter to the shuk. But reading it, you feel a sense of nostalgia for the present moment, an awareness that you need to grasp this time and place because it’s slowly disappearing before our eyes.
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If you know anything about Adeena, or stalk her on social media (just me?) you know that she seems to spend most of her time in Shuk HaCarmel, the Tel Aviv market that was established during the British Mandate. Tel Aviv is a relatively new city, founded in 1909 just up the coast from the port of Yafo. I haven’t spent as much time there as I do in Jerusalem, but listening to Adeena speak, you can almost feel as if you’re walking around there yourself. And sometimes in her, when she speaks, I see a completely different version of myself, the self that might exist if I ever moved to Israel. Buying groceries at the market everyday, playing around with flavours and finding the freshest produce I can and letting that guide what I make for dinner; but also, a bit of a more brazen version, one that’s quintessentially Israeli.
Adeena told me that she’s one of those people now that if someone invites her over, she immediately whips out her phone and makes a date; someone who invites herself into people’s kitchens to try their regional specialties, from Bukharian rice-stuffed chicken to Jachanun. I have to imagine that my North American readers, with their North American sensibilities, see a strange element to this; I read an interview done with her once where a foodie just met her on the street in the shuk and was just invited over to her apartment for iced coffee and food talk. If anyone invited me over to their house on the streets of Toronto or Boston, I’d be worried I’d be about to get murdered and dismembered, but this feels like a distinctly Israeli experience.
This story also somewhat proves something about the Jewish state: it’s not truly Western nor Middle Eastern, but a wonderful amalgam of both. It has many Western values and institutions, but it also has that rambunctiousness and togetherness, the community-heavy “my door is always [literally] open” that is seen more frequently in Middle Eastern societies. The shuk itself is a microcosm of that strange amalgam. And Adeena is almost a culinary ambassador of the Jewish state at this point (Israel, in case anyone in the government is reading this, maybe this should be a newly appointed position — the rest of your PR has failed so miserably, maybe going down this route is a good move), but I wonder how much of a role the shuk and her proximity to it actually had a hand in creating the identity she has created for herself and the space she has carved out for herself in Tel Aviv.
Adeena is from Northern California, grew up eating mostly food from the traditional Ashkenazi canon, and made Aliyah just over a decade ago. Israel is a hard society in many ways, very different from Northern California. I love Israel but know I could never move there, because there’s an element of brashness and chutzpah that is required to get by. But perhaps it’s through the vehicle of the shuk that Adeena (and other Israeli foodies) are able to assimilate so easily?
Everyone who comes to Israel comes with a story. In the ingathering of the exiles, whether your great-grandparents were sabras or you yourself just left North America or Europe, no one moves to Israel for no reason. After all, it’s a highly-contested spit of land that has been under existential threat of some kind since its advent — and, well, long before it. But it is these stories that seem to inspire her so much, and form the basis for what she loves to do. As she said, in an era where history is politicized, the one thing you can never deny is people’s stories.
And the shuk is a place of stories. Often these vendors have been working in similar trades for generations. She told one story about one of her spice vendors, and how their grandfather used to go around and buy up red bell peppers and dry them to grind his own paprika; while the family still sells spices, most of the paprika production is specific to Hungary now. It’s all imported. Both Shuk HaCarmel and Shuk Machane Yehuda represent in miniature the vastness and variety of the Jewish food experience. All of the produce sellers, hocking everything from the biblical Seven Species to lychees. In one place, Jewish traditions from the bible, to Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Georgia, Iraq and Egypt - and more. It’s a small window into a much larger world.
And there seems to be some concern about whether or not, for many of these traditional families of the shuk, if this may be the last generation for it. Israel is the “start-up nation,” one of the centres of tech and innovation. Many of the youth of these families are going to university, and going into high tech, or going into the army, or going into different professions — often with the encouragement of their parents. Food life is a hard life, even if one that is full of wonder and creativity.
And when you talk to Adeena, you get almost a sense that she feels herself to be a keeper and purveyor of these stories. The shuk became so much a part of her food identity that it bled over into her personal life: apparently in all of her “wedding finery” she and her husband went into the shuk and received a flowering basil plant as a symbolic gift from one of her favourite spice vendors. I have faith in the continuity of the system though, even as it changes — there will always be people emigrating to the country, and Jewish food is such a central part of Jewish identity, that the shuk will endure.
What is less clear to me is whether she recognizes that she is going to be one of those sacred stories of the shuk that is worth preserving. Her love of the people, the food that they create, and the stories and histories that they bring with them is transcendent. She’s able to break through the barriers of the institution and draw out its warmth, and love, and most importantly, the stories and foods that need remembering.
Speaking to Adeena, I get a sense that she holds almost a sense of nostalgia for the present moment — that as she wanders around her beloved shuk, schmoozing with vendors, listening to peoples’ stories, hearing their recipes, cooking their food, and sharing their lives, she is desperately trying to preserve a moment in time, space and food that is changing very rapidly. And perhaps that’s why her food writing is so iconic and impactful — because you feel that nostalgia for the present moment, and a sense of longing to step through the pages of her books and into the shuk she inhabits.
Sababa, and her follow-up cookbook Shabbat, are two of the greatest cookbooks ever written, and if you want to truly feel like you’re stepping into the sun-drenched kitchens of Tel Aviv, buy them here.
But seriously, I hear that I know people who know people who know people in the government. Culinary ambassadress is a good idea. And I know who I would vote for.
Isn’t food great? Betayavon!
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