My mother grew up in the southern part of Ukraine in the early part of the 20th century. When conditions were stable there, her family owned a bakery and coffee shop. My mother’s job as a teenager was to carry the water from the well. Like an ox, she wore a yoke across her shoulders, and two water buckets hung from ropes on each side.
The families in my mother’s village held true to their Jewish traditions. Every Friday afternoon, the village women would bring the pots of meat they were cooking for their families’ Saturday night Sabbath dinners to our family bakery. Religious laws prohibited cooking on the Sabbath. Pots of meat for the rich families and the poor families were stacked, side-by-side, in my grandfather’s bakery’s ovens. The pots slow-cooked the meat and vegetables, and the food was kept warm until the next night. When no one was looking, my mischievous mother would take some of the meat out of the rich people’s pots and put it in the pots of the poor people.
