Eating America

Abstract

Research Article| August 01 2022 Eating America Joanne Jacobson Joanne Jacobson Joanne Jacobson is professor emerita of English at Yeshiva University, and former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Yeshiva College. Her most recent book is Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses (University of Utah Press, 2020). “Eating America” is part of a new project, on home. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2022) 22 (3): 19–22. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.3.19 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Joanne Jacobson; Eating America. Gastronomica 1 August 2022; 22 (3): 19–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.3.19 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search In the years just after World War II, the Passover seder pressed into service every seat in my aunt and uncle’s house, down to the nicked and crayon-stained furniture from my cousins’ bedrooms. Included, of course, were the massive, upholstered oak chairs that completed the dining room set, one of the first major purchases that clinched homeownership for this first American generation. The sticky, vinyl-seated chairs from the kitchen dinette were also jammed around the table, and the wheeled office chairs that had to be lugged from the basement—which occasionally took an elder on an unexpected ride into a wall. The aging immigrants who gathered rarely spoke of their own flight, at the turn of the twentieth century, from Polish anti-Semitism or the Czar’s army; nor did they connect their escape from Europe to the story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt that they read in stumbling English from the... You do not currently have access to this content.