#chokeberry jam recipe

[pinkmartiniboy]

Dżem z aronii

Aronia jest jednym z tych owoców, które możemy nazwać “problematycznymi”, bo na surowo jest on nie zachęcający do jedzenia, łykowaty, cierpki z wyraźnie wyczuwalną goryczką. Lecz wiedząc jak należy z nim postępować, możemy z tak nieprzystępnego owocu zrobić wyśmienite przetwory, których smakiem wszyscy będą się zachwycać. Robiąc przetwory z aronii należy pamiętać o tym, aby aronię pozostawić jak…

[petrichorate]

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: Thoughts

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon)

Chabon is really great at writing descriptions. So great that he often describes the same scene or object in three or four different ways before moving on—his images are beautiful, but I equate it to something like eating too much candy. 

I personally didn’t really like this book, even though the premise is really interesting—it’s an alternate reality novel, set in a Sitka, Alaska which has turned into a haven for Jewish refugees. While Sitka sits on the verge of “Reversion,” which threatens the residency of its inhabitants, detective Meyer Landsman sets out on a new homicide case which exposes far more than he initially expected. But I felt that the plot didn’t move fast enough for me—even though almost every scene eventually fit a new piece of the puzzle into the crime case, I just didn’t feel a strong connection with the characters or story. I chalk some of this up to personal preference, since the others I read this book with really enjoyed both the plot and the writing style. I prefer novels that intertwine narrative and some deeper message about human nature, and I felt like that type of more profound inquiry was lacking for me in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. 

While the quotes I picked out from this book are not as representative of experiences that really spoke to me, there were some notable descriptions that I wanted to remember: 

“An old man, pushing himself like a rickety handcart, weaves a course toward the door of the hotel.”

“They shake hands again. This conversation is the equivalent of Landsman’s kissing the mezuzah, the kind of thing that starts out as a joke and ends up as a strap to hang on to.”

“Brennan studied German in college and learned his Yiddish from some pompous old German at the Institute, and he talks, somebody once remarked, ‘like a sausage recipe with footnotes.’”

“Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko’s hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport.”

An example of, I think, too many comparisons in one paragraph: “The shammeses have interrupted their game in its dense middle stages with the Russian, playing White, holding an unassailable knight outpost. The men are still caught up in their game, the way a pair of mountains gets caught up in a whiteout. Their natural impulse is to treat the detectives with abstract contempt they reserve for all kibitzers. Landsman wonders if he and Berko ought to wait until the players have finished and then try again. But there are other games in progress, other players to question. Around the old ballroom, legs scratch the linoleum like fingernails on a chalkboard. Chessmen click like the cylinder turning in Melekh Gaystik’s .38. The men—there are no women here—play by means of steadily hectoring their opponents with self-aspersions, chilly laughter, whistling, harumphs.”

“The red-rimmed eyes widen. Wonder mingles with horror as Mr. Litvak intensifies his study of Landsman, searching for some proof of this unlikely claim. He turns a page in his pad and pronounces his findings in the matter. Impossible No way Meyerle Landsman could be such a lumpy old sack of onions ‘Afraid so,’ Landsman says. What are you doing here terrible chess player ‘I was only a kid,’ Landsman says, horrified to detect a creak of self-pity in his tone.”

“Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see.”

“‘Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.’”

“Landsman watches her walk across the dining area to the doors of the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria. He bets himself a dollar that she won’t look back at him before she puts up her hood and steps out into the snow. But he’s a charitable man, and it was a sucker bet, and so he never bothers to collect.”

“The Granite Creek Big Macher outlet died about two years ago. Its doors are chained and along its windowless flank where Yiddish and Roman characters once spelled out the name of the store, there is only a cryptic series of holes, domino pips, a braille of failure.”

“Then Batsheva Shpilman lifts her veil. The body is frail, perhaps even gaunt, but it can’t be with age, because the fine-featured face, though hollow, is smooth, a pleasure to look at. She has wide-set eyes of a blue that wavers between heartbreaking and fatal. Her mouth is unpainted but full and red. The nostrils in her long, straight nose arch like a pair of wings. Her face is so strong and lovely, and her frame so wasted, that it’s disturbing to look at her. Her head sits atop her veined throat like an alien parasite, preying on her body.”

“‘Go on. Nu. Your son was shot. In a way that— Well, to be frank, ma’am, he was executed.’ Landsman is glad for the veil when he pronounces that word. ‘Who by, that we can’t say. We’ve learned that some men, two or three men, were looking for Mendel, asking around. These men might not have been very nice. That was a few months back. We know he was using heroin when he died. So, at the end, he felt nothing. No pain, I mean.’ ‘Nothing, you mean,’ she corrects him. Two blots, blacker than black silk, spread across the vail. ‘Go on.’”

A really strange comparison: “Her hair is the colorless color of a sheet of foil under a wan light.”

“Spiro’s tone is not quite pitying but prepared to turn that way if necessary.”

“His voice seems to spend too long bouncing around in his chest before it emerges. The words come out thick, poured with a slow ladle.”

“The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy.”

“Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid picture of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless as arguments among Jews. Ghosts of Imperial Russia traced in the onion dome of St. Michael’s Cathedral, and of Warsaw in the rocking and sawing of a café violinist. Canals, fishing boats, islands, stray dogs, canneries, dairy restaurants. The neon marquee of the Baranof Theatre reflected on wet asphalt, colors running like watercolor as you come out of a showing of Welles’s Heart of Darkness, which you have just seen for the third time, with the girl of your dreams on your arm.”