Matzah (Kazakhstan)

In my grandmother’s house, in the hall, there always hung a bag with Jewish bread or evreiskii khleb, as we knew it at home (matzah or matzo). Once a year we baked several dozens of matzah. She also sewed many beautiful bags, adding ornaments with badalchin cloth. My grandmother prepared the liquid dough for the bread, which consisted of flour and water, in big jars. I baked the bread during one whole day in an electric waffle maker. The breads took the shape of thin flat waffles; they were hard likes pieces of wood. They made a sound when I broke them and if one ate the bread too quickly, one could get a stomach ache. The bread did not have a particular taste (it did not contain salt or sugar) and yet it was distinctive. For me, the taste of matzah is the taste of my childhood and my grandmother. We gave most of the breads to our neighbors, packing them in small fabric bags that my grandmother produced. One big bag full of matzah hung on a wall in our corridor, high up away from house animals, and my grandmother told me several times that in the future I should always have a bag with Jewish bread hanging in my house. When I asked her why: she told me that I could cross a desert with it because it never spoiled. As a child, I did not understand what she meant. Of course, I stole matzah from the bag: to break and dunk them in condensed milk was my favorite treat. Later, in 2020, a Lithuanian acquaintance told me that her grandmother always kept a pillow-case full of dried bread, “just in case”. Her Lithuanian grandmother would always repeat: “you never know what will happen tomorrow.”

The dry bread was the material expression of their experiences of hunger during the Soviet period. Through teaching me to bake Jewish bread at a very young age and throughout my childhood, my grandmother tried to teach me how to survive and be always ready for a catastrophe. The bread, however, also told me a different story. The bread was a cultural borrowing and I do not know when exactly she started baking the bread and how she baked it before the electric waffle-makers appeared on the market. It also told me a story of cultural loss. My grandmother’s family perished during the hunger and she grew up in an orphanage. Her biography was defined by hunger and the Jewish bread was an object for survival that she tried to pass on to me.

While my grandmother did not tell me the stories about hunger, historians have discovered different scenarios of death. I now know that my grandmother could have been eaten by her parents or those with whom they exchanged the children in an attempt not to eat one’s own children. She could have been eaten by a wolf, the number of which grew speedily in the steppe where nomads died of hunger en masse, making one historian call it a place of death. She could have been sold for a bit of food. She also could have starved together with her family and died in an orphanage, or she could have been shot by the Soviet army while fleeing the Kazakh SSR to China or Russia. Of course, dying from a disease could have been a permanent scenario, too. Girls were more likely to die than boys because Kazakh families were usually more willing to save a boy’s life than a girl’s, because it were boys who were believed to keep the family line.

I never baked Jewish bread as an adult because I never felt that it was necessary. Yet, it carries a story about my grandmother’s life and her wish to endure.

Literature:

Mehmet Volkan, ‘Growing up Soviet in the Periphery: Imagining, Experiencing and Remembering Childhood in Kazakhstan, 1928-1953’. Ph.D. Dissertation, 2020.

Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe. Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell Unversity Press, 2018

Botakoz Kassymbekova is a Lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland.