Finding Meaning and Memories in a Bowl of Matzo Ball Soup

By Annie Mark-Westfall — LETTERS FROM BERLIN

Today my Facebook memory is a photo of my Grandma Bea’s matzo ball soup. As I sit on the U-Bahn in Berlin, staring at the bowl of soup on that suburban New York table five years ago, myriad thoughts fly at me. The speed and variety of these thoughts recall to mind being a child in the passenger seat of my father’s truck, driving through a snow storm, trying to watch each individual snowflake as it swirls into the headlights. The calm, hypnotic pattern. I think some of my best childhood memories are watching weather events from our car.

I google “snow in headlights” and the top hit brags, “Smart headlights let drivers see through snow and rain.” Damn. One more element of childhood, relegated to “the good old days.”

Grandma’s matzo ball soup is my ultimate comfort food. As a child, I would eat it for breakfast while my family commented on it around me. A couple years ago when I quite generously offered to share some with my husband, he gently noted it was perhaps best served to those who grew up with it. This shocked me for many reasons. Not least because this was the man who had pretended to like gefilte fish for so many years — a sacrifice that no other being was willing to make, even for Grandma Bea’s sake. (Gefilte fish is like white fish meatloaf…