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Sparkle (2)
My grandmother was born in Sobrance, in what was then called Czechoslovakia on November 5, 1930. She grew up in ten kilometers away, in a small town called Nagy-Muzsaly.
Her father's family were landowners, something that was very rare for Jewish families at the time, and they used that land to produce wine. My grandmother's family led simple lives. All that changed, though, when my grandmother was 13 years old. On the last day of Passover in 1944, my grandmother and her family were first deported by the Nazis. She was taken to the ghetto at Beregszas, in Hungary, along with her three sisters and her parents, Blanca and Moshe, where they remained housed in a brick factory, for about 6 weeks. Then, they were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was the last time that my grandmother saw her parents, and her two younger sisters, Agi and Vera.
My grandmother survived Auschwitz through some combination of luck and determination, only to end up being taken from work camp to work camp in Germany. After being liberated by the British Army on May 14, 1945, she spent most of that summer in a hospital. My grandmother knew little of comfort in her life, aside from those early years in Nagy-Muzsaly. That's not to say that she didn't find some measure of happiness, of course. She met my grandfather, gave birth to my mother, and found purpose in teaching Hebrew school to third graders for nearly forty years. She took great joy in participating in the rearing of my brother and myself. Still, though, her experiences in the war left lasting marks on her, both physically and emotionally. From her family's deportation to her liberation, the entire ordeal only lasted a little over a year. And still, those early experiences changed her forever.
She rarely slept through the night. She was always anxious, often crying in response to what I considered trivial matters. While a fantastic cook, she took no great joy in eating. When the family wasn't over, her meals consisted mainly of instant coffee, burnt toast, and fruit.
And yet my strongest memories of comfort from my childhood and adolescence are associated with my grandmother and her kitchen. Whenever I was sick, I asked her to make "feel better soup." Feel better soup was not chicken soup -- as is perhaps the case in many American Jewish households -- it was komenymagleves, a Hungarian caraway seed soup.
Photo by atl10trader (Flickr).
When I went to college, even though my dorm at USC was only some forty miles from her house in Northridge, I was sent with plastic containers of frozen feel better soup. Years later, some time after she'd passed away (in March 2008), I found myself feeling incredibly sad and desperately lonely after a particularly painful breakup. And I found myself attempting to recreate her feel better soup.
How was it that comfort, for me, was so strongly associated with a woman who must have had to work so hard to find her own comfort in life?
It's no secret that people often consume comfort food when they experience negative emotions, as an attempt to create within themselves a more positive emotional state. In a paper recently published in the journal Psychological Science, psychologists Jordan D. Troisi and Shira Gabriel proposed that "comfort food derives its appeal from cognitive associations with relationships and that the comfort of comfort food can be understood by examining its effects on loneliness."
Indeed, feelings of loneliness and social isolation are unpleasant and can be downright dangerous, leading to outcomes ranging from hurt feelings and reduced self-esteem to depression and sometimes physical pain. In order to avoid loneliness, sometimes people seek out "social surrogates," or "non-human social targets." In other words, in order to fill a void left by social partners, people will immerse themselves in the alternative social worlds of TV, movies, or books. Others find refuge in the implied intimacy of online social networks, such as by following their favorite celebrities and science bloggers. Still others escape into old photo albums or letters or, for the millennial generation, perhaps old emails, chat transcripts, and favorited tweets. In each case, the socially isolated person is attempting to artificially recreate a feeling of belongingness. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps quite reasonable for people to find solace in familiar foods.
Understood from within the framework of embodied cognition, the idea that foods could serve as social surrogates actually
