The Shame of Eve
The author relates the arrival of her first period. It occurs while she is far away from her mother and also while visiting her grandmother in Brooklyn. When she confides in the old woman about this transformative moment in a young girl’s life, she is greeted with a slap across the face and a touch of irony in the smile which breaches granny’s face. The slap is not intended as punishment per se, but speaks to an ancient tradition which becomes the ironic punchline that concludes the anecdote:
“I may have been the last in my line to be punished in advance for sexual sins, mine and those of every mortal woman.”
Wonderful World of Black and White TV
Childhood memories include being the last white family left on the block and a maintenance-free appearance to their lawn. Irony arrives in the form of being too poor to even own a color TV:
“We had to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in black and white. I can still visualize the NBC peacock, fanning out its stylized tail feathers in many a proud shade of gray.”
The Mikvah
The mikvah is a ritual bath designed for Jewish women to attain ritual purity before marriage. It is all about purity through cleansing. And yet, the author eventually comes to realize something deeply ironic about the woman who come to clinic where this rite can be performed:
“Suddenly, the whole plain, dowdy, modest, quiet, archaic place reminds of nothing so much as sex.”
When Going Kosher isn’t Kosher
It is inevitable that the average non-Jewish reader is going to reach a point where they ask a very logical question: with all the rules that must be observed and the fundamental impossibility of the average person being able to commit to them all and still live a viable existence, when is keeping partly kosher not really keeping kosher at all? The overarching irony of the book is that the author is forced to pick and choose which of the truly demanding rules of eating kosher she is willing to overlook and rationalize away. The effort she puts into adhering to as many as she can is kind of undone by the arbitrariness of those which she ignores. It serves to bring into the question the entire point of keeping kosher if one is not keeping comprehensively kosher.
Tragically Cruel Irony
For the most part, the irony in the book is of the light-hearted and comical sort. But the author tells a story that is not just about cooking and the labyrinthine complications of various ancient Jewish rituals. It is also the history of family and legacy ripped apart by evil. The cruelest irony is one where the volume of tragedy leaves no room for even a flicker of light in the recollections of a Holocaust survivor:
“Later they took my father away, to Buchenwald. He was very sick and hungry. He died a day before the American army came.”
