Yael Raviv joined Jewish Food Society as COO in 2021. She is the author of “Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel.” Yael holds a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU and founded the non-profit Umami food and art festival. Here, she shares her family story in her own words.
My grandmother, Savta Hannah, passed away when I was 12. I have clear memories of her, but they’re from a child’s perspective. I wish I had the foresight to ask more about her journey, which I find inspiring and baffling in equal measure. An actress who immigrated to Tel Aviv from Poland in 1925 with her theater troupe, she went on to perform at HaOhel theater in Tel Aviv for many years. The only role I was able to see her perform was her last, in the iconic 1964 Israeli film “Sallah Shabati,” where she plays the Yemenite (!) mother to the title character, played by the famed Chaim Topol.
Hannah was born in Bendzin, a town in Poland when it was controlled by Russia, to Isaac and Sarah Sheintal, and had five sisters and a brother. Two of her siblings passed away as children from scarlet fever and her parents and remaining three sisters perished in Auschwitz. But, we never talked about my grandparents' life and family back in Europe. In the early decades of Israel, life in the Diaspora was something to be erased and ignored. I can’t imagine what it was like to go through such a loss and not be able to share it. I know these details from my grandfather, Nachum, who wrote them all down for us — he wanted to make sure these family members were not forgotten. Saba Nachum was an engineer for the British railway in Mandatory Palestine and the kindest person I’ve known.
Savta Hannah was creative, fashionable and, reportedly, an excellent cook, but as a 10 year old, I didn’t appreciate her specialties of brined tongue, cholent, and chopped liver. The only dish I recall both liking and making with her is wax beans with breadcrumbs. She called it shtrushkes, which means shavings in Yiddish, perhaps a reference to the breadcrumbs.
I remember sitting with her at the kitchen table of the small flat she shared with Saba Nachum, snipping the ends off a mountain of beans. My father Amiram, the cook in our family, still makes this recipe today, as do I. It’s a little piece of her that remains with us.
