A holiday homily: the family that ate its pets

Thus it came to be in the land of Brooklyn that Morris Brownstein knew Anna Brownstein, his second cousin, and they begot Hilda, Murray, Pearl and Zelda. Pearl, third in the family order, is my mother and the only one who seems to have entirely escaped the questionable legacy of having parents who are also blood relatives.

In the warm bosom of my mother’s nuclear family, Passover was a sacred time. Grandma Annie and Grandpa Morris spared no effort in bringing to their four children a meaningful holiday experience.

Perhaps the most cherished Brownstein family tradition was dining on homemade gefilte fish for the holiday. Grandma Annie believed in going to the source, so she would purchase a large, live carp and keep it in the bathtub for a week or two until it was time to ease it from its comfortable aquatic home into a grinder.

This was fish farming in its most primitive form. The business possibilities were not lost on young Murray, who was blessed with an entrepreneurial spirit. When he was 19 he considered buying up tens of thousands of bathtubs to raise carp.

Unfortunately, at the time all his funds were tied up in a machine that made shoes out of sweet potatoes, and he didn’t want to spread himself too thin.

Anyway, keeping the carp in the tub was not without consequences for the Family Brownstein. First, since the carp was in the tub for two weeks, and there was only one bathtub, one wonders if they bathed with the fish.

The second consequence of growing their own, so to speak, was that my mother, the most tender-hearted of the lot, immediately bonded with the carp. She had always longed for a kitten or a puppy, but her parents weren’t about to indulge her, so once a year she had what you might call a transitory experience in nurturing an animal.

Granted, a carp isn’t much of a pet. But young Pearl had little else to call her own.

This was not what you would call a psychologically enlightened family. Since “Sesame Street” had not yet been created, Grandma would entertain her kids by bringing them to the Canarsie slaughterhouse, where they would watch the chickens being killed.