Gefilte Fish

Helen Ernst Dosik
Words in Mind
Published in
2 min readJul 8, 2020
Photo by Oziel Gómez on Unsplash

Those glassy, frozen eyes

stare at her once a year

as she washes the head

gills still suffused with blood

lifeless tail

skin glistening

It must be done

Tradition

She needs the bones, heads,

leftovers to line the

bottoms of the pots to make

those old-world staples

fish balls

colorless, naked dumplings

part of her hand-me-down

bag of culinary rituals

Taste it

Home made, not from a jar

A little beet horseradish on the side

You like it?

What’s not to like?

Her mother had scraped scales,

dissected, chopped

and chopped,

that old wooden bowl

cradled in her arms

as she sat on a kitchen stool,

for years the recipe a guarded secret

the results a symbol to her family

reaffirming her role,

only before her death

did she allow

her daughter to be present

at the ancient rite

Oh whitefish, trout, and pike

Did you ever have a mother?

And she

watched

translated the

“pour in a little matzo meal”

“not too much water”

“taste it raw, not too much salt”

into history and then

passed it on to her own daughter

a slight twinge of envy when

they emerged as good as hers

So once a year

she digs her hands into the

smelly, gooey, cold mixture

to remember her mother’s gift

the sharing

But

she can’t bear those lifeless orbs

so taking her thumb

she plucks them out

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Helen Ernst Dosik
Words in Mind

Helen learned 4 languages by the time she was 10 years old. She is always searching for the right word.