A young Jewish student who finished his studies in New York and decided to move to Berlin for a while told me the foloowing story:
He met here a former student of his father, a professor at at an American university. The former student finds out that the American will be traveling for a week to a city where her parents live just at the same time that she will be there, and offers him to spend the weekend at their place.
Of course, the story starts to blow out of proportion from the moment the former student is telling her parents that they are having a Jewish guest for a Shabbat dinner at their place. They feel that they are on a voyage to wonderland. First, they look for the nearest synagogue and try to understand how long it will take him to walk over to their house after the prayer. Then they are searching every butcher in the Rhine, looking for Kosher meat. They can’t find one so they opt for a dairy meal, but then they hear that Jews eat meat on their Friday dinner, so they go a long way, dozens of kilometers with a car, and find a kosher butcher store. They make great preparation but how many Germans have the opportunity to host a Jew. They don’t want to screw it up.
Everything goes well. They all go to the Synagogue, they witness the service, then they all walk home for about an hour, it’s a lovely spring night, and the guest tells them what the service was about. Then they sit for dinner table and the guest can’t believe his eyes: the table looks like it was inside a house in the middle of orthodox Brooklyn: Chala bread covered with cloth, red wine and a special glass, they even managed to get a yarmulke. and a praying book. The young Jew is singing the prayers, translating them and blessing everyone with a “Shabbat shalom”. They answer with “Shabbat shalom” but struggle with “le’chaim”, the Hebrew word for a toast.
They have some small small talk and start to serve the food. The visitor is serving himself several spoons from the salad bowl. He tastes it and praise the host for the flavor. The mother of the former student is telling him about the struggles they had to go through in order to prepare a meal that will answer his very specific needs. She tells him what the salad is made of and how she made the special sauce. Then come the main dish, a wonderfully cooked red meat swimming with rosmary potates in brownie sauce. The guest tastes it and can’t find enough good words to praise his hosts.
The hosts are relieved. They are really glad he liked it. “This meat, we are cooking only to special guests”, the mother says to the mouthful guest. “Usually we use other kinds of meat, but we gave it the same treatment. We marinated it for 24 hours in honey, soy sauce, garlic and crab sauce”.
