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What’s Cooking

Eventually, I promise you, the 2000 presidential election will end and the 2001 Los Angeles mayoral race will begin.
[additional-authors]
November 30, 2000

Eventually, I promise you, the 2000 presidential election will end and the 2001 Los Angeles mayoral race will begin. Already, six contenders can’t wait for the April 10 primary. But will this great city get the crusade it deserves — the first truly multicultural campaign of the 21st century?

Because we’re all so completely exhausted by the overtime election that shifted this week from Tallahassee to the U.S. Supreme Court, I won’t even attempt a political analysis of what’s at stake.

Instead, let the arts speak to us about who we are and what our political dialogue might be. The soul of our city is ready for reconciliation, though our would-be leaders are too busy playing strategist Karl Rove, cobbling together slivers of ethnic voting blocs, to see it. I therefore recommend to mayoral candidates (in reverse alphabetical order) Wachs, Villaraigosa, Soboroff, Hahn, Connell and Becerra that they arrange to see Gurinder Chadha’s insightful and mouth-watering film “What’s Cooking?” and the Skirball Cultural Center’s thoughtful exhibit “Revealing & Concealing: Portraits & Identity.” Here are two glorious efforts at surmounting ethnic limitations even as they relish diversity. It’s good to see them both, as I did, in one day.
Filmmaker Chadha is Indian-born and British bred, but having married a Los Angeles Anglo-Japanese screenwriter, she’s in the perfect position to play Alexis DeTocqueville, seeing the strengths of our city that many long-time residents miss. Those strengths lie in the solid middle class, particularly its commitment to home and children. This is the side of L.A. usually debunked as uncool, but it’s our salvation.

Chadha takes us into the Los Angeles homes of four families as they prepare for Thanksgiving dinner: Black, Latino, Vietnamese and Jewish. The choice of Fairfax as the film’s epicenter has obvious poignancy for our own Jewish community, and I challenge anyone to see “What’s Cooking?” without waxing nostalgic for the days when Canter’s really was the greatest deli around.

Ruth and Herb Seelig are the oldest family (in age and tenure) on the racially diverse street, and as played by Lainie Kazan and Maury Chaykin, they are kindly, lumbering dinosaurs who move haltingly through a land they no longer understand. The Seeligs were in Fairfax “at the beginning,” when numbers and opportunity created a cultural confidence that uprooted the WASP establishment. One can imagine the Seelig family having proudly voted for Henry Waxman when he first ran for State Assembly in the early 1970s and voting for Paul Koretz three decades later. Refusing to move on to Encino, they have changed with the times only enough to put a hot tub in their backyard.

But if the Jewish family is now, according to “What’s Cooking?,” outvoted by young families who don’t put marshmallows on their yams, there’s little threatening in the spring rolls and tamales that replace them. Under the Spanish-style roofs, the eternal American stories are acted out. Turkey, potatoes and stuffing are still prepared (mostly by women) as the agents of assimilation. The film does not ask what is lost in the mix. For Chadha, what joins us is enough: families in loving turmoil, teenagers who rebel, then move on to college and the daunting challenges of making their own lives, anchored by a grandmother who acts as a link to traditions that are always in jeopardy.

For some in the Jewish audience, “What’s Cooking?” may beg for a rejoinder. Authenticity of belief and tradition should not be placed into the blender of American values. Well, you can decide for yourself. But according to Chadha, the Seeligs are actually a step ahead of the rest, having moved beyond the machismo of ancient cultures to accepting gay children who want to be parents. Diversity in America takes endless forms.

The question of ethnic self-image is also on view in the Skirball’s ambitious display of portraiture. Black, Latino and gay artists, including Faith Ringgold, Carmen Lomas Garza and Albert Winn, join such Jewish artists as Ruth Weisberg and Ken Aptekar in an exhibit that asks the question, what is ethnic about art?
I found myself lingering over Jill Poyourow’s “The Bundt/Sisters Piece,” a charming painting of the artist’s five aunts and their baking pans. But the legend under the painting made it clear that younger artists like Poyourow are interested in more than nostalgia. Poyourow attests to a life in which questions of Jewish identity have remained unanswered in her family’s journey from Brooklyn to upstate New York to Wyoming and beyond. Her father, she says, married a Native American and lives in Alaska. Poyourow herself lives in L.A.

What is Jewish about Poyourow’s art, if only the questions of identity she raises? It’s a core question that speaks to many of us. Perhaps, as Adin Steinsaltz has written, there is a flame of spirituality latent even when the fire seems cold. But what will triumph, the fire of diversity or the flame of universality?


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Reflections on Love, Death, Faith, Food & Family Life by Marlene Adler Marks
Paperback – 227 pages 1 edition (November 1998)
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