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NEW YORK STORIES

"Matzo to Marriage" by Nicole Robson



“What the hell is that noise?” my boyfriend, Olin, moans from our one-bedroom, three-floor walkup on Rivington Street. Living on the Lower East Side, we are used to the sounds of late-night partiers and speeding ambulance sirens, but this isn’t your typical New York noise.

It’s 5:30 a.m. and the workday has already started for the country’s largest family-owned matzo factory. Thousands of pounds of flour are being pumped through giant vacuum nozzles to the second floor, creating a noise resembling a lumber mill. Aron Streits—a matzo baker from Austria—opened his four building matzo company in 1925 at Rivington and Suffolk Streets. The crispy, unleavened flatbread is particularly popular during Passover, when it’s substituted for traditional bread in remembrance of how the Israelites’ opted to bake theirs before it could rise to make for a faster exit from Egypt.

Each piece of Streits matzo is kneaded, baked, cut and packaged within the Rivington Street buildings. Kosher items are marked “Kosher for Passover. Under the Supervision of Rabbi M. Soloveichik,” who clocks in and out of the factory like any other employee.

The early-morning sounds of slurping flour convince me, in the year and a half of living next door, to finally visit this LES Jewish institution.

I enter an empty store. With no salesperson to talk to, I inspect three rickety shelves of matzo products that line the west wall of the store. The counter, which sits in the middle and snakes over to the east, is as wide as a bowling lane.

Deciding to surprise my boyfriend, I pick out ingredients for matzo ball soup: Streits’ chicken stock, a carton of matzo ball mix and a 12-ounce pack of short, vermicelli-like egg noodles.

A thirty-ish guy with a baby and stroller in tow walks in and forms a line behind me. “Bella!” he yells, now standing beside me, and Bella, at 5 feet 4 inches tall, bursts through the factory-side entrance. She’s dressed in a fur-trimmed, chocolate brown leather bomber jacket. Her hair is unbrushed and speckled; a mixture of gold and auburn that resembles a ripening apricot. The shapes of her eyes are traced in teal, and her lipstick is an eye-popping maraschino red. “Doesn’t she look like Bridget Bardot?” the man asks.

Bella, who has worked at Streits for 25 years, begins to ring me up. Stern-faced, she takes my money and looks me up and down.

“You Jewish?” she asks.

“No. This is for my boyfriend,” I respond.

“He Jewish?”

“Yes.” Her eyebrows rise. She prods further.

“His mother Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“Oh no, no, no,” Bella repeats, her manicured nails now removing my items from the bag. She opens the cash register.

“Here sweetie, take your money back. He will never marry you.”

Trying to reconnect the dots of the last five minutes, I wonder how it went from matzo to marriage. I explain to Bella that his mother had married a non-Jew, and any objection she may have towards me wouldn’t be religion-based.
Bella seems relieved and hugs me as if I had taken some huge weight off her shoulders. “Let me give you my recipe for matzo ball soup,” she says.

I memorize quantities of onions, carrots and parsnips that must be quartered and boiled for stock as Bella repacks my merchandise. The final ingredient is a kosher chicken from East Side Glatt, a local Jewish butcher.

As I head for the door, matzo in tow, I decide against saying anything about the suctioning flour sounds. The noise, it seems, like the flour, the family and the factory behind it, is a neighborhood institution.

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