However it’s ‘spelt,’ this challah is tasty SPELT

While on line in the supermarket this week, there was an adorable little girl and her mom. The mom was testing her daughter on the spelling for that week’s test. 

The memories started flooding back to my days in Shulamith elementary school. Everyday we had a different assignment to complete using spelling words — one day it was writing each word five times, the next day incorporating them into sentences, and so on.

That night over dinner, I told my husband Jerry, about the little girl on line and how it brought back pleasant memories for me. Spelling was my favorite subject as it was the easiest. Jerry disagreed, and said it was one of the most frustrating classes for him.

His parents were European and spoke no English at all when they arrived in America in the early 50’s. They spoke mostly Yiddish at home, as his mom didn’t speak Romanian as his father did, and his father didn’t speak Czechoslovakian as his mom did. As they learned English, they started to use it more often, but with a very heavy accent. Jerry and brother, thinking that was the way to pronounce words, each sounded like little old men on the Lower East Side with cigars in their mouths selling sour pickles. Jerry’s teacher in first grade asked his mom when he came to America; she was shocked to hear he was born here.

He went on to explain that although his mom wanted to help him study for the spellings tests, and she did, the results weren’t favorable. It went something like this:

Fire engine was pronounced fire renger; circus, tzurkis; stupid, stupitt. Jerry played ketch with his dad and brother, watched The Three Stugens on TV, or played in the park if it was a butiful day.

They had a parrot named birdee in the house, and his mom spoke of the tenor that lived upstairs — which impressed me. “Wow, an opera singer,” very cool. Then the next time I spoke to her, she said her brother’s tenor upstairs … and I thought that was way too much of a coincidence the they both had opera singers as tenants.