On the other side of the world was my “real” life in California. There, Jews spoke English and “ate bagels” (though I didn’t understand that bagels were, allegedly, “Jewish” until my early 20’s). Many of their family names ended in “berg’ or “man” or “stein,” unless they were Persian.  None of them had a family name resembling “Yehezkel”. 

Truthfully, at the time, I didn’t identify myself as anything other than Ashkenazi— that was the Jewish world around me. I was barely aware that my family was Iraqi, or that there was such a thing as Iraqi Jewish history. My grandfather never spoke about it except when telling terrible stories of barely surviving an antisemitic stoning attack at six years old. I am told by a close friend that drinking loose-leaf tea in glasses is a distinctly “Iraqi” thing, due to British influence during the Mandate. I don’t know if that is true, but I suppose I did grow up drinking a lot of loose-leaf tea from the garden.  

Only in high school, the first time I studied at a non-Jewish school, did I first claim my Iraqi roots.  A high school frenemy had spoken about being Middle Eastern, and I piped up. “I’m Middle Eastern too!” I said. He disagreed. “You can’t claim an identity just because your ancestors were there 2,000 years ago.” I told him that my grandfather speaks Arabic natively, that my family in Israel are only one or two generations displaced from Iraq. In hindsight, I understand that I never needed to prove myself. Even if I didn’t grow up eating my Savta Yaffa’s t’beet every Shabbat.  

That t’beet is the recipe for which I have been saving Savta Yaffa’s baharat over the past two years. My grandfather’s sister, Dina, used to invite me over for Friday night dinner every time she was doing a “Shabbat t’beet” or “Shabbat sambousak.”  If I couldn’t make it that weekend, she would wait to make it for a Shabbat where I could come. Now that Dina has passed, no one else has made Savta Yaffa’s t’beet recipe. For the past two years, I have been tempted to make it myself, but I worry that her special baharat mix will have become stale after all those decades in the freezer. 

The baharat of my ancestors— literally, from three generations before me— has sat untouched in my grandmother’s freezer for fifteen years, and in mine for two.  Possibly, the last hands that touched said baharat were those of my great-savta Yaffa.  Did she mix the spices herself, or did she instruct the spice merchant on what to add? I imagine my grandparents opening her spice cabinets in the week that she died unexpectedly from an infuriating incident of medical malpractice. Those jars of fresh spices were mixed with the expectation of many more home-cooked meals for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They were not meant to be frozen for decades. Maybe, I thought, I could meet those expectations. I resolved to try, at least. 

At the butcher’s, I requested two enormous turkey necks and told him I’m making t’beet. 

“You’re making t’beet?”, he asked incredulously.  

“Yes, and you’ll be surprised to know that I’m actually Iraqi.” I replied with a smile. A sentence I have repeated a thousand times before. This line of questioning has always baffled me: do people think that cooking choices or skills are predetermined at birth? What have I actually inherited from Iraq, other than a last name, traumatic stories, and a box of seventeen-year-old spices? Truthfully, I have always felt like an imposter, deeply insecure about if I am “enough” of an Iraqi Jew, if by being brought up in the U.S. and far from my culture invalidates it. Much of the reason I have learned to cook so many Iraqi dishes over the years, read stories of Iraqi Jews, watch documentaries, written essays, interrogated my aunt Dina, and constantly told others where my name comes from is out of that sense of insecurity. Desperation, too, that it won’t one day all disappear. 

But I write now about cooking t’beet with Savta Yaffa’s baharat. One of my aunts, Orly, compiled all of her handwritten recipes and sent them to me. My grandmother Zehava guides me over the phone— she learned to cook t’beet from her mother-in-law, Savta Yaffa herself.