To the Editor:
In Toby Shafter’s well-told and amusing story, “Maine Pastoral, With Duck” (February), I did not mind the author’s hunting up an old anecdote about a kashrut -ignorant housewife who knew, however, how to “make,” or render, treife meat kosher (so she thought). What I found a bit hard to swallow was the “supper of gefilte fish“ served Saturday night at the home of a Jewish family with a seemingly traditional background.
Is it a New England custom—among Jews—to eat gefilte fish during the post-Sabbath meal as well as on Friday night and Saturday? Or did the Maine-born writer pick up that fish-lore at the Jewish Seminary in New York? . . .
Another question about life in Maine: is it customary for kashrut -observing women of that community to buy meat direct from the shochet, or rabbinically certified slaughterer? To my knowledge, it is butchers and not shochtim who sell meat. In the old country—and, I’m sure, in the New World as well—a shochet is a member of the clerical class within a Jewish community. As such, he does not go around selling ritually slaughtered meat. That’s a butcher’s business. And I thought that, in this respect, as goes the rest of the nation, so goes Maine. . . .
I am in complete agreement, however, with much that is contained in the February issue of COMMENTARY — particularly the letter from Philip Hochstein in praise of Robert E. Fitch’s recent essay on the cockeyed “liberal” line of so-called intellectuals regarding so-called “McCarthyism,” etc.
Maurice Winograd
New York City
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