Matzos and Me

I love matzos. Those crisp, crackly, cardboard squares have been a favorite of mine since I first smeared them with soft unsalted butter when I was 5.

We had just moved to a tenement house on New York’s Lower East Side, across the street from a matzo factory, where floury rubber conveyor belts, operated by floury men in floury paper hats, seemed to run 24 hours a day during the Passover season.

In those days, mothers thought nothing of permitting their little darlings to play on a city street all the long, lazy hours of a Sunday afternoon. There was no danger, and no danger was perceived. We knew, however, that Mother’s steely eye followed our every move from a window five stories up at all times. Even when she wasn’t looking.

We did not stray far. Our prescribed limit was the length of the city block, and that was it. So when my sister and I strapped on our roller skates and tightened the cleats with the keys we hung on strings around our necks, we would glide up and down the block, jumping over the crack on the pavement and skirting the floury path laid by matzos missing the baskets on the production line. Matzos fell off the belt by dozens, breaking and beckoning passersby to reach over the rail for a broken piece. Eventually, the fairy dusting of flour on the pavement of the open storefront would invariably stop us in our tracks.

The skates stopped short of the flour path so often it worried my mother, who bade us never, ever take a morsel of anything from anyone. Not even broken pieces of matzo offered by the cheerful workers manning the matzo belts. “Shaynela,” floury lips would call out in endearing Yiddish, “take, take.” And we’d nip off with small pieces of matzo in our mouths as we made flashy turns and spins on our skates.

My mother would buy matzos from Louie’s, a mom-and-pop grocery store nearby, which made Louie, the owner, wonder why a Gentile family needed matzos during the Passover season. My mother just knew we loved smearing them with unsalted butter and jam as afternoon snacks.

When I grew up, I stayed loyal to matzos, even during the long years of the no-salt mania, when most companies banished salt and turned my savory, salty matzos into tasteless tiles. With or without salt, I always keep a box of matzos on hand for those moments of nostalgia when my mind’s eye sees those men in the floury paper hats and the rolling floury belts heaving matzos into piles.

The name of the matzo company eludes me, and I would surely love to know who owned it and how long it remained on the Lower East Side before it disappeared, as we eventually did, never to return.