Thanksgiving in the Diaspora

When I was teenager in Vermont, Thanksgiving was always a potluck affair. My mother would supply the turkey, stuffing, and her special cranberry-orange sauce, and the guests would bring everything else. She’d invite friends, most of whom were half her age, unattached and with families too far away to visit. They’d contribute such unconventional (and occasionally barely palatable) Thanksgiving fare as millet and zucchini salad, soybean casseroles, and apple pies with whole-wheat crusts made from hand-ground flour. This was the hippie era, after all.

Several decades later, I went to another Thanksgiving feast that promised to be equally unconventional. Six years into our marriage, my husband and I drove down to Orange County in Southern California to spend the weekend with his Iranian relatives. Uncles, aunts, and cousins all turned out for the event.

I didn’t expect the meal to be a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings. At every dinner party I’d attended in the homes of Iranian friends and relatives up to that point, only Persian food had been served. So I expected the same at this Thanksgiving in Orange County. There would be shirin polo, perhaps, a colorful rice pilaf studded with orange peel, shredded carrots, almonds, and pistachio nuts, a dish that frequently turns up on festive occasions. Or perhaps baghali polo (braised lamb shanks served with dill-and-saffron-speckled rice). Certainly a kebab or two.

Boy was I wrong! This Thanksgiving dinner would have made Martha Stewart proud.

We had a perfectly succulent roast turkey (and in my experience, turkey is rarely perfect but usually a tad dry), bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, rich gravy, green beans, and glazed yams. There was even a homemade pumpkin pie for dessert, dished up with little rosettes of whipped cream around the rim. All lovingly prepared and graciously served by my husband’s cousin, in whose home we were staying, along with her two sisters-in-law.

Strictly speaking, this Thanksgiving dinner was a great deal more conventional than my mother’s long-ago celebrations in Vermont. And yet, apart from the food, nothing about the Orange County gathering felt in the least bit American. Not the way the guests sat formally on chairs and sofas selected more for elegance than comfort, waiting to be served tea in elegant glasses by the lady of the house (who looked thoroughly shocked when I offered to help, as though I’d suggested that her hostessing skills were not up to par). Nor the melodious tones of the Farsi I heard all around me, with its drawn-out vowels and soft consonants.

In Vermont, none of us thought it odd to turn up on Thanksgiving in jeans and work shirts, faded with many washings. After all, this most comfortable of all holidays was not intended to be a formal affair. (And tight clothes make for misery once you’ve stuffed yourself to bursting with a rich meal.)

In Orange County, the Iranian guests arrived all decked out as though for a wedding, the women in stiletto heels with gold flashing at their throats, the men in well-pressed suits and white shirts, with slicked-back hair. In Vermont, we scraped the dirt off our shoes before entering the house. In this Persian home, everyone left their footwear at the front door and walked about in their stocking feet.

One custom the two Thanksgivings shared in common was the way the food was served: buffet style. But as I made my way around the table at the Iranian feast, placing items on my plate, my helpful hosts added more spoonfuls of everything. Left to my own devices, it was assumed, I’d leave the feast hungry, not wanting to appear greedy, and clearly requiring much prodding to avoid such an unthinkable disaster. Being the only “foreigner” present, I received extra royal treatment.

Life in the diaspora always means making adjustments to fit into the rhythm of the dominant culture. It’s a balancing act between embracing new ways and preserving accustomed values, traditions, and family structures. Iranian immigrants in California have especially strong ties to the old country and usually large extended families in the new one. So it makes sense that even a quintessentially American holiday like Thanksgiving would have a Persian flavor in the diaspora.

And what is American, anyway? We are a mongrel nation made up of many different cultures, both immigrant and homegrown. Take my mother’s potluck holiday feasts – I suspect that few Americans would share such memories, where the only identifiable component was probably the turkey.

Thanksgiving is the most adaptable of holidays since it is not linked to any specific religion or ideology. After all, doesn’t every world culture have a tradition of celebrating life, family, and community with a big, delicious feast?

Off the Beaten Track: Bookbinding—A Family Tradition

Our guest today is Marianna Holzer, a third-generation bookbinder, who also happens to be Heidi’s sister. She owns the Holzer Book Bindery in Hinesburg, Vermont, and specializes in book restoration and preservation. She was recently featured on WCAX TV's Made in Vermont series. To learn more about Marianna and the Holzer Bindery, visit her website. And be sure to check out the WCAX video of Marianna at work.

I grew up in a bookbinding family. It all started with my grandfather, Ulrich Holzer, who emigrated to Boston from a Swiss village on Lake Constance, after learning his craft in Italy. His two sons and three daughters all worked in the business. Everyone loved to read and the story went, “you have to wait for your books to be read by each member of the family before you get them back.”

Our house was filled with books, most of which were beautifully bound in leather with colorful marble paper and gold lettering. Every evening, my father, Albert, would read stories to us from those precious volumes: Mother Goose, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Han Christian Anderson, or Mark Twain. Then I discovered Gone With the Wind, Jane Eyre, and the works of Louisa May Alcott. All these stories stood on our shelves and I wouldn’t go anywhere without a book in hand. We even had a complete set of Dickens, crafted with a blue leather cover and matching marble paper that a long-ago customer had commissioned then failed to retrieve.

Years later I became a bookbinder myself. My father had died when I was still young, but my mother, who’d learned the craft in her native Germany, set up a small bindery in our new home in southern Vermont. There she taught my sister and me some of the basics skills needed to bind books. We made simple blank journals and repaired a few literary treasures for family friends. After college, I discovered a small bindery in northern Vermont and went to work for them. This bindery mended and repaired municipal records for cities and towns all across the United States. What a gift it was to get paid to do what I loved: take care of books. I deepened my skills in creating those leather covers, stamping gold letters and designs on the spine as well as restoring and rebinding books that were falling apart.

In addition to working on the municipal records, I took on smaller jobs—the cookbook that was falling apart, the treasured family bible, the much loved and worn children’s books. Sometimes we would get a request to create a special book for someone’s birthday, wedding, or another special occasion. These were the projects I really loved to work on.

The company that had employed me for nearly 30 years was sold to new owners out of state when the original proprietors decided to retire. This brought many changes, culminating in extensive layoffs. I had collected a lot of tools over the years, which augmented those I already owned, left over from the family’s Boston bindery. Some of them are big heavy cast iron tools like a guillotine to trim the pages, a backer to hold a book while you round the spine with a special, fat-headed hammer, and a big press to press the books in the final stages of the work. Other essential tools are small, like the bone folder, the glue brush, a ruler and good quality, sharp scissors.

I was collecting all these tools with the intention that “some day,” “after I retire,” I would open a small bindery of my own.  Well, that day came a lot sooner than I had planned. After the initial shock of losing a steady paycheck and company health insurance, I am finding renewed joy in having my own family business, working with my husband, Rik Palieri, to repair that abused cookbook, imprint a name on a bible, or make a beautiful cover for someone’s first book.

Our current project is rebinding a book called The People’s Home Library, published in 1917. This copy was in terrible shape with the front and back pages torn and crumpled, many of them falling right out of the book. It is exciting to take something in such poor shape, mend the torn pages, re-sew the book and put it all back together, using the original cover material and making it readable once again. This particular book is so interesting that the customer may find herself waiting for us to read it before she gets it back! Together, Rik and I are continuing the Holzer family tradition of turning old books into new and creating finely crafted heirlooms for future generations to enjoy.