Tag #117869 - Interview #100315 (Geta Jakiene)

Grandparents had their own two-storied stone house. There were several rather small, but very cozy rooms. I slept in a smaller room on the sofa. My room was next to grandparents’ bedroom. When I was sick in the childhood, grandpa took my room so that I stayed with granny. There was a fair dining-room. The kitchen was near that room, there was a large stove in the center of the kitchen. Something was constantly cooked. Our housekeeper, a Lithuanian lady, cooked mostly during the week. She also helped grandmother with house chores. On the eve of Sabbath and on holidays grandmother did not let anybody approach the kitchen. Though, as I understood later on, she was not a very tidy woman. I did not like the idea that the kitchen was not clean. Grandmother sacredly observed kashrut. There were separate dishes for milk and meat. God forbid to confuse a knife or a folk. There was a case when granny threw away the fork which I used in the wrong way. We ate only kosher meat. There was no kosher meat store in Prenai. Sometimes Sarah’s husband brought it from neighboring town, but I was not very often. As a rule, grandmother cooked poultry which was supposed to be cut in a special way. We did not have our own livestock, so grandmother bought fowl on the market. I remember thoroughly granny how chose chicken, blew on the feathers, haggled. When I was small grandma took me to the market and to shochet in the synagogue. When I grew up, I took the poultry to shochet myself. There was a small shed in the yard of the synagogue, where the poultry was cut. Shochet made a precise cut on the fowl’s neck so that it would not suffer for long, hung it on special hook over the funnel where blood was seeping down. Only after than the fowl became kosher and was ready to be cooked.