When Life Gives You Etrogs...
By Dr. Bella Tendler Krieger Director of the Chandra and Michael Rudd Department of Adult Learning
My husband’s family has a story they have been telling for generations about an ill-fated investment.
One late summer, his grandfather, Benjamin Krieger, was returning to New York from Mandatory Palestine with his wife, Ethel, and their young daughter, Lily. Benjamin had an idea.
Sukkot was approaching, and good etrogim were precious commodities in New York.
So before leaving Palestine, he invested what the family remembers as a small fortune in crates and crates of etrogim, intending to sell them when he arrived home.
It was a perfectly sensible business plan - with one rather significant problem.
The ship did not arrive on time.
According to the family story, their vessel was unexpectedly rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope. By the time Benjamin and his precious cargo finally reached Jersey City, Sukkot was over.
And there is perhaps no commodity on earth whose value falls more precipitously than an etrog the day after Sukkot.
There is even an old Yiddish expression for something that has outlived its usefulness: an esrog nokh Sukkos - an etrog after Sukkot.
Before the holiday, an etrog is scrutinized like a diamond. Is its shape beautiful? Is the pitom intact? Is the skin unblemished? Jews will spend significant sums for the perfect fruit.
In fact, I found that etrogim in the early twentieth century generally cost between $5 and $10 apiece, roughly $120–$220 in today’s dollars.
But once Sukkot ends, the etrog’s ritual value, and with it its financial value, disappears overnight.
So, the Kriegers arrived in New York with crates of what had suddenly become very expensive citrus fruit.
I have heard this story many times. It was always told with laughter: a classic family tale of the schlemiel, the hapless businessman whose clever scheme went disastrously wrong.
But this year, I started wondering about it.
Why, exactly, had their ship gone around the Cape of Good Hope? What ship were they on? And what became of all those etrogim?
I confess that the last question especially intrigued me.
There is a long Jewish folk tradition connecting the etrog with fertility and childbirth. One custom has pregnant women bite the pitom of an etrog after Sukkot and recite a prayer for an easy birth. In other communities, the post-Sukkot etrog is cooked into preserves or jam.
My own mother has carried on a version of that tradition. Each of the three times I was pregnant, she made sure to FedEx me a jar of etrog jelly before I went into labor.
So naturally I wondered: were the Kriegers entrepreneurial enough to salvage their investment? Did Ethel spend the following winter turning hundreds of worthless etrogim into preserves?
Or did those crates simply get thrown away?
I still don’t know the answer to that part. And I will make sure to update you if my research turns up any good intel.
But I did discover something much more important.
The El Nil
The ship they sailed on was the Egyptian passenger vessel S.S. El Nil.
And the family story is not merely family lore. What I had never fully understood was when this story took place.
It was 1940.
On November 15, 1940, the American Consul General in Jerusalem, George Wadsworth, sent a report to the U.S. Secretary of State about the increasingly dangerous situation facing American citizens in Palestine.
Europe was at war. France had fallen. Italy had entered the war in June. The Mediterranean was becoming dangerous for civilian shipping, and the possibility that the conflict might spread further into the Middle East was very real.
The U.S. government was urging Americans in Palestine to come home.
Wadsworth reported that during the preceding months only about 150 American citizens had succeeded in leaving Palestine. And then comes a sentence that stopped me in my tracks:
“Fifty-odd departed in August on the Egyptian S.S. El Nil via the Red Sea and the Cape of Good Hope.”
There it was. The family story.
Not simply an inconvenient shipping delay. Not some comical navigational mishap.
The El Nil had taken the long route because the world was at war.
And the timing was extraordinary.
Sukkot in 1940 began on the evening of October 16.
Benjamin Krieger had purchased a perishable commodity whose entire value depended upon arriving in New York before this one particular date.
Instead, he and his family traveled around Africa, avoiding the increasingly dangerous wartime Mediterranean.
The etrogim arrived too late. But the Kriegers arrived alive.
Suddenly, the family story sounded very different to me.
The Holiday of Uncertainty
Sukkot is a harvest festival. The Torah tells us to celebrate it “when you gather in from your threshing floor and your winepress.”
The work has been done. The grain is harvested. The fruit has been gathered. The anxiety of the growing season should finally be over.
This should be the moment when we feel most secure. And precisely then, the Torah tells us to leave our houses.
Go outside.
Build a flimsy shelter.
Make the roof porous enough that you can see the sky.
Spend a week inhabiting something temporary.
The sukkah seems almost designed to undermine the lesson we might otherwise draw from a successful harvest: I worked hard. I planned well. I gathered everything in. Now I am safe.
No, says the sukkah. You are never quite as secure as you think you are.
But perhaps the inverse is also true: You are not always as doomed as you think you are either.
Of course, the harvest does not always turn out as expected. Sukkot does not promise that every failure will secretly become a blessing.
It asks us to live, for one week, without knowing.
To sit beneath a roof that cannot fully protect us and acknowledge how little of the future we can actually see.
Lulav and Etrog market on Manhattan's Lower East Side in New York City during the 1930s.
An Etrog After Sukkot
I began this research wanting to know what happened to a shipment of etrogim.
Instead, I discovered that I had misunderstood the family story.
We had always told it as a punchline: He lost a fortune because his etrogim arrived after Sukkot.
Now I hear another version:
Because his ship went around the Cape of Good Hope, he and his family made it safely home.
Same story. Different ending.
Or perhaps the ending had always been there, and we simply hadn’t known how to read it.
We spend so much of our lives deciding, in real time, whether what has happened to us is good or bad. Sukkot asks us to loosen our grip on those judgments.
Sit in the sukkah.
Look through the branches.
Recognize how much you cannot see.
Sometimes an etrog after Sukkot really is just a worthless etrog.
Sometimes a failed investment is a failed investment.
And sometimes the thing you are mourning turns out, years later, to have been carrying you safely home.
If Life Gives You Etrogs…
If Sukkot reminds us how much we still have to learn, perhaps there is no better way to begin the new season than by learning together.
CAJE Adult Learning’s Fall semester begins the first week in October, with courses that invite us to ask better questions, encounter new ideas, and see familiar stories differently.
I hope you’ll join us for a season of learning, questioning, and discovering what we may not yet know how to see. Register for Fall classes here!
