Challah at Camp Kin-a-Hurra

Childhood experiences create a special kind of nostalgia — half humorous remembrance, half horrific rite of passage still reverberating.  Dave Barry once remarked that he still has dreams about his Little League games, but that fortunately he can control them with medication.  Mindy Schneider writes at her website that when she first started working on this book, she kept having nightmares “that my parents sent me back to camp for another summer, as an adult.”

Schneider has written a 240-page “memoir” of her experiences as a 13-year old camper at Camp Kin-A-Hurra in Maine back in 1974.  It is an engaging and endearing book, covering some nearly universal summer camp experiences:  facilities that were not quite what had been promised in the brochure, barely edible food, rich-kid bunkmates with names like Autumn Evening Schwartz, continual boy-girl anxieties, the trauma of the first kiss, the mid-summer visit of the parents, harrowing field trips, the end-of-summer awards ceremony (her award as “Best and Worst Athlete” — for her simultaneous success and failure at different sports — was later listed on her 13 college applications, at her father’s suggestion, minus the words “and Worst”), the last dance, the where-are-they-now outcomes from the 1997 reunion.

Here’s a brief excerpt, taken from her description of the day they learned to make challah from camp cook Walter Henderson, who had “spent thirty-plus years cooking for maximum-security prisoners in upstate New York” but was now “retired and cooking in paradise.” 

We watched as he assembled the ingredients on the long wooden table:  vast amounts of eggs, sugar, flour, water, yeast, margarine, and honey.  I’d never thought about what went into a challah, just that it came out of a plastic bag. . . .

“[B]efore we start, who knows why we make the challah?

For all the years of Hebrew school among us, no one knew the answer.

“Maybe you do?” I proposed.

Walter let out a sigh.  “You kids should know this.  Making challah is a mitzvah.  Who knows what ‘mitzvah’ means?”

I knew that one.  “It’s a good deed.”

“Yes.  And who knows about the twelve tribes of Israel?”

Hallie took a shot.  “Um, there were these tribes.  Twelve of them.  In Israel . . .”

“Walter, why don’t you tell us?” Maddy suggested.

“All-righty then.  Eleven of the twelve tribes were farmers, raising their own food.  But the twelfth tribe, the Levis, took care of the temple.

“Far out,” said Autumn Evening, “and then they invented pants.”

“In appreciation,” Walter continued, “the other tribes would bring them donations of bread.  Challah is the name for the act of separating the piece of bread given to the Levis.  It’s why we break off a piece when we make the blessing on Friday night and pass it around the table.  Sharing is a mitzvah.  God’s commandment that we make challah is His way of reminding us to share.”

At Mindy’s website, there is a picture of the man who made the world’s best challah: