Chicken Soup: The Story of a Jewish Family

Chickens, from Bessarabia to New York City, provide a generational through-line in these four vignettes.

- Alma Igra

POPOL

TWENTY-THREE YEARS after my last bowl of chicken soup, my mother mentioned in passing that she was once a vegetarian, too. “Why did you go veggie?” I wondered. “For the same reason that all these hypersensitive children do,” she said in her matter of-fact way: “to piss off their parents.” It was back in the 1960s, right after her aunt from the settlement Kfar Vitkin visited her family in Haifa. She carried baskets with her on the bus—oranges and avocados, aluminum pots, jam, and a large metal basket with a rooster my mom named “Popol.” They kept him in the bathroom, and a few days later, Popol was taken to the slaughterer. My mom refused to have the soup.

It’s hard to determine what