Leaving Berlin in 1939 and the Life and Goulash That Followed

Shared by Ariel Pasternak and Shelly Porges
Recipe Roots: British Mandate Palestine > Flushing, Queens >  East Meadow, Long Island > Herzliya > Marin County, California > Washington DC and Brooklyn

In 1937, Ariel Pasternak’s grandmother Inge Winterfeldt left Berlin for a boarding school for gifted students in Sweden where she could study with Jewish professors who had left Germany. She was just 15. Less than two years later, she returned to Berlin where two tragedies struck her: her father took his life and her home city was ravaged in November of 1938 on Kristallnacht.

Inge’s family worked quickly to escape the city and the country. Her mother was an American citizen and planned to take Inge’s brother and sister to the United States. Inge, who was involved in a Zionist youth movement, pushed to move on her own to British Mandate Palestine. For days, Inge and her mother would go to Alexanderplatz, a central square in Berlin, to get papers stamped by the Gestapo so she could leave the country.

“Finally, they told me that they would let me leave Berlin on Jan 11, 1939,” Inge wrote years later in her memoir All My Life I Had to Write Letters. “I remember those very sad days in Berlin, the last days before the beginning of our new lives. So sad, because of our parting from each other, with fears in our hearts, fears neither my mom nor I would talk about, if we’d ever see each other again. Remembering this scene now, I am still crying my heart out, I still feel the pain—a dreadful memory, it’ll always hurt. But at least I was let go.” So many others weren’t.

Inge boarded a ship in Trieste, Italy alone. A week later, she arrived in Haifa bay to a large arching rainbow. “I felt, this is an omen—the portals of heaven opening for us—it was a most wonderful beginning,” she wrote. She built a new life for herself on a kibbutz, adopting the Hebrew name Yael, finding friends who were also refugees. Two generations later, her granddaughter Ariel says she admires her grandmother’s transition to her new life. “She grew up in a very aristocratic family in Berlin and essentially went from this very cosmopolitan life to a kibbutz,” Ariel explains. 

Inge (left) with her husband in Israel in the 1970s.

It’s likely here in Israel that Inge learned to cook, her daughter Shelly says. She swapped recipes with friends and learned recipes from her Czech mother-in-law, building on recipes she may have learned from her own grandmother before the war. No one in the family is quite certain where Inge learned to cook or how she came to make goulash, the rich beef stew spiced with paprika, but it became one of her signature dishes. She served it for decades with egg noodles or boiled potatoes and cucumber and dill salad. 

Inge wrote a loose recipe down in a small notebook that Shelly kept. Like countless other family recipes written down over the generations, Inge left out measurements for the dish. “We’re all left to assess what tastes good to us. We all improvise when we use it,” Shelly, her daughter, explains. 

It was one of Shelly’s favorite recipes growing up and was a staple of Ariel’s childhood in California, where the family moved. “It wasn’t just for special occasions,” Ariel explains. “Everytime we were together, it was inherently a special occasion.” In her teens, Ariel and her family moved to Washington D.C. and today, she lives in New York. 

As an adult, Ariel says, “I think that it tastes like my youth,” but she can still conjure the memory of those meals. “I can taste the whole dish now, the whole meal now, it’s very strong in my mind.” 

Goulash

Makes: 4 to 6 servings
Total Time: 3 hours

Ingredients
2 teaspoons kosher salt, divided
1 ¼ pounds beef chuck, cut into 1-inch cubes
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 yellow onions, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 4.5-ounce tube tomato paste
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped into 1-inch cubes
2 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon dried marjoram
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 sprigs fresh rosemary
¼ teaspoon caraway seeds
2 sprigs fresh sage
½ pound button mushrooms, thinly sliced
¼ cup fresh parsley leaves, chopped

Preparation
1. Season the beef with 1 teaspoon of salt. Add the vegetable oil to a medium pot over medium heat. Once the oil is hot, add the beef to the pan and sear on all sides until golden brown, about 5 minutes per side. 

2. Add the onions and garlic into the pot and saute until soft and translucent, about 10 more minutes. 

3. Add the tomato paste, paprika, green pepper, carrots, 1 teaspoon salt, pepper, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, caraway seeds, sage, and enough water to fill up the pot halfway. Increase the heat to medium high and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover the pot with a lid and cook with a gentle simmer for 1 hour.

4. Add the mushrooms and parsley and cook covered on a simmer for 2 more hours, stirring occasionally, until the stew has thickened and the meat falls apart when pulled with a fork.

5. Remove the sprigs of thyme, rosemary, and sage before serving.

6. Serve hot with a side boiled potatoes and sliced cucumbers.