Image of the Week: Pickling in the Crusades
© D. Yael Bernhard
Meet Miryam, a young girl who lives in the year 1106 in my picture book, The Life of an Olive. Last week's post featured a shepherdess from the first century CE. Today we see a mother and child nearly a thousand years later. Though it's peaceful under the olive tree, the rumble of war can be heard in the distance. Smoke rises from the port city of Akko. Philistines and Assyrians, Egyptians and Greeks, Romans and Arabs once overran the land of Israel – and now Crusaders, driven by religious fervor, fight to re-establish the "Holy Land" as a Christian kingdom. It is dangerous even to buy salt, which Miryam's family needs for pickling olives. All around them lay many-colored olives, from pale yellow to yellow-green, from smoky mauve to purplish black.
Miryam's mother shows her how to break the skin of each olive so that the salty brine may pickle the fruit. The fine art of olive cultivation, harvesting techniques, pickling recipes and oil pressing have been debated for millennia. Special ways of pressing or preserving olives were handed down from generation to generation. This knowledge was squeezed and fermented, tended and pruned along with the olives themselves. In addition to crushing the fruit between stones, Miryam would also be learning the ways of her ancestors – who may have picked olives themselves from this very tree, centuries ago.
Miryam kneels with her feet nestled against the ancient roots that curl like great toes against her bare feet. Behind her, the tree's massive presence feels peaceful and still, as if a folded and wrinkled face patiently watches over her.
Sit under an olive tree that is three times the age of the United States, that predates Christianity, that is rooted in the land of Naphtali, sixth son of Jacob in the Kingdom of Israel – and you will begin to understand this feeling. The olive harvest is just beginning in Israel this week! Wish I could be there to join a picking crew . . .
Plink, plunk! Another olive is dropped in the pickling jar. Season by season, year after year, the cycle of life generated in olives seems to go on forever. So do the Jewish people, despite countless waves of anti-Semitism over the ages . . . the latest of which was washing over our nation yesterday even as I wrote these words. Only a tree as ancient as the subject of this book would be living witness to this – which is partly why I wrote the book. Next week, I'll feature an illustration that brings the olive tree into modern times.
You can order a signed copy of The Life of an Olive for $12.95 (shipping included!) from my webstore, find it on Amazon, or request it at your local library (please do! – a hardcover edition is available).