By Marcie Geffner (Ventura, California)
My neighbor told me about the cheese blintzes.
I live in a small town, about sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles, closer to the San Fernando Valley than the Westside. There’s no New York-style deli here. Cheese blintzes weren’t exactly for sale around the corner.
But they were for sale down the street. Less than two miles away at . . . wait for it, Trader Joe’s. In the frozen foods’ aisle.
They came in a thin, rectangular blue box. On the front, below the yellow script saying, “Cheese Blintzes,” was a mouth-watering photo of two blintzes stacked and cut to show the filling. Chunks of peaches nestled at their sides. A dollop of sour cream rested on top. Eight in a box, each a small, convenient bundle of warm, familiar comfort food.
And, oh, they were delicious! Creamy. Not too sweet. Perfect with a tiny scoop of Costco’s strawberry preserves. The best blintzes, maybe, I’d ever tasted. Certainly, the best frozen variety. And, according to the package, they were surprisingly low-calorie, relatively speaking.
They quickly became my favorite go-to late-night snack.
And then, they went missing. In vain, I searched through the Trader Joe’s frozen foods’ aisle. Ice cream. Broccoli. Spanakopita. Pasta. Pizza. Waffles. Pancakes. French fries.
I approached a guy in a red shirt.
“Blintzes?”
He gave me a blank look.
I explained.
“I’ll check in the back.”
“I’ll wait here.”
I waited. And waited.
“They’ve been discontinued.”
Do I need to tell you how heartbroken I was? Bereft. Grieving. I’m not a foodie, but I am a picky eater. When I find something I like, I become fond of it, attached even.
What’s more, I’d felt seen because of those blintzes, as if someone at Trader Joe’s knew where I lived and knew I liked their cheese blintzes.
Now I’d reverted to being invisible. Melted into the pot instead of a crouton in the salad.
This mystery of the missing blintzes became my go-to conversation starter for more than a week.
“Did you know?” I’d ask. “Yes, I went to the website.”
I complained. Requested. Begged. “Please, please, PLEASE bring back the cheese blintzes!”
I’d expected my neighbor who’d told me about the blintzes to share my concern. But he was oddly blasé. Not disappointed. Not distressed. Not even a little. Not at all.
“Costco has them,” he informed me.
Need I say: massive relief?
Total excitement!
Can you guess what happened next?
Off I went. Costco’s frozen foods’ aisles are longer, wider, taller, and more numerous than Trader Joe’s’.
I searched. No blintzes.
“We no longer have them. Discontinued.”
No!
Was it a conspiracy? A supply chain snafu? A manufacturer gone out of business? Were cheese blintzes not profitable enough at any price to earn their shelf space? I had no idea.
That might’ve been the end of this story had not one of my cousins invited me to lunch with some of our other cousins at a well-known deli in Los Angeles a few weeks later.
I’d been thinking of ordering a veggie sandwich until . . . you guessed it . . . someone ordered cheese blintzes.
Cheese blintzes?!
I perked up.
They were not, I’m sorry to report, as awesome as Trader Joe’s’. Good, yes, but not great. More doughy than creamy and too sweet. A lesser-quality brand of frozen, I imagined. Or just not to my taste. I’d been spoiled by the best.
I turned to one of my cousins. “Trader Joe’s discontinued these,” I told her.
“It’s antisemitic,” she said.
“What?” I didn’t think so.
“It’s true,” she insisted.
“Then, why are they still selling the frozen potato latkes?”
She didn’t know. We discussed this at some length. We didn’t agree.
Later, I wondered: Was she right? Was there actually a products manager in a small, dark office somewhere at Trader Joe’s going through lists and canceling anything that seemed Jewish? And was there another manager in another small, dark office somewhere at Costco doing the same thing? And had both of these managers targeted my cheese blintzes?
I couldn’t imagine it. But my cousin had sounded so sure. An Israeli brand of hummus had been discontinued as well, she’d said.
I don’t know which thought was more troubling to me: that the discontinuation of the blintzes was antisemitic or that whether it was or wasn’t antisemitic didn’t matter as much as the fact that reasonable people, such as my cousin, believed it was and, though I wasn’t convinced, I couldn’t prove them wrong.
Was I hopelessly naïve, so far outside of the bubble of Jewish life or just not Jewish enough to realize that the discontinuation of cheese blintzes was obviously antisemitic? Was I being persecuted, albeit in a way that seemed small and unprofitable?
The idea struck me as ludicrous. But I have to admit: I had doubts and I had credible reasons to be on guard, cynical, even suspicious.
Boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses and Israeli-made products have a long history.
In Austria, such actions dated back to at least the 1890s and continued until 1938, when the Nazis annexed the country and forced out the Jewish owners, leaving no one for them to target with future boycotts.
The Nazis had already organized a similar boycott in Germany five years earlier, in 1933. It lasted only one day and was ignored by many, but marked the beginning of a nationwide campaign against the Jewish population.
In the U.S., activists have targeted Trader Joe’s products imported from Israel since at least 2009, when protestors removed Israeli products from shelves and distributed anti-Israel leaflets at two stores in Northern California. Just last year, some 15,000 people signed a petition.
Lists of boycott targets that I found online didn’t mention Trader Joe’s or Costco. But some included Quaker Oats and Doritos, both of which are sold at Costco. Also on the target list: Whole Foods Market. Did they sell cheese blintzes?
None of this explained whether the disappearance of my beloved blintzes was a trivial matter or a serious issue or maybe even a precursor to something worse. Would a ban against Jewish grocery shoppers be next?
Paranoia or persection: what do you think?
I wish this story had a happy ending.
A week later, the cheese blintzes were back!
Alas, no.
Now I can only wander, forlorn, up and down the frozen foods’ aisles, searching for the blue boxes, hoping for them to reappear, and wondering why, exactly, they went missing.
See you there?
Marcie Geffner is a journalist, writer, editor, and book critic. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, Professional Builder, Urban Land, Entrepreneur, Publishers Weekly, and the Washington Independent Review of Books, among other publications. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English at UCLA and a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) at Pepperdine University. Originally from Los Angeles, she currently lives in Ventura, California. She’s an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. Website: www.marciegeffner.com
The Jewish Writing Project 