Mohnkuchen, Neues Museum Café, Berlin, December 1, 2011. Taken by me, the botanist of the sidewalk. Took this photo because I cannot order Mohnkuchen (poppy seed cake) without thinking about Paul Celan’s book, Mohn und Gedächtnis (poppy and memory) and I thought it was so fitting to record my last Berlin meal in 2011 as a fond memory under the auspices of Mohn and memory. I never really understood the juxtaposition of these two words together; I assumed it was some very interesting piece of Celan’s Symbolist style or even a bit of absurd Dada synthetic language. I even found little crumbs of meaning in the fact that while the Hebrew word for poppy is pereg פרג, when Purim rolls around and we remember Esther’s story with Hamentaschen (actually ha Montashn, or “the poppy pockets), I still sometimes hear Israelis refer to the poppy filling as “mon.” So Yiddish is not altogether forgotten in the Old New Land. And then on the first shabbat after I took this picture, after 18 years of thinking about the title of Celan’s volume of poetry, I finally had the synaptic flash in my brain that made the connection between the words in Yiddish: מאָן –> דערמאָנען; mon –>dermonen (poppy seed –> memory). Silly girl, I am. Why did it never occur to me that Celan spoke YIDDISH?!?! Where everything makes sense. And we can eat our cake, too.