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Two types of sweets were served with the tea: one was varenya, a chunky jam chock-full of whole pieces of fruit, usually grapes. (Who had money for strawberries? my aunt Batsheva pointed out when she read a draft of this book.) The other was “herring tails,” as my grandfather called herring, which was to him—and now to me—better than any sweet the world over. Grandpa Aharon called it selyodka and told the following story about it: In the shop that his family had “back there” in Makarov, in Ukraine, “we sold products for the body, products for the soul, and products for between the two.” When I asked him what he meant by that, he explained. “Products for the body were axes and hoes and boots for the Ukrainian farmers. Products for the soul were tallises, tefillin, and prayer books for the Jews.” Then he fell silent and stared at me in order to get me to ask what the products in between the two were. “Grandpa,” I said, “and what were the products in between the two?” “In between the two,” he chuckled, “is selyodka, herring. It’s for both the body and the soul.
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Meir Shalev (My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir)