Kosher Wine

Forty miles away, just beyond the blue mountains outside Amman, people were busy preparing for the most important night of the Jewish year, the Passover seder. Stores everywhere were selling the essentials of the dinner--matzo bread and kosher wine. Amman boasted a few Easter bunnies, but Passover was entirely forgotten.

My job was to find kosher wine for the dinner--or a suitable alternative. We had entertained using a cheap grapejuice for a while, but the brand wasn't kosher and the liquid certainly wasn't wine. I thought we could do better. Carrying an empty backback into one of Amman's most modern market centers, I guiltily entered a wine store seeking to fill it.

"What do you want?" the wine-seller asked me in English.

Knowing every sentence I spoke in English would add a dinar to the price, I pretended not to understand. "You don't understand English," the clerk lamented in Arabic, fearing that transactions were going to be hopelessly awkward.

"I speak a little Arabic," I told him.

"Kweis," he said doubtfully, and continued in Arabic, "Where are you from?"

"I'm...Italian," I concluded.

"Italian? Then you must know something about wine."

Knowing nothing about wine, I fumbled for something intelligent to say. "Just Italian wines," I explained. Looking around, virtually every bottle proudly displayed some Italian name or other. I quickly and hopelessly scanned the racks for "Manischewitz."

"What are you looking for?" he pressed.

"Oh, just--you know--wine," I explained, as though that made it all clear. Then I guiltily added, "Cheap...wine."

"Try this." The wine-seller went to a corner of the store and proudly took a bottle off the bottom rack. "It's Jordanian." I leaned forward to read, "Mt. Nebo: Wine of the Holy Land."

"It's perfect," I exclaimed. From a religious sense, it was far from perfect. It certainly wasn't kosher, and it had appropriated Moses' death place as an marketing ploy. Something else about it though, truly was perfect.

Waiting for me to find money in my wallet, the clerk asked, "So where in Italy?"

It took me a minute to understand the question until I remembered I was Italian. "Oh," I stammered, "Verona."

"Verona. Like Romeo and Juliet." Impressed, I handed him my ten-dinar bill and waited for the change. "You know, you really should learn English," the cashier continued, "Then you could read Shakespeare."

I lifted my eyes from the table and up to his. He was smiling. "I'm teasing," he said in English, "An Italian would never buy wine that shitty." I laughed and thanked him.

He laughed back, and said, "And don't worry, this store doesn't give 'Italian' prices."