Modern Motzo Pieces

In the 3,000 years since the Jews fled Egypt with their unleavened dough, no one has come up with anything better to do with it than eat it.

And even that's not such a good idea.

That is why it was such a joy to attend the world's first Matzo Sculpture Competition last week at New York University. The sponsor was — big surprise — Manischewitz, the country's foremost matzo maker.

Matzo, FYI, is the flat, hard "bread of affliction" Jews (like me) are commanded to eat on Passover, which begins Monday night. It is supposed to remind us of the Exodus, when there wasn't time to let the dough rise — or, apparently, acquire any taste.

What can one fashion out of oversize crackers? The contestants came up with matzo candlesticks, a matzo chandelier and even a matzo video game, complete with mini matzo Mario. "Super Mario Brothers is a game of conquest, but more notably of oppression," the artist's statement read. "You thought it was a game about pizza-eating plumbers? How could you be so naïve?"

Uh, easy. Anyway, the official theme was "Home" and Eric Goldberg had made three little matzo dioramas meant to represent his parents' home, his grandparents' home and now (the one with the matzo futon), his own home, as an NYU student.

"They gave me a foundation," he said of his family, and you just know that somewhere out there, there are two generations of Goldbergs very proud that their boy is spending his $39,000 education gluing matzos together.

Another student, James Donovan, glued even more matzos together to make an impressive arch. You try bending matzo. He won the $1,000 prize.

The idea was "to bring matzo back to people and let them really interact with it on a personal level," said a Manischewitz spokesman.

But the reason something as unpalatable as matzo has remained part of Passover for so long is because it is already very personal, laden with holiday memories. Think of it as the Jewish fruitcake. (And not just because you can eat it a year later and it still tastes the same.)

"One time," business student Israel Aboud recalled, "we hid the afikomen under my grandfather's mattress." The afikomen is a piece of matzo that is traditionally hidden for the children to find. Whoever does gets a prize. But sometimes, as in Aboud's family, the children hide it from the adults.

The problem was that Aboud's grandfather fell asleep on the mattress, unaware of the matzo beneath him. "We didn't want to wake him up," Aboud said. "So we sat there and felt really bad. We kept on making noises — banging and stuff — to wake him, and once he sat up, we said, 'We've got to get the matzo from under you!'" The afikomen is supposed to be the last morsel eaten at the Passover meal. "But my parents didn't want to use it after that," he said.

My husband's chief matzo memory is of his cousin convincing all the other kids that he had built a "matzo detector," along the lines of a metal detector. He later developed some extremely important computer part and became a multi-millionaire.

Other people's matzo memories focused on the joy of eating it with butter, or — in the case of student Paula Pulizzi — with olive oil and Parmesan. "I'm Italian and I was always curious about it," she said. Once she finally bought a box, "I wound up having it every day after school. My parents were like, 'Are you OK? You sure you don't want Italian bread?'"

Scrumptious, crusty Italian bread? Who'd want that when you can have the bread of affliction?

I'll bet she likes fruitcake, too.

Lenore Skenazy is a contributing editor at the New York Sun. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lenore@lenoretown.com), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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