Two experts at latke-making are Regina Karolinski and Bella Katz, best friends in their 80s who share an apartment in Berlin. Regina and Bella the stars of a new documentary (and a cookbook) called “Oma and Bella” (Oma for grandmother). The film’s director is Regina’s German-born granddaughter, Alexa Karolinski.

I recently dropped in on Karolinski in her Brooklyn kitchen to talk about the film, and make cookies.

We start by opening up a stick of butter and a package of cream cheese.

“Philadelphia by Kraft. No low fat. It’s full fat everything, and flour,” said Karolinski.

We’re making the dough for “Hagelzuckerkekse” — Regina and Bella’s sugar cookies. The film doesn’t just feature the women cooking desserts; there are also soups, meats, and sauces.

But all this food isn’t German. It’s from Eastern Europe. Regina is originally from Poland, and Bella is from Lithuania. Along with many other Jews from Eastern Europe, they ended up in German camps for displaced persons after World War II. Alexa Karolinski said that most Jews in the DP camps left Germany, but a few thousand stayed on.

“I don’t think it was a conscious decision to stay,” Karolinski said. “I think it was just that they didn’t leave. They all had babies in the displaced persons camp and they all married basically the first person they met after the war and started these new families. I think living life became more important than leaving, but I think they definitely paid the price for staying, psychologically.”

Karolinski said that while Regina and Bella are holocaust survivors, and thus in many ways her movie is a holocaust movie, she didn’t want to tell just another story of what happened during the war. She wanted to focus on their friendship and their strong personalities.

“To me what I wanted to do was make a film in which you can get to know two people who went through this, but who are very much alive today — and to let the past, the dark past trickle in really randomly in the way that memory actually works.”

The past especially trickles in when they are in their shared kitchen in Berlin. As Bella comments in the film, you remember it so vividly when you are cooking.

I wanted to talk to Regina and Bella myself, so after we put the cookie trays in the oven, we got on Skype to call Berlin.

With Karolinski as my interpreter, I asked Regina how she felt about talking about the dark past in the documentary.

“She said that they didn’t want to talk about it for the longest time, but during filming they realized it would be an important document for the future generations,” Karolinski conveyed to me. “It was really hard in the beginning but then they realized that even though it’s hard it might be important to talk about it so it doesn’t get forgotten — and then she asked me immediately after that how I’m doing.”

When we get off the phone, Karolinski looked thoughtful.

“They say they’re happy now. I think they’ve made peace with living in Germany. I also think that the success of the film in Germany and the fact that so many non-Jewish Germans have fallen in love with them and have gotten to know them and they get stopped on the street by people for photos has really come to help them to feel accepted for who they are,” she said.

We take the golden brown cookies out of the oven, the sugar sizzling on top. As Regina and Bella say of the cookies in the film, they look like beauty.

German Sugar Cookies
“HAGELZUCKERKEKSE”

Makes about 40 cookies
1 pack cream cheese (8 oz)
1 stick butter (4oz)
¾ cups flour
1 egg white
1 cup coarse baking sugar

Place the butter in a bowl. If the butter is cold, grate it with a cheese grater so that it mixes easily with the other ingredients. Beat in the cream cheese.

Fold in the flour and mix ingredients well so that they form a dough.

Place the dough on a lightly floured flat surface, and mold it into a ball.

Refrigerate for 2-3 hours, or as long as overnight. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Sprinkle some flour onto a pastry board and roll out the dough until it is about ⅛th of an inch thick.

Cut out individual cookies using the rim of a small glass.

Beat the egg white in a dish and, using a pastry brush, coat each cookie with it.

Dip the wet side of each cookie into the baking sugar until generously coated.

Bake the cookies on a baking sheet for 25 minutes until golden brown.

After about 20 minutes start to check the cookies. Depending on the oven, they might need an extra 5 to 10 minutes.

Now, as Julia Simon reports, it provides a temporary home for other persecuted writers from around the world.

I lived in Cairo a little more than two years and whenever I’d walk down the street and hear a honk, I thought was just a…honk. It turns out, that honk has a meaning.

The honk—four short bursts followed by a slightly longer one—means: “Open your Eyes.” It’s directed at people who aren’t paying attention. Or in the words of Hicham Uhmarey, a Cairo cabbie, people who are “crazy,” and not looking up.

Cairo taxi driver Hicham Uhmarey (Photo: Gabriel Luis Manga)

Uhmarey took me for a cab ride around Cairo for a little lesson.

It probably won’t come as too much of a shock that a lot of the honks represent such descriptive swear words that I can’t translate them here. But the honks aren’t just for other drivers. Some are for women that drivers see walking on the street. There’s a special one for “I love you.” Honking is a male language.

Even so, some women do know they’re getting honked at. But they may not know whether the message is “I love you” or “Oh, beautiful woman.” To the untrained ear, they sound similar. What’s more, many of my female Egyptian friends don’t know any honks at all. Even among the few who drive, many haven’t gotten the chance to learn the honking language.

But I am proud to say that I am now officially a student of honk. Hicham Uhmarey confirms that I can now honk “I love you.”

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Bekya is the call of the Egyptian junk collectors.

And the cries reveal a lot about Egypt’s economy.

Twenty-six-year-old Josh Leffler sits in a Cairo cafe smoking a water pipe while men play dominoes and watch TV nearby. The American teacher doesn’t look stereotypically Egyptian, but after four years of living in downtown Cairo, he does blend in. And he loves it.

“I can go to my regular café anytime of the day and I will always sit with people,” Leffler says. “If I go to a coffee shop in Los Angeles and do this it doesn’t quite work like that, and so this aspect of community, it’s really nice.”

Yet even for Leffler who has a community here, the past year has been tense. During the revolution he got detained a few times. And lately with the protests downtown he’s felt like some Egyptians look at him differently as a foreigner.

“After I was detained a couple of times I began to act much more careful,” he said. That includes keeping his camera hidden when walking on the streets.

Khaled Fahmy, the chair of the history department at the American University in Cairo said the anti-foreigner sentiment that Leffler is experiencing doesn’t come out of nowhere.

There have been foreign plots in Egypt before, like the notorious Lavon Affair in 1954, when Israel was accused of recruiting Egyptians to plant bombs inside Egypt. And Fahmy said Egyptians don’t forget..

“Egyptians are very aware, in their recent history, of outside interventions. So this is a sensitive point, more so than elsewhere,” he said. “But that’s not the issue. The issue now is that there is a deliberate use of this xenophobic language, of this suspicion of foreigners.”

Fahmy and other critics say the current government – the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF – is taking this very real sense of outside threat and whipping it up into fullblown xenophobia through State TV and radio.

“There is a deliberate use of this xenophobic language, of this suspicion of foreigners by SCAF and by the Minister of International Cooperation,” he said.

Hossam Baghat, Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said there’s always been racism in Egypt. But these days his organization gets lots of complaints from people who have never been targeted before.

“In the past most of the complaints we received were by migrants, or refugees or asylum seekers with black skin that were subject to racially motivated harassment in Egypt,” Baghat said. “But since January of 2011 most of the complaints have been received by people who were targeted because of their fair skin or because they come from the West.”

There have been verbal and physical attacks, as well as citizen arrests. Baghat said foreigners are caught in the crossfire as the Egyptian government tries to undermine the continued protests.

“It presents the political protest movement in Egypt as being primarily pushed by the famous foreign agendas. And the foreign agendas are normally understood to mean western agendas,” he said.

Rasha Azaizy, spokesperson for the Egyptian Tourism Ministry, said there may seem to be a lack of security on the streets. But she didn’t see any hostility towards tourists or foreigners.

“It is not aimed at foreigners, it is just random,” she said. “And because of the language barrier, or the randomness of the whole thing. Stop and search is something that can happen in any city in the world. Egyptians are extremely warm and welcoming people. Very friendly.”

Azaizy said even with the unrest this year 10 million tourists came to Egypt, but that’s a drop of 30 percent. Even so, Historian Khaled Fahmy said it’s clear there is a concerted campaign against foreigners. And he said the Egyptian government shouldn’t just worry about the safety of tourists, but about the very foundation of Egyptian society.

“Egypt throughout its long history thrived not by being shunned off and shut out and inward looking, but rather by being open and engaged, and by interacting.”

As for American teacher Josh Leffler, he still considers Egypt his second home, and hopes to stay. But he added, “I’ll see how it goes.”

In the basement of the Indonesian embassy a 28-year-old woman we’ll call Susan sits on a mattress in her polyester pajamas. Asked how much money she made in the nine years she was a domestic worker in Egypt, she slapped her hands together.

“None at all,” she said.

“Year after year I asked for my wages, but my employer said, ‘later, later, later.’ For nine years. I feel sad and depressed because I came from Indonesia to work for my family. I am the bread-winner of my family,” Susan said.

Susan was locked inside an Egyptian house for most of the past decade. Sometimes her employers didn’t give her food. Sometimes they beat her. Without money or contacts, she was afraid to escape.

“My employers knew that I was here alone. They knew for nine years that I was heartbroken, they knew I was heartbroken,” she said.

But last September her employers took her on a trip with them to the beach, and she finally got the opportunity to run away.

Susan said she had been so isolated that when she first arrived at the embassy in Cairo that she didn’t know that there had been a revolution in Egypt. She thought Hosni Mubarak was still president. Now she’s one of five former domestic workers taking shelter while they seek their unpaid wages.

“When I got to the embassy I called my family,” Susan said. “They thought I was dead. My sister didn’t recognize my voice, my mother too. She didn’t recognize my voice.”

Susan laughed as she washed dishes with some of the other women in the embassy kitchen. Ironically, the revolution that Susan didn’t know had happened may turn out to be good for her.

Ali Andika Wardhana works for the Indonesian Embassy and said these days, he and his colleagues have more mobility within the Egyptian government to help workers like Susan prosecute their abusive employers.

“Now we are having direct access to the prosecutor’s office, only after the revolution. Before revolution we didn’t have contact, but now we coordinate on things that matter to the migrant workers,” Wardhana said.

But Susan and the others are getting help only because their cases are so egregious, and fall under Egypt’s new laws against human trafficking. The country’s labor law doesn’t recognize “domestic workers.”

In a villa in a wealthy suburb of Cairo, two Filipino women danced to childrens music with some toddlers. The toddlers’ father, a businessman who spoke on the condition he wouldn’t be named, employs three Filipinos to clean and care for the kids. They make about $400 a month, a lot of money in Egypt. Susan, had she gotten paid, would have only made $120.

The businessman said having foreign domestic help is an open secret in Egypt.

“I wouldn’t mind signing a contract but I cannot sign a contract with an illegal someone who is working illegally,” the man said, “because (they come with) it’s a student visa and they’re not allowed to work anyways.”

Their illegal status is why domestic workers are so susceptible to abuse, said Hossam Baghat. He’s the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and his group advocates changing Egypt’s discriminatory labor code.

“Effectively it removes this entire profession, this entire group of men and women, completely outside the realm of any legal protection,” Baghat said.

And no one knows how many foreign domestic workers actually live here. Estimates range anywhere from 5,000 to 80,000.

Back at the Indonesian embassy, Susan said while she’s sad about her experience in Egypt, she’s not desperate. She’s got a new lawyer and as soon as she gets her money, Susan hopes to return to Indonesia and get married. As for her former employers, if they’re not punished, she fears for the next Indonesian they might hire.

There are approximately two million Nubians in Egypt. They’re skeptical of Egypt’s politicians, but hopeful that their long-standing status as outsiders might change.

Ahmed As’haka sits drinking tea with milk at a Nubian community center in downtown Cairo. A small group of men play dominos nearby.

As’haka lives in Cairo — and will vote here — but his heart is with his hometown.

“I have lived in Cairo, but I was born, I grew up in the village of Tomas in old Nubia. And so I am, like all the Nubians, attached to old Nubia,” As’haka said.

The old Nubia he refers to is an area of Southern Egypt that was flooded in the 60s for the construction of the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser. Nubians have lived in Egypt along the Nile for thousands of years, working as farmers and fishermen. Today, many of the approximately two million Egyptian Nubians – like As’haka – bristle at their lack of political representation.

“We had two parliamentary seats that were taken from us in the 1970s,” As’haka said. “We have tried to get these two districts inside the parliament but such attempts were not taking seriously. We tried to get these districts after the revolution but we are still waiting.”

The thing about Nubians is while their numbers are low, they tend to unify behind a cause. So Asha’ka and others are pondering the same questions as many Egyptian minorities: in a democratic Egypt, how can we best exert political influence?

In the Nubian village of Armena in Southern Egypt, men walk down dry, dusty streets. When the government built the dam thousands of Nubians were resettled, many away from the fertile Nile Valley on a high desert.

64-year-old English teacher Abdullah Mohamad Abdel Fatah says that in the months before the election many parties have come looking for Nubian support – including the new Free Egyptians Party, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Fatah says none of these parties will address Nubian demands.

“All the Nubians know who will love them who will stand before them, who will come to take their voice and after that will never ask about them,” Fatah said. “They know who will never care about them.”

That’s why Fatah is running on the Socialist Party ticket in Aswan. His campaign pledge is to return Nubia to the banks of Lake Nasser.

“To returning to our old nation on the banks of the lake. And after the elections if I was succeeding in my plan I will carry out in returning to Nubia,” Fatah said.

But that’s a tough campaign promise. This territory on the edge of Lake Nasser is hugely valuable – in fact it’s some of Egypt’s most fertile agricultural land. Lawyer Fady Saleh says the Mubarak regime made corrupt deals for much of that land including with billionaire Saudi Prince Waleed Bin Talal. And he says the military owns some of the land too.

“The resistance is vicious because they are not defending principles, they are defending billions of dollars so it won’t be an easy fight,” Saleh said.

Manal Tibe of the Egyptian Center for Land Rights says her organization has filed a lawsuit with the Egyptian government over the land, and even though it may sound ludicrous she’s actually optimistic.

“I’m optimistic but not on the side of the government,” Tibe said. “They are the same before the revolution as after the revolution unfortunately but many of the Nubians who were silent and don’t talk now started to talk and organize demonstrations and express their opinion and claiming for their rights.”

Lawyer Fady Saleh agrees, and he says that’s why he’s forming coalitions with political parties so that Nubians can petition for their rights together.

“I consider this a must that us Nubians have to constitute a lobby,” Saleh said.