Chloe's Bat Mitzvah
- Apple Pie on Passover or Disparate Parts Too Potent to Ignore
the Holocaust scholar across the streetmust have heard of Passover—being Midwestern can't explain the lapsethough I suppose he had no reasonto know apple pie falls into the categoryof to-be-avoided, eschewed for theweeklong eschewing of flour,or is it just risen flour,in honor of ancient liberation?Our one small gesture—no bread no flour no cake this weekmatzo galore, with butter, lox, jamsquished in matzo brei of onion and eggour culinary efforts remind usof a heritage fraught with liberationachieved not by Moses and his flock alone [End Page 21]
but our own parents tooliberated from pogroms of Eastern Europeand imminent threat of Nazi campsmy mother's big familyfled Szeged in Austria-Hungaryhis parents both uprooted as teensescaped Hitler's Germany to start over,their wealth education connections lost,new lives carved out in crowded New York
we mark these real Passover liberationswith Seders and matzo, a week's worth ofapples and nuts in winey charosetsmodest gestures also markedby the anniversary today of the Warsaw Ghetto uprisingApril 19, 1943,brave men and women fought backon this same day, sixty-three years ago—a disparate part too potent to ignore
the apple pie arrivedlike stealth slipped into our kitchenand slice by slice got eaten by us twosuperb buttery perhaps made kosher for Passoverby our neighbor's neighborly gesture [End Page 22]
Buff Lindau is public relations director for Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where she edits and writes for the alumni magazine. She was born and raised in Columbia, SC, went to Goucher College, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. Her dissertation on feminism in the English novel was a very early jump into women's studies (1970). She has come to poetry in the last three years and has had poems published in The Onion River Review, previously in Bridges, and has poems forthcoming in Families.
