Yiddishlands: A Memoir

14. The Last Seder Night

With so many stories, you’d think that the one that really mattered, the story of our exodus from Europe, would surely have been fished out of the sea of Mother’s memory, an episode here, an insult there, especially as it happened overPassover,andourownsedersinMontrealweresofraughtwithanxiety. Not for the reasons you would expect—not because of the need to clean the house top to bottom, removing all signs of leaven, every last incriminating crumb; not because of the special foods, though the timing of Xenia’s kneydlekh , the traditional matzoh balls, generated plenty of tension between Mother,whoranthekitchen,andFather,whorantheseder—butonaccount oftheguestlist.ItstartedwiththepoetMelekhRavitchandhiscommon-law wife, Rokhl Eisenberg, whom Mother detested, on account of her being a Communist.Mothermusthaveintuitedthatthehatredwasmutual.(InRavitch ’sdiary,nowhousedattheNationalandUniversityLibraryinJerusalem, theentriesfor1952–66—theyearofMother’sterriblefallingoutwithRavitch over something he let slip from his otherwise carefully guarded tongue— amply document the fierce arguments between Rokhl and Ravitch over whether or not to attend the Roskies family seder.) Not to mention Ravitch’s vegetarian option, which added an unwanted burden to the menu of welldone roast beef and soggy asparagus, capped by Mrs. Gaon’s chocolate hazelnut cake, so rich that no one could believe it was really peysekhdik, 81 14 The Last Seder Night kosher for Passover. Add to this the presence of the Steiners, my brother’s in-laws. Misha Steiner, of course, everyone loved, for if the seder went without a glitch, Mother would retire to the living room where she would accompany him in those sentimental Russian ballads that ended with Misha whistling like a Cossack. No, it was his wife, Ganuchka, a character out of Dickens, with her veils and tinted glasses and heavy eye makeup, whom Mothercouldnotabide.Butmostofall,Motherresentedthepresenceofgentiles at our seder, actually the one, Professor Harry Bracken, who could hardlybeconsideredyouraveragegoy,sincehetaughtphilosophyatMcGill. But even Harry was one goy too many. He was invited by my sister Ruthie, a token of her “revolt,” her spitefulness. Bringing a gentile to the family seder was a warm-up act, so far as Mother was concerned, to the provocative things that Ruthie would say at the seder. When we got to the part about the five rabbis in Bnai Brak who retold the story of the Exodus all night long and my sister Eva revealed in the name of her home room teacher, Lerer Dunsky, thattheywereactuallyplanningtheBarKochbarevoltagainstRome,Ruthie countered this heroic reading of the passage with a contemporary fairy tale by Edmund Wilson, who imagined Elijah the Prophet showing up at a seder of Jewish intellectuals on the Upper West Side of Manhattan accompanied bytheMessiah.Mightilyirritatedbysuchromanticgarbage,mybrotherBen burst out laughing. Thank God Ravitch succeeded in smoothing things over by proposing that the name Israel was an acronym for Isaac, Sarah, Rachel, Abraham, and Leah. I chimed in with the story about King David’s ring with its all-purpose inscription, gam zeh ya’avor, “this too will pass,” which I gladly repeated from one year to the next in the hope that Father would forgettocalluponmewhenitcametimetoask ,matzohzo,‘alshummah,thismatzoh , what does it signify? Father wanted an explanation in our own words and we never knew what object on the seder plate would be ours to expound upon or even what language we would have to do it in, because Harry Bracken, for all his knowledge of Judaism, did not speak a word of Yiddish. When we came to the Hebrew phrase khayav odom, each and every person mustthinkof himselfasifhepersonallyhadgoneoutofEgypt,Fatherwould look up from the Haggadahto see if this year there was something new to offer . If we came up short or were getting signals from Mother to speed things up, the explosive singing of “day-dayynenu” not only proclaimed that God’s manifold miracles would have been enough but also that by then we too had had enough and were anxious to move on to the kneydlekh. chapter fourteen 82 At that critical mid-point in the seder, as Mother ladled out the steaming broth, which Ruthie and Eva distributed to everyone but Ravitch, Mother might have been reminded of how much she had hated schlepping all the way from Czernowitz to Bialystok for the Roskies Family seders, to Polna Street 20, where her eldest brother-in-law, Shiye, who was always busy opening and closing windows, inspecting his throat in the mirror, and taking his pulse at regular intervals, would arrive every year from Budapest with his feisty wife, Malcia, who made a bee-line to inspect the pantry and who...