Special thanks to
Robin Dorman, Julie Komorn,
David Levithan, and Helen Perelman
for sharing their
Bar and Bat Mitzvah stories.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Letter from Ann M. Martin
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Scrapbook
Also Available
Copyright
“Abby? Abby!”
I looked up from where I was sitting on the sidelines of the soccer field and grinned and waved. My twin sister, Anna, and her violin were standing there.
Well, okay, the violin wasn’t standing there. My sister was holding it in its case under one arm, while she waved to me with the other.
I finished lacing up my sneaks, jammed my cleats in my pack, and stood up to join her.
Although my sister and I are twins, we are identical only in appearance. We both have deep brown eyes that are almost black; we both wear glasses or contacts (depending on our moods); we both have dark brown, thick, curly hair, and pointed chins. But Anna wears her hair shorter than mine, with bangs. And although she is coordinated, she isn’t athletic. Her talent is music, and while I like to listen to music, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
Anna is first chair in the Stoneybrook Middle School orchestra, which means she is really, really good on the violin. She also plays the piano and she’s been known to do a few turns on our father’s old harmonica. In fact, I bet Anna could play any instrument on earth after only a couple of tries.
Also, Anna doesn’t have asthma and allergies. Life makes me sneeze. Kitty litter, dogs, dust, feather pillows, down comforters, down coats, tomatoes, shellfish, milk, and cheese all give me fits. But although I’ve had a couple of serious asthma attacks (which got zapped by a quick trip to the emergency room), there’s no way I’m gonna let that slow me down.
I don’t play the violin or the piano or the harmonica. I do my best playing with my feet. Soccer is my game, but I also like running, skiing, basketball, and softball. I love sports. Back on Long Island, where we used to live, I was the star forward, leading scorer, and co-captain of the soccer team.
I’m not bragging. In my opinion, the only people who brag are the ones who aren’t first chair, if you know what I mean.
“How was band practice?” I asked Anna as I jogged up to her. I waved good-bye to my teammates on the SMS soccer team and fell into step beside my sister.
“It’s the orchestra, not the band, and you know it,” said Anna, smiling at me.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to do violins to your feelings,” I replied, making an awful pun on the word violence.
My sister groaned.
“Sorry. That was viol,” I couldn’t resist adding.
I like puns, the worse the better. My sister tolerates them. Another difference between us.
“If you make another vile pun, Abby, you’re in trouble.”
“Oh, fiddle,” I wisecracked and ducked as Anna took a swat at me. But she was grinning.
“Practice was fine,” she said. “What about yours?”
“Excellent,” I said. “I love April. Perfect soccer weather. Too bad we have to go to Bat Mitzvah class. I wish …”
Wait, wait, wait. I’m doing what I always do. Going at top speed. And leaving you behind, right?
Here’s the deal.
I’m Abby Stevenson. I’m thirteen years old and I live in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, with my only sibling, Anna, and our mother, Rachel. We moved here from Long Island not too long ago, after our mother got this great promotion at her publishing house in New York City. The promotion allowed my mother to buy a bigger house, and since she felt the family needed a change, we moved to Stoneybrook.
Neither Anna nor I was delighted with the Big Move. Although we didn’t talk about it, I know we both felt that there had been enough changes in the past few years. We didn’t want to leave the house where our father had lived with us, either. He was killed in a car crash when we were nine.
That was the worst time in my life. The driver of the truck who hit our father’s car only broke his arm, but our father was killed instantly. For a long time, my mother wouldn’t even mention his name. For a long time, I forgot how to laugh and I couldn’t make jokes.
For a long time … no, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
Anyway, we complained, we resisted, and then what did we do? We moved, of course. My mother liked her new job. My twin sister joined the band — excuse me, the orchestra — at school and started making some friends. We were both invited to join this club called the Baby-sitters Club (also known as the BSC, more about that later). Anna decided to stick to her music.
I joined the club.
The members of the club became my friends, and provided not only friendship but some pretty wild adventures and baby-sitting jobs that brought in very welcome extra money. I also joined the soccer team, participated in class, and avoided any major asthma attacks, except for one that sent me to the emergency room and almost canceled my membership in the BSC (but that’s another story).
In short, I adjusted. We all did. I started liking Stoneybrook for real.
And then the Bat Mitzvah (pronounced Baht Mitz-vah) business creeps up and bites me on the ankle.
Okay, okay, a Bat Mitzvah can’t bite you on the ankle. Becoming a Bat Mitzvah is very special. It is the day when a Jewish girl celebrates her entry into adulthood, usually shortly after she turns thirteen. It is an extremely important, wonderful celebration (Jewish boys have a Bar Mitzvah).
But becoming a Bat Mitzvah involves a ton of work. At least one year in advance you have to start taking lessons to prepare you for the Shabbat when you become a Bat Mitzvah. (Shabbat is the holy day of the week for Jewish people, from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown.) To become a Bat Mitzvah, you have to read a portion of the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible written in Hebrew. The Torah contains stories, laws, and history of the Jewish people.
Hebrew. This is a language I am studying (not very well) to become a Bat Mitzvah. That is one of the reasons it takes so much work to become a Bat Mitzvah. I have to sing (yikes!) another part of the service, the Haftarah, a reading after the Torah.
So you read (actually you chant more than sing, in Hebrew). And then in my synagogue, you also have to give a speech (which the rabbi keeps calling a sermon, which makes me even more nervous). And then there is usually a party. All your relatives come and give you gifts and big hugs and kisses and tell embarrassing stories about when you were a little girl.
At least, that’s what will happen at our Bat Mitzvah, if I know some of our relatives. And practically all of our relatives, it seems, were attending the big event. Mom, who once took classes at the Culinary Institute of America (she calls it the CIA — Anna and I used to tell other kids that our mother worked at the CIA), was planning a huge Friday night dinner to celebrate.
We had even sent out printed invitations — heavy, purple paper; thick, curly white lettering; the whole bit. And we were going to go shopping for special dresses to wear. Our Bat Mitzvah was going to be big. Huge. Wedding-sized, practically.
All that work, and all those details, can sneak up on you, no matter how fast you move. So as much as I was looking forward to
it, I was also beginning to worry, really worry, about my part of the Bat Mitzvah.
For one thing, I wasn’t keeping up with everything as well as Anna was. And for another, maybe, just maybe, I had let spring fever lead me into playing soccer and taking baby-sitting jobs when I should have been doing schoolwork and practicing my Hebrew.
Anna, on the other hand, had managed to keep up with her two hours of violin practice every day, plus belong to the orchestra, plus do her schoolwork, and shine in Bat Mitzvah lessons.
We turned up the sidewalk to our synagogue.
Anna sighed.
I frowned. “Something wrong?”
“No,” replied Anna. She sighed again.
“You’re sighing. Something’s wrong.”
“Well …” Anna said. “I guess there is. I keep thinking about the speech.”
The way she said it, I knew that both words were in capital letters in her mind: THE SPEECH.
Anna continued, “Every time I think about standing up in front of everybody, all our friends and relatives, everyone at the Shabbat service, I feel, well, sick.”
This truly amazed me. “Anna,” I said, “You’ve played a solo with the high school orchestra on Long Island! You’ve stood up in front of judges and won violin competitions! How can making a speech scare you?”
“I don’t know, but it does.” Anna wrapped her arms around her violin case and hugged it to her chest, almost as if it were armor. “It’s different when I play the violin. I forget where I am. I even forget who I am. I don’t think about anything. I just play.”
I considered that for a moment. Times like that occurred in sports, too. Suddenly, running wasn’t hard, it was easy. You floated above the ground. And then, just as suddenly, the race was over, or the game finished, and you looked up in surprise. At that moment, your feet came down on the ground again, hard.
I remembered, too, the dazed expression on my sister’s face when she finished a performance and the audience began to applaud. She always looked a little startled. I realized now that it was because she had forgotten other people were even in the room with her.
She’d come down to earth, too. Hard. And it was only then she saw the audience.
“You’ll do fine,” I reassured her. “After you say the first few words, everything will fall into place, just like a violin piece. And you’ve got a good speech.”
Actually, we’d worked on our speeches together. Anna was going to talk about some of the changes that we’d been through, and becoming a Bat Mitzvah. I was going to talk about the travels ahead and becoming an adult.
Anna nodded. But she didn’t stop clutching her violin case as we walked through the doors into the synagogue.
Rabbi Dorman was waiting for us. He seemed glad to see us and didn’t seem to notice that we both, for separate reasons, looked less than happy to be there.
“Come on in,” he said, waving us to the table on one side of his office.
The office, I decided, was a lot like Rabbi Dorman himself. It was friendly and interesting and full of unexpected surprises. The rabbi liked plants and both windows in his office were full of them. The light that came in filtered through a jungle of hanging spider plants and ivy, fat cacti, and jade plants. Some of the plants looked as if they were on their last leaf, but it wasn’t because Rabbi Dorman didn’t have a green thumb — it was because he couldn’t help “rescuing” plants he saw dwindling away in grocery stores and shops.
Another thing I liked about the rabbi was that the first thing he did, before he began our lessons, was give us this cool book to read called Turning Thirteen. It was about a girl who is afraid she’ll lose her best friend unless they prepare for their Bat Mitzvahs together. The rabbi had used that book to talk about the reasons people have a Bar or Bat Mitzvah and what becoming a Bar or Bat Mitzvah means.
I’d never really thought about it before. In my mind, it was this big party that was somewhere in the future. Gifts were involved. Lots of gifts. That was about it.
Bat Mitzvah is Hebrew for “daughter of the commandment.” When I became a daughter of the commandment, I would become a part of the adult Jewish community, not just my synagogue, but the whole Jewish community all over the world, from Australia to Africa to Alaska.
“The celebration of becoming a Bar Mitzvah or a Bat Mitzvah is a tradition rooted in the commandment to study Torah,” the rabbi was saying now. “Bar Mitzvah, the celebration for a Jewish boy coming of age, has been around since the Middle Ages, but Bat Mitzvahs have been celebrated only in this century.”
I remembered when my mom announced on our twelfth birthday that it was time to start preparing for our Bat Mitzvah. Then she showed us pictures of her own service and the next thing we knew, we were taking lessons with Rabbi Dorman.
“How is the Torah portion coming along?” Rabbi Dorman asked us.
“Great,” said Anna.
I began to calculate how much more work I had to do.
Calculate. An unfortunate choice of words. Calculate was exactly what I wasn’t doing well these days.
Although a great soccer practice had helped put it out of my mind, the memory of the math quiz I’d gotten back earlier in the day, with a big red “F” across the top, returned in full force.
My teacher said my mother had to sign it, to prove she’d seen it. Honestly, I thought indignantly. It’s not as if I wasn’t going to tell Mom about it. It’s just that I wasn’t going to tell her about it right away. I wanted to wait until the time was right.
Like when I was twenty-one.
“And you, Abby?” asked Rabbi Dorman.
“Huh? Oh. Great,” I said.
Rabbi Dorman smiled. “You’ve still got time yet. Don’t worry. Now, let’s get to work.”
We got to work. But I had trouble concentrating, even though we were studying the history of the Hebrew bible, which was very interesting. I had too much to think about.
* * *
“What were you thinking of?” demanded my mom.
Post-dinner test-signing time. Not the perfect time to ask my mom to sign off on a flunked math test, but I figured it was better than waking up at dawn when she was drinking her coffee alone in the kitchen.
“It wasn’t totally my fault,” I answered quickly. “I’d been out for two days before that, remember? With a cold.” I pointed to the date at the top of the test.
“Did you tell your teacher? What’s her name? Ms. Frost?”
“Yeah. But she said, ‘tough,’ and made me take it anyway.” I tried to look righteously indignant and pathetically victimized.
My mother’s brown eyes narrowed. “That’s not right! Did you show her the note I wrote to your homeroom teacher?”
“Ms. Frost didn’t care,” I said. (She hadn’t. That was true.)
“You tell Ms. Frost,” said my mother, folding up the test and sticking it into her briefcase, “that I’ll give her the signed test back tomorrow in person. I have a few things I’d like to say to her.”
Uh-oh.
“Mom! That’s okay. I mean, it’s just one test. I’ll make it up.”
“Abby, I’m not about to let a teacher treat one of my daughters this way. In fact, I very much hope I wouldn’t let a teacher treat any child this way. Injustice is injustice.”
“But …”
Mom suddenly smiled. “I won’t embarrass you, Abby, I promise.”
What else could I say? I gulped, and nodded, and left.
I’d told my mother the truth — and I didn’t think what Ms. Frost had done was fair. But I also knew that I’d spent most of the second day I was home from school watching reruns on TV, including a Leave It to Beaver marathon. After that, I’d studied the translation of the Haftarah, and finished reading a book on the Shabbat service that the rabbi had given us. I could have kept up with my math homework instead of watching Wally and the Beav. But I hadn’t. I’d been counting on Ms. Frost’s being sympathetic.
She hadn’t been. And when I said that I was afra
id that looking at all those numbers would cause me to have a severe relapse, she hadn’t even cracked a smile.
“Abby. You haven’t been giving math your full attention for some time now. I don’t see that two days out with a cold makes that much difference,” Ms. Frost had said, folding her arms.
I folded mine.
We looked at each other. I gave up and took the test and flunked.
So there was some nastiness on both sides in this situation.
Things went from not nice to worse the next afternoon. I spent the whole day dreading my mother’s visit to school. The expression on Ms. Frost’s face when I told her my mother was bringing the test in personally didn’t help.
Ms. Frost knew she was being set up. And even though she deserved it, sort of, I felt bad.
The last bell rang and I leaped from my seat. Maybe my mom hadn’t been able to get off early. Maybe her train had been delayed. Maybe she’d reconsidered and decided to mail the signed test back to my teacher.
I dashed into the hall and headed for my locker, vowing to do my math homework first that night, even before the Bat Mitzvah homework.
I stopped as I saw my mother push open the door of Ms. Frost’s room and step inside.
Slowly I started forward again. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I’m not sure what I meant to do. Somehow, though, I found myself standing outside the partially open door, listening to my mother talk to Ms. Frost.
“But Mrs. Stevenson,” I heard Ms. Frost say.
“I’m not finished,” snapped my mom. “I’d appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of listening to what I have to say, a courtesy you apparently don’t extend to your students.”
Uh-oh!
“Now just a minute,” I heard Ms. Frost say indignantly.
But my mother was on a roll. Keeping her voice firm and calm and steely cold, she cross-examined Ms. Frost like a prosecuting attorney on a television show. By the time my mother was finished, Ms. Frost had admitted that she had refused to give me extra time for the test, even though she knew I had been out sick. Ms. Frost didn’t even have the chance to work in the information that I wasn’t the best student and maybe hadn’t earned any kind of special treatment — and that maybe, just maybe, I should have been able to do my math homework and stay caught up on my own.
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