Though I was useful in helping Mom pick through suitcases and dust off silverware, nowhere was I more needed than handling rice. Back in Cairo, when rice came in twenty-kilo sacks replete with stray bits of grain or straw, it was important to sanitize it for the holiday. This was considered such a crucial task that the typical Jewish housewife took it upon herself to inspect the rice no fewer than seven times, each more rigorously than the last. Nor could the work be entrusted to the maids. Even in the relative comfort of Egypt, where almost every chore could be turned over to a hireling, women such as my mother performed this task themselves, or else with other family members.
Admittedly, some of the more progressive families went over the rice only four times. Edith insisted on seven. In Cairo, Mom had “hired” Suzette and César to help her out, installing them at the large dining room table and paying them a few piasters for the work.
But here in America, when our rice supply consisted of the tightly wrapped cardboard packages of Carolina or the even pricier Uncle Ben’s, we had on our hands a product that had already been processed, purified, homogenized, sterilized, and hermetically sealed.
What impurities could those milky white granules contain? What could possibly be sinful about eating Uncle Ben’s?
Edith warned me to be careful as she spread a large white sheet on the dining room table, put me in a chair by her side, then forced me to dump out the contents of box after box so that the table was covered with mountains of rice. Each of us began the task of going through each grain of rice, separating the pure white grains from the blemished brown ones. I would put rice into a large bowl and proceed to review a handful of rice at a time, relishing how the grains felt as they slipped through my fingers.
I never questioned the necessity of what we were doing. It never occurred to me to wonder why we needed to peer at thousands upon thousands of individual grains of rice, one by one, one by one. I never challenged any of the rituals we followed at home, they were such an essential aspect of who we were as a family.
And among the scores of observances and sacraments that we tried to uphold through our peregrinations, from our home in Cairo to our refugee hotel in Paris, the welfare hotel in New York, and an immigrant community in Brooklyn, the Sifting of the Rice was the one that we never compromised, because it was permeated with the most sacred aura.
My mother would smile as I handed her bowl after bowl of the purified rice. I had carefully examined each one precisely seven times to make sure there wasn’t the slightest imperfection. We sifted through twenty pounds or more, for that was how much the family would consume within the first couple of nights of the holiday.
When I grew older, and learned that my American peers, the Jews whose ancestors hailed from Eastern Europe or Germany, didn’t eat rice at all during Passover because they considered it taboo—almost as much of a sin as eating bread—I was completely taken aback.
What care we had taken to make sure the rice we ate would pass God’s own inspection!
And then there were the friends and acquaintances who startled me in a different way, by eating whatever they wanted on the holiday—even bread. Whatever happened, I wondered, to worrying over the integrity of a single grain of rice?
The Passover marathon culminated in a ghostly candlelit inspection tour conducted by my father. Late at night on the eve of the holiday, Leon, clad in his pajamas, holding a tall white candle in one hand and a prayer book in the other, led a nocturnal procession. As he shuffled from room to room and from corner to corner, Mom and I followed anxiously behind him, holding our breath as he peered inside closets, opened kitchen cabinets, rifled through bedroom drawers, and bent down to examine the floor, checking for stray crumbs. He looked like one of those detectives from those 1940s film noirs going over a crime scene with a flashlight, searching intently for any evidence of wrongdoing.
He was as rigorous as these mythical old Hollywood detectives. While there was a piece of me that enjoyed the theatrical aspects of the ghostly inspection, I realized this was deadly serious business for my father. Mild-mannered in most of his dealings with us, he was intransigent, uncompromising, and almost tyrannical when it came to religion. There were no shortcuts to faith, my father believed, no rules that could be bent or broken.
My mother alternated between trying to please him and rebelling against his despotic ways.
“Fanatique,” she would cry out.
But she usually retreated, either because she was cowed by him, or because she, too, became persuaded that God himself cared that our little Brooklyn apartment was spotless for the holiday, and that He personally wanted to make sure the steaming platters of rice that would accompany the fragrant meat stews, or served alongside the thousand exotic delicacies she prepared, adhered to the highest standards of heaven and earth.
OF ALL THE ARCANE rituals and ceremonies I associated with the holiday, none was more sacred to me than shopping for a new dress.
My mom spent months carefully putting money aside so I could have a proper outfit to wear that single week of the year. For a holiday that signified renewal, where closets were emptied and shelves were stripped bare and floors were scrubbed and old food was mercilessly cast aside, it would have been unthinkable not to have a sparkling new wardrobe.
No other occasion, not even my birthday, warranted as major an expenditure.
La Eighteen, as Mom liked to call Eighteenth Avenue, with its cheery array of children’s stores catering to families with small budgets, was our choice destination. It was my mother’s favorite shopping venue, and in the course of walks either alone or with me, she had befriended most of the storeowners and was able to converse in fluent Italian she’d mastered as a child with those who hailed from Naples or Calabria.
La signora francese, they called her, or simply la signora, and beckoned her to enter their establishments, though she could rarely afford to make a purchase.
As I looked forward to turning ten, I was no longer willing to defer to my mother in the selection of this all-important dress. In the past, she had wielded considerable influence, nudging me toward one or another outfit because of budgetary constraints or her own definite tastes. This time, I was determined to buy a dress entirely of my own choosing.
I longed for the years when my shopping expeditions were with my father, who had exerted almost no influence on what I wanted to buy. He’d simply stand aside, chatting with the salesgirls—only the pretty ones, of course—as I fluttered about a store, trying on this dress or that. He became involved only when it was time to pay the bill.
My dad no longer took me shopping: the responsibility was now left entirely to my mother. I found her rather a sorry substitute—opinionated where he had been open-minded, penny-pinching where he had been munificent. As if sensing that she was falling short, she announced that she had in mind a special destination for my all-important holiday purchase.
“Loulou, allons chez Milgor,” she said jauntily, and off we went to the most upscale children’s store we knew, the one whose shop windows filled us with longing, yet which seemed so intimidating that we were always afraid to actually go inside.
For our weekly Saturday walk, my mother and I always set out for Milgor, though we deliberately left it for last. We wanted time to pause and savor its elegant window displays, crammed with an abundance of overpriced fineries we could admire but never possess.
Its windows were like theater, a small outer-borough version of the great Manhattan department stores. Come Christmas, for instance, red velvet reigned supreme: Milgor’s windows featured clothes that were either made entirely of crimson velvet or had a velvet trim. There were dresses with lush velvet skirts and skirts with soft velvet sweaters, gleaming red velvet coats with black velvet collars and severe black coats with discreet red velvet collars. Even the shoes featured small black velvet bows.
As the weather turned balmy, velvet gave way to frothy lace. Pintsized mannequins appeared, clad in white dresses with veils and bejeweled cr
owns that made them look like the delicate child brides of my mother’s generation, the child brides of the Levant. They were only confirmation dresses, popular in this enclave of Italian Catholics, but I thought of them as miniature bridal gowns, and fantasized how wonderful it would be to wear one.
My mother was beguiled. This was how she longed to dress me, in clothes that were stylish and refined—the kind that her children had worn once upon a time when she had money and leisure and could pick and choose. Staring at the windows of Milgor became emblematic of our new lives: recalling what we had once enjoyed, despairing at all we could no longer have.
In the spring of 1966, the windows looked like a pastel rainbow—dresses in pale peach, icy pink, pistachio green, and songbird yellow drifted across a make-believe sky, frivolous and flirty and oddly provocative with their high waists and puffy sleeves.
Few of the clothes had price tags, or if they did, they were so small as to be almost illegible. In this hardscrabble neighborhood where the women stayed home while their husbands toiled as cops and firefighters, and most establishments billboarded their low prices, Milgor’s was the only store with enough of an affluent clientele to survive with this approach.
The dress I loved stood alone in a corner. It was pale pink, with a white bodice, pink buttons, and a small white collar. I pointed it out to my mother with glee. I had made my decision instantly and at a glance, the way even I knew that life’s most important decisions can be made, the way that my father had spotted my mother seated at the café in Cairo.
We pushed open the formidable glass doors that seemed to say, “Stay away, you’re not worthy.” Though we’d ogled the displays dozens of times, we had never actually entered the store. What was striking was the silence, the all-encompassing stillness. That and the fact that there was no merchandise we could touch and feel and examine. We were used to sifting through crowded racks and foraging inside bins and competing with bargain-hunters for clothing that had been tossed in large piles.
At Milgor’s, clothes were kept in glass cases that were shielded from prying hands by long wooden counters. If a customer needed help, a salesclerk would silently unlock a case and bring out the desired items one or two at a time, like jewels.
Having scrounged up the nerve to enter, I was determined to make a purchase. I told the one salesperson who approached us that I wanted the pink dress. Without saying a word, she went to a glass case and retrieved the longed-for garment in my size. Up close, the dress looked and felt like cotton candy. Made of the softest cotton, it was more shocking pink than pastel, but the bodice, which had seemed white in the window, turned out to be a delicate blend of pink and white polka dots.
I rushed into the dressing room to slip it on. When I emerged, my mother was deep in conversation with the salesgirl. I had found the perfect dress, I interrupted them to say. I’d make good use of it, I vowed. I would wear it to the Seder dinner. I would wear it to see friends. I would wear it to greet Elijah.
My mother didn’t seem quite as enraptured, and even the Milgor clerk cast a wary eye on my frothy pink number. Edith had coopted her, enlisted her as an ally—she had the knack of taking complete strangers and turning them into her friends. She wanted to see other options.
The Milgor saleslady dashed off to the back and returned holding a dress so new it was still in its plastic sheathing. It had arrived the previous day, so there’d been no chance to place it in the window, she said, and lifted the wrapping to reveal a striking turquoise dress. It had the fashionable empire waist of the season, but with a demure, old-fashioned twist: on the front were five large embroidered tulips in different colors, as if blooming in some fantasy garden. The dress was strangely elegant—a cut above even what Milgor’s typically featured.
For my mother, it was love at first sight. This was the dress she wanted for me. And I hated it, hated its primness and its silly tulips and, above all, the fact that my mother had contrived to find me a child’s dress when I’d hoped that I was all done with childhood, and longed for the wanton abandon and frivolity of the pink dress.
She implored me to try it on but winced at the steep price the salesgirl quoted. It was two dollars more than the pink dress, which already cost more than what she could afford. I noticed that familiar anxious look as I headed toward the private fitting room.
I walked out transformed, the refined little girl of Edith’s dreams, in a powerful rival to the pink dress.
“Which one will you be taking?” the salesgirl asked Mom.
She hesitated. I noticed that she seemed nervous, eyeing the tulip dress, doing some mental calculations to see if there was a way we could afford it on the small, haphazard allowance from my father.
“Madam, will you be taking the tulip dress?” the salesgirl repeated gently, if insistently. “Madam?” She tried to shake my mother out of her reverie by placing both dresses, the pink and the blue, side by side on the wooden counter.
Sadly, regretfully, with a sense of such profound yearning that even the clerk appeared moved, my mother said we weren’t going to be taking the dress with tulips. We would be purchasing the pink. I of course was overjoyed. The dress with the sea of flowers was my mother’s ideal, not mine. It matched her vision of la jeune fille rangée—the sedate, well-mannered young girl she was trying to raise, albeit in a place where no one seemed sedate or especially well mannered.
The pink dress made me feel giddy and grown-up, as if I’d been granted a taste of womanhood. The magic that I’d always sensed in Milgor’s windows was finally in my grasp. I felt almost as if I could float, the way the pastel mannequins seemed to do in the window display.
IT WAS HIGH TIME for Elijah to arrive: that is how I felt on the eve of Passover.
On top of sifting rice, combing the house by candlelight for forbidden bread crumbs, buying my pink dress, and helping my mom out with the general housecleaning chores, I had added one more sacred ritual: purchasing a wine goblet for the prophet Elijah.
It was my attempt to improve on a time-honored tradition, although in my case the custom had turned into a small obsession.
On both nights of the Seder, a cup of wine had to be placed on the table, set aside exclusively for Elijah. No one was permitted to drink from this cup or even touch it. It was intended as a gesture of pure hospitality. If Elijah were to stop by, he would find he had a place at the table.
It was a charming allegory, one of dozens of symbolic gestures in a holiday crammed with them: re-creating the Exodus from Egypt by carrying a make-believe bundle over our shoulders, munching the flat bread of affliction to reenact our hurried departure, acting out each of the ten plagues—blood, frogs, vermin, beasts, boils, hail, cattle disease, locusts, darkness, and the killing of the firstborn—until at last crossing the Red Sea to step into the Promised Land.
Except that in my mind, there was nothing figurative about this holiday. Our family had suffered under a modern-day pharaoh—Nasser—and our exodus had been hurried and filled with trepidation. And so, when I was told that Elijah came to every house, I believed with all that I held dear that the biblical prophet would walk through our front door on that night.
His arrival was so tangible and concrete that I prepared for it and found myself anxiously listening for his footsteps.
I took religion literally, possibly far more literally than even the rabbis had intended. When my mom, shunning ordinary candles, lit a floating wick in a glass filled with oil and made a prayer for our well-being, I believed the flame in the glass contained supernatural powers. I’d close my eyes and make a wish, certain it would be granted, in the same way that a couple of years later, when friends traveled to Jerusalem to visit the Wailing Wall, after Israel had reclaimed it in the 1967 War, I’d send along notes to God containing my most profound longings. I’d instruct them to place them in the deepest crack they could find in the wall: God read the scraps of paper left for Him every night. My father had taught me there were random moments on any given day when the heavens
were open, and if I happened to say a prayer at one of those moments, my wish would be granted.
As I walked home from school, I’d look up to the skies trying to divine if the heavens were open, and make outsize requests. I prayed my sister would move back home, and to have my dad walk well again. I believed in shrines and holy men, in the power of psalms and incantations, and, above all, in the possibility of miracles.
In the spring of 1966, I decided to throw myself into preparations for Elijah’s imminent arrival.
“Loulou, magnouna,” my mother told me, using the Arabic word for a crazy person. She was mostly amused by my fastidious attempts to keep the faith, but also alert to any sign that I was turning out like my father: too religious, a fanatic. Even her gentle sniping couldn’t get me off course.
Of all the mystics who floated through the Bible, Elijah was my favorite. It was, after all, he alone among men who had been spared from dying because God loved him so completely. Elijah, blessed with eternal life, embarked on a series of good works. I pictured him wandering the globe, a kindly old man shuttling from city to city, from home to home, to perform his miraculous deeds.
Would he really stop at 2054 Sixty-sixth Street?
That was the question that consumed me. I thought I had an answer—a surefire way to lure Elijah to my house.
There were a series of rituals associated with welcoming him, in addition to filling his goblet. In Cairo, we had prepared our own wine, either squeezing grapes by hand or boiling several pounds of raisins for hours and hours in large vats mixed with sugared water and lemon. The result was a thick syrupy mix we thinned out by adding more water until we had a beverage that was light and sweet—not exactly fermented wine, but delicious. There were always dozens of small yellow raisins stuck to my glass, which I loved to spoon out and eat. But here in America, even Elijah was relegated to drinking sweet purple Manischewitz instead of my mom’s delicately limpid and airy homemade brew.
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Page 27