Zeidy is already wearing his white kittel, and I can see Bubby shaking her head when she notices the deep creases in the fabric. The others slip on their kittels in preparation for the seder, buttoning the long white linen coats all the way from the bottom to the top, then cinching them with a belt at the waist. They line up on the right side of the table, leaving the women to sit on the side closest to the kitchen. They are supposed to be angels tonight—that’s why they wear the white kittels—but to me it just looks like they are wearing dresses.
As Zeidy prepares the kiddush, I fetch the Passover pillows and lay them out over the large armchair at the head of the table so that Zeidy can recline in true Haggadah fashion when eating the matzo. The others gather to the table, adults in the front and children in the back. Bubby has laid out all her best silver and the table is crowded with it, each wine flask and candlestick competing with the next, and the glare from the brass chandelier is so bright, it hurts to keep my eyes open.
We all stand for kiddush, with our own individual silver goblets filled to the brim with wine. We’re supposed to drink it all after the blessing, down to the last drop to make room for the next cup, but I can barely manage a sip without grimacing. Bubby makes the Passover wine from scratch, and I’ve watched it ferment in the fridge for the past two weeks. Roiza laughs at my expression.
“What’s the matter?” she asks, leaning close to me. “Too strong for you?”
“Nu!” Zeidy calls from the front. His hearing is excellent. “What is this, idle talk? On Pesach?”
I don’t answer, but I elbow Roiza sharply in response. We all know there’s no talking allowed at least until the eating starts. Until then we have to sit quietly as Zeidy plods through the Haggadah reading. I hope he doesn’t spend too much time on his drashah, the annual sermon that’s always about the same thing, but there’s quite the crowd this year and that really gets him going. It’s the first night of Passover, and that means that the last bite of matzo has to be eaten before 1:00 a.m. It’s already 10:30 p.m. Surely that means Zeidy has no choice but to speed things up.
Sure enough, Zeidy pauses after the Mah nishtanah to place a marker in his Haggadah and close the book, pushing it aside. He’s getting ready to tell the story.
“Here he goes,” Roiza whispers into my ear. “Right on schedule.”
“Roiza Miriam!” Zeidy calls out. He insists on calling all of us by our full names. Without him to do that, he claims, some parts of our names would be forgotten, even by us, and our namesakes obliterated. “Devoireh! It would do you both good to pay attention to what I have to say.”
Zeidy is going to talk about his time spent in the Hungarian army during World War II. He doesn’t usually talk about his experience during the war, but once a year he feels it’s appropriate, especially on a night that commemorates all the persecution our ancestors were put through. I think he’s trying to tell us that the Passover celebration is still current and real; whether it’s freedom from the Egyptians or the Nazis doesn’t matter. The point is, we should cherish the freedom we have right now and not take it for granted. Zeidy always warns us that our freedom can disappear at any moment, according to God’s decision.
I can hear him start with the funny part, to hook the children in. Yes, yes, I know, it’s preposterous, really, assigning Zeidy to be the army cook, when he can barely warm up his own soup. He had to ask the scullery maid how to make kraut pletzlach. Hilarious.
“Three meals a day I had to cook, for a whole army. I kept a kosher kitchen and everything, all in secret, of course. When I was at a loss, I asked the kitchen maids to do the cooking and I would do their cleaning. I hardly ever had time for prayer, and when I did, there was rarely a safe place to hide.”
I finger the gold-edged pages of my Haggadah, with its luxurious cowhide cover that has Bubby’s name inscribed on it in gold letters. Fraida. Only Zeidy calls her that. She doesn’t call him by his name, though, only meyn mahn or “my husband.”
“On Passover there was no flour to make matzo, only potatoes. So we ate potatoes instead of matzo, half a potato for each person, dipped in plenty of saltwater.”
I look over at Bubby. I can see she feels the same way I do now. She’s covered the side of her face that’s facing Zeidy with a calloused hand, and although she’s looking down at the table, I can see her shaking her head in exasperation. She’s heard this story many more times than I have.
It’s Bubby’s story that rarely gets heard. Bubby, who lost everyone in the war, whose every relation was brutally murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz while she labored in the factories of Bergen-Belsen. Bubby, who was near death from typhus by the time liberation came.
It’s Bubby who lights a yahrzeit candle for every one of them, from little baby Mindel to fourteen-year-old Chaim. But she almost never talks about it.
Zeidy knows he was lucky to get away with army service, even if he got his beard and payos cut off.
When the plate of horseradish is passed around, Bubby takes a generous helping. I pretend to spoon a heap onto my plate, but I purposely end up with only a couple of shreds. It smells awful. I stick my tongue out tentatively, slowly initiating contact with the white threads on my spoon. At the first touch I can almost hear a hissing sound, as the herb burns my tongue. I feel my eyes welling up.
Looking over at Bubby, I can see her chewing dutifully on her portion. I wonder how Bubby is so ready to remember the bitterness of captivity without really being able to celebrate freedom from that bitterness. I don’t know if her work will ever really be over. After the Haggadah she’ll have to serve the meal, then wait until the men finally finish the ceremony at dawn, at which point she’ll have to clean up the entire mess before going to bed.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Roiza yells suddenly, pointing to her throat. She gasps for water.
“What’s the matter?” I ask. “Too strong for you?”
“Nu!” Zeidy says. “Enough with the shtissim talk already!”
After the eight days of Passover are over and all the regular dishes are back in the unlined cabinets, Zeidy begins marking the omer, the special forty-nine-day countdown to Shavuos, the holiday that commemorates the day the Jewish people accepted the Torah at Mount Sinai. During this holy period, called sefirah, we are not allowed to listen to music, cut our hair, or wear new clothes. It is a somber time, set ironically against a backdrop of gorgeous spring weather.
Zeidy is especially introspective during this time. After the havdalah ceremony that follows the end of Shabbos, he stays at the table for a long time, sniffing the smoking embers of the braided yellow havdalah candle, periodically dipping them in the spilled wine so that they make a hissing sound. The dishwasher quivers furiously, hot steam escaping as the load of Shabbos dishes is scrubbed clean, and the roar of the giant vacuum cleaner I use to scour the carpet overwhelms any sound.
Bubby and I are in the bedroom folding linens when we hear Zeidy calling from the kitchen, his voice barely carrying over the hum of the washing machine’s rinse cycle.
“Fraida, is there a cake in the oven? I smell burning.”
Bubby clucks disapprovingly, scurrying to the kitchen. “What cake? I have time to bake a cake, you think, on motzei Shabbos? When did I whip it up, tell me, in the ten minutes since you made havdalah? Before or after I put in a load of laundry?”
I follow Bubby into the kitchen and soon see what is causing the smoke detector to go off. On Zeidy’s head, his mink hat crackles and smokes energetically; it must have caught fire from the embers. Zeidy rests obliviously in his chair, still sniffing the candle.
Bubby rushes over, muttering in annoyance. “Husband mine, your shtreimel is burning, not a cake,” she sputters, and before Zeidy can protest, the fur is crackling angrily in the sink, the hiss fading slowly under the rush of water from the faucet.
“See, Zeidy?” I say with a smile. “You’re so holy even your shtreimel is burning.”
Later, the shrunken mess sits sodden and morose on the
dining room table, a testament to Zeidy’s piety and absentmindedness, two qualities that would be considered interchangeable by many. I delight in retelling the story to all my cousins, who laugh hysterically at the idea of Zeidy sitting innocently at the kitchen table while his shtreimel flickers enthusiastically overhead.
Sunday, Zeidy goes shopping for a new model, grumbling bitterly about the cost (two thousand dollars and up), and refuses to let Bubby throw out the burned one just in case it can still be saved. A trim here and there, he says, maybe a good brushing, and I can still wear it on Shabbos. Bubby laughs, because the shtreimel is so obviously charred and collapsed, there’s no way it can ever be worn, and when Uncle Tovyeh arrives to take Zeidy to the hat shop, she stuffs it into a garbage bag and takes it to the Dumpster in the construction lot across the street.
Zeidy comes home with a new hat, much higher than any of his old ones because that’s the new fashion, but the mink is too shiny, and you can tell he was looking for a bargain. The expensive shtreimels have a softer, more natural look, but this new one is stiff and haughty and very unsuited to Zeidy’s personality.
“Only for weddings I will wear it,” he says, and puts the hatbox on the highest shelf of the living room closet, behind his other hats.
Zeidy is one of the most dignified people I know, yet he only dresses in old, shabby clothes. The idea of wearing something new and expensive horrifies him. I crave dignity, but I only feel proud when I am wearing new and neat things. What brand of self-pride is the consciousness that Zeidy has, that he can dress like a pauper and still command respect?
I know Bubby feels the same way I do. Zeidy never let her buy clothes for her daughters when they were young, so she would go to the big department stores in the city and look at the new fashions, inspecting every seam under the guise of testing its quality. She was really memorizing the dress pattern, and later she would re-create more modest versions at her sewing machine, using the finest fabrics available for purchase. If she was sewing the clothes, then Zeidy would let her buy fabric. He approved of her thriftiness; he called her geshikt. He was proud to have an efficient wife.
So Bubby’s children were always well dressed, and no one knew her secret. Since it was widely known that Zeidy was a wealthy man, who would have dreamed that those lace-trimmed dresses with exquisite details had not been purchased from Saks Fifth Avenue?
In the photos of my grandmother when she was still a young mother, she looks impossibly elegant and feminine. Her T-strap shoes are dainty and slim-heeled, her shapely calves peeking out from underneath a long, graceful skirt. Her waist is still defined even after three children. She would continue to maintain that figure even after she had given birth to the eleventh. They were all born so close together, it’s a wonder that she managed it, but even today Bubby is a perfect size six.
After all this time, though, she is tired of fighting for everything. She has given in and no longer nags Zeidy to buy new clothes. And she doesn’t use the sewing machine anymore. I wish she would take it out from underneath its wooden table, just once, to sew something for me, but to ask would be presumptuous. If I am truly lucky, one of my aunts will bring a dress back for me from one of many shopping trips to Daffy’s discount store, dropping it off at Bubby’s house like an afterthought.
Spring works its magic here too, in the grimy streets of Williamsburg. The trees burst into blossom, filling up every available space with lush, heavy boughs. Strong tree limbs poke insistently into the rib cages of brownstone homes; their scents pour into windows left open to receive the breeze. Until the stifling heat of summer sets in, my neighborhood is suspended in momentary perfection, a fantasy filled with swirling gusts of pink and white petals that rain down on the sunlit pavement.
In May, Zeidy joins the other men on their way to the anti-Zionist parade in Manhattan. On every Israeli Independence Day, the Satmar Hasids make the trip from their various communities to demonstrate their opposition to the State of Israel. Contrary to what is commonly believed about Jewish support for Israel, the Satmar Rebbe insisted that we had to take it upon ourselves to fight for the destruction of Israel, even if it meant martyring ourselves for the cause. Zionism is a rebellion such as our history has never seen, said the rebbe. The idea that we could bring about our own redemption from exile, how preposterous! Faithful Jews wait for the messiah; they don’t take up guns and swords and do the work themselves.
The parade is a strange sight. No one knows why an obviously Jewish-looking person would hold a sign that says Destroy Israel. But to me, it makes sense. I’ve always known that the State of Israel should not exist.
It is up to us to atone for the deadly sin of Zionism, the Satmar Rebbe said in his manifesto, the Vayoel Moshe. Every Satmar home has a copy of that anti-Zionist bible. The book relates the history of Zionism, how it started in the early twentieth century, how a small group of Jews took up the bizarre idea of carving a Jewish homeland out for themselves. Back then, everyone thought they were crazy, but the rebbe, he knew what they would become. He predicted it.
Many times they attempted to bring about their evil goals, he wrote, but only after the Holocaust did they garner sufficient political and social clout to actually achieve power. To use the Holocaust for sympathy is an affront to all the souls who perished, Zeidy relates; certainly these innocent Jews did not martyr themselves so that the Zionists could take control.
Bubby is very bitter about the Zionists too. She tells me of all the Jewish people who tried to escape to Israel to get away from the Nazis, and how the Zionists turned the ships away upon arrival, sending them all back to the camps. They didn’t want to populate their new land with ignorant Jews from religious shtetls, she tells me; they wanted a new kind of Jew, educated, enlightened, devoted to the cause. So instead, she says, they took little children, who were still young enough to be molded, and when people heard that, they realized that if there was a chance their children could survive, it was worth separating from them.
In school we learn about how the children were beaten and abused until they had renounced their faith and promised everlasting devotion to Zionism. I understand that Jews and Zionists are two different things; one cannot be both. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the only real Jews are Hasids, because to add even a drop of assimilation to the mix instantly disqualifies anyone from being a real Jew. Although women are not allowed at the protest, I would gladly join, if only for Bubby’s sake and the family she lost in the war. Someone has to do the work, and if the “liberated” Jews can’t be bothered, then we have to double our efforts, surely.
I’ve seen the photos, all of them. Black-and-white portraits of Bubby’s sisters and brothers, her parents, her grandparents; all of them are dead. I keep them wrapped in a paper towel in my top drawer and pull them out when I’m feeling strong enough. Their faces are so real, I can’t make sense of it. The baby, killed when she was two years old. How can it be? I ask God. How can these living, breathing faces be gone? They’re my ancestors! I always cry when I see the photos, and I have to put them back in the paper towel quickly, before my silent heaving sobs turn into wails. Bubby doesn’t like to talk about her family, and I don’t want to be the one to remind her.
The Zionists used the Holocaust for sympathy, she says. But tell me, what do they know of the Holocaust? Not one true survivor among them, she says. Not one. And I believe her, because there are tears collecting in the wells of her eyelids.
The rabbi has forbidden us from traveling to Israel. Until the messiah comes, the Promised Land is off-limits. In school there are strict rules about it; even if one has family living there, we are not allowed to visit. To do so would warrant permanent expulsion. It strikes me as a particularly unfair rule, to prevent us from glimpsing the country where our roots so firmly lie, the country our teachers talk about when they tell us of our illustrious history. Still, I know there are girls who have broken the rules, whose families have taken circuitous routes and brought their daughters into that forbidd
en land. In fact, in only two weeks, thousands of American Jews will be making a trip to Israel for the holiday of Lag Ba’Omer, the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the great second-century sage who wrote the Zohar, the chief work of Kabbalah. In fact, I know that my aunt Chavie traveled there a year before her son was born to pray at Rabbi Shimon’s grave. It is traditional for infertile women to pray for a son there, promising in exchange to return to the grave site when the child is three years old and perform the first-haircut ceremony on Lag Ba’Omer. Chavie will surely take Shimon when he is old enough, because everyone knows it was a miracle that he was born, and only Rabbi Shimon could be responsible for such a miracle. Even Zeidy approved of Chavie’s efforts; for the purpose of reproduction, some rules could be overlooked, even if the Satmar Rebbe created them.
Lag Ba’Omer is a very exciting holiday. On every street in Williamsburg the men build large bonfires and dance around them until dawn, singing traditional tunes while the women peek out of windows or watch from the stone stoops. The flames licking upward send an eerie orange cast over the men’s faces, their earlocks catching the light as they swing enthusiastically along to the dancing. I like to stay up as long as I can to watch, because the scene is so powerful and mesmerizing, even if I don’t understand exactly what it means.
The fire department sends trucks to every corner to monitor the fires, and the firemen stand outside, leaning casually against the truck sides, watching the goings-on with remote expressions on their faces. They are mostly accustomed to safeguarding our activities, and some seem resentful of being constantly called to service our community. They aren’t friendly to us, because we aren’t friendly to them. I wish I could talk to one of them, but somebody would see me. It would be considered very inappropriate behavior.
Instead, I watch them. Their uniforms are bulky and sag on their frames, but their faces are clean-shaven, a stark contrast to the faces I’m used to seeing. The eyes that gaze so coolly out on the scene are clear and bright, unhidden by thick glasses or hats. If I stare long enough at one of them, perhaps he will stare back, I think. I do, willing him to meet my eyes, but he doesn’t know. He can’t see what I’m thinking behind the mask that makes me look like everyone else. For once I blend into the crowd.
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