Why is this Night Different from All Other Nights?

Covering the matzoh plate with the gold satin coverlet, stained by Mogen David wine drops from Passover Seders past, was the last thing that had to be done before the Seder could officially begin.  That, and waiting for the guests to arrive and the sun to set.  Sarah had watched her mother, Shana Gelb, drape the matzoh plate with that same coverlet for the last 24 years.  Attending to details attracted Sarah to Passover.  She loved this holiday because of its order and traditions.  Sarah imagined that this must be how her old friend Lolly Dillon feels like when an angel doll is placed on top of their family Christmas tree every year.  It must also be how her new “friend,” Richard Martello, who was on his way to his first Seder must feel when Rosa, his mother, tops their Christmas tree.

Sarah’s mother had been working away for days to prepare for the Seder.  Matzoh balls the size of small grapefruits made puffy because of Shana’s seltzer-instead-of water recipe floated and bobbed in a vat of chicken soup.  The oven aromas of cholent with potatoes stewed to a color of brown gold mixed with the sweet tzimmes, carrots and honey stewed to perfection.  Gefilte fish carefully arranged on an oval plate with homemade chrain, chopped liver accompanied by half-sour pickles, and a fat and fattening matzoh farfel kugle lined up the kitchen counter eagerly awaiting to be served after the Haggadah was read and the service was over.  Sarah believed with all her being that she could smell these smells nowhere in the world.  It wasn’t just the food, but it was the fact that her parents prepared them with so much thought and detail.  Her father, Harry Gelb, oversaw the entire feast as the royal tester suggesting “…a bisseleh salt” and “a bisseleh fat” to just about everything.  Chopping and cutting and cooking and baking went on for days to create this unique, personal smell. Sarah’s mother would lecture on why kids were growing up without a sense of family.  TV dinners and golden arches drive-in cuisine did not fill a room with the right kind of aromas.  It was not the way Sarah was raised.  “A house just doesn’t smell like a home anymore,” Shana would say.  A home, to Shana, meant baking your own challah for Friday night kiddish and not buying chazzerai from the grocery store.  Sarah never argued her mother’s a-house-just-doesn’t-smell-like-a home theory.  In fact, she thought it was brilliant.  Sociologists and psychologist pontificate for days on what has become of the American family, its values and morals.  Just ask Shana and she’ll tell you that the root of all evil can end in the kitchen if people just didn’t buy canned soup made from diseased chicken parts giving off such an unappealing smell that kids retreat to their rooms and hide!  

As Sarah set the table, she felt a tension that was usually not there on her favorite holiday.  She tried to convince herself that it wasn’t the fact that she had invited her Italian boyfriend to the Seder before asking her parents if they approved.  What was she thinking, or not thinking when she asks a stranger, a goy to attend a holiday meal.  It’s not that the Gelbs would disapprove because there wasn’t an extra plate of food for a guest - He who is hungry come eat.  It wasn’t even the idea that the Gelbs disliked Richard because they had never met him.  Sarah carefully kept her family and her love life parted and separated like Moses did the Red Sea.  The guttural reaction to hide from and exclude non-Jews from their personal lives came from a self-preservation instinct in the Gelbs.  They had images of pogroms and holocaust and hate that only a people segregated and ghettoed in Europe for hundreds of years could understand.  Ironically, Sarah was always taught that she should not hate anyone because of their religion – just don’t marry them! 

“He’s gonna feel terrible,” Sarah’s father pleaded.  “What’s he know from Seders!”   

Her mother topped off the disapproval, but-what-can-we-do-now conversation with, “And …he’s never going to like my cooking.”  If she had known the poem, Shana would agree that her Seder would not conjure up visions of sugarplums dancing in Richard’s head! 

To invite Richard to the Seder or not to invite, that was the question.  Sarah felt stuck two weeks before Passover.  She had been dating Richard, who had invited her to all of his Christmas and Easter dinners with his family, for the last year.  But all she had to do at the Martello table was say no thanks to the ham and discreetly pick out raisins from the stuffing.  The raisins were not a religious preference, just a culinary one of not wanting sweet items mixing in her “real” food.  Shana Gelb would never think of putting raisins in stuffing.  Fried onions a must, raisins not a chance.  But for Richard, it was another story.  He was about to step into 5,000 plus years of living and dying and suffering.  As Harry Gelb would always remark, “Es iz shver tzu zein a Yid” (It’s tough too be a Jew). A hard life for Harry and Shana was an understatement.  Both barely survived the Nazi slaughter of World War II Poland.  In 1945, Harry was the only member of his family that was alive. Not a single relative survived; not a cousin, aunt, in-law would breathe after Hitler marched through their tiny piece of the world.  Two entire families of hopes and dreams and fears gone up in smoke or shot to death in mass graves.  So Sarah felt like she was betraying the parents who lived through the war by some one-in-a-million miracle only to break their hearts by not marrying a nice Jewish boy.  She debated with herself how she could not ask Richard, and not offend him.  Or, ask him and not offend her parents.  When Richard invited himself, the debate quickly came to an end.  It was not her doing; it just happened.  She felt off the hook, he asked for it.  Hope the gefilte fish agrees with you!   

Sarah was almost finished setting the table when the doorbell rang. Her parents looked at each other as Sarah looked at them.  To everyone’s delight, it was Sam, Sarah’s brother with his wife Helena, and 7-year-old niece Jordan. For now, the tension eased because the perfect Jewish mathematical equation had just arrived: nice Jewish guy + nice Jewish girl = nice Jewish child. Sarah was never quite good in math, and was not doing well in the marriage category either according to her parents, not to mention the voice inside her head.  Jordan’s glee lifted the tension like sun melting fog.  You could see it and feel it as Jordan laughed and played with her Zayde in the den. 

Sarah tried to slip into the kitchen when Sam and Helena quietly asked with an air of elder sibling disapproval, perhaps disbelief, “You told Mommy and Daddy that he was “half “Jewish?  How could you?  What is ‘half’ Jewish?”  Sarah was a bit speechless.  It was a ridiculous statement, and she knew it even as she told her parents when explaining the guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner routine.  She thought it could soften the blow for her parents.  The Martellos were Italian and Catholic.  For her parents, visions of Al Capone-like men in dark suits was not the same as Hassidic men in their dark suits. 

“Sarah, that’s a lie.” 

“I know, I was desperate.” Sarah tried to move out of the room feeling as if she were slithering away in shame and embarrassment.   

“Do you think they believe you for a minute?”  She felt stupid and stuck like a fly on the brown paper strips that used to hang in the basement.