Now, many years later, as I write these lines, I’m thinking: Grandma Lisa was essentially right, after all. My Grandpa Yoskhaim was an epic hero, in a certain sense.
Chapter 45. Dayenu!
Even now, when I hear a happy ringing exclamation at a Passover Seder, it seems to me that I don’t hear the voices of people at the table but rather the voices that I heard at my Grandpa Yoskhaim’s table many, many years ago.
“Da-a-yei-nu-u!”
Low men’s voices, soft melodious women’s voices, loud enthusiastic children’s voices seemed to merge into a common choir and become indistinguishable. But no, I recognize each of them.
The memories of my childhood – that’s what they are.
Grandpa’s bedroom had been transformed. It had become festive and smart. There were shiny glasses, rock crystal decanters, bottles and sparkling Passover dishes on the big table draped in a starched white tablecloth. The table had been brought here because the bedroom was bigger than the living room, and it was cozier with the stove, the ceiling finished in small wooden planks to create a nice pattern, and the antique carved furniture. Great-Grandpa, Grandma Lisa’s father, looked down at us from the photo on the chest of drawers, as if participating in the festivities.
Grandpa Yoskhaim looked extremely smart in his starched snow-white shirt, black suit and black skull cap – a real patriarch with his gray beard. Only his rough fingers, disfigured by work, remained the same. But, perhaps, patriarchs had fingers like that.
I see those twisted fingers carefully break a piece of matzo into two parts. It was the section in the middle of the three sections in front of him at the beginning of the Seder dinner. He broke one of the parts into small pieces and distributed them among us. We would eat them at the end of the dinner. The second section, called afikomen, had to be hidden where the kids couldn’t see it, for they would have to find it at the end of the festivities. The child who found it and hid it again was lucky: the head of the family would pay this child a ransom for the matzo. But in our family, even Grandpa didn’t quite remember that custom. That’s why only the second part of it was performed: the children hid the matzo. And Grandpa was busy with his principal task. After opening the Haggadah, the well-used book turned yellow and puffy from years of use, in which the rules for conducting a Seder were set forth in Hebrew and Russia, Grandpa began to read. If the rules had been strictly observed, we would all have had a copy of the Haggadah in our hands. But where could you get sacred books in our time? It was lucky that Grandpa had managed to preserve one copy. And we repeated our part after him… or pretended to.
The Passover Seder was accompanied by the solemn, singsong reading of prayers and blessings and the singing of psalms. Grandpa took pauses to give the necessary instructions to family members, to draw them into the festive ritual. Grandpa read the first prayer, waving the three pieces of matzo, which were now on the table in front of him, in his hand. Then he passed them to the youngest of us, Yura. Yura, almost without prompting, repeated the prayer. After him, it was my turn, and so on all around the table. Certainly, Grandpa knew everything he needed to read at Passover by heart. But one was expected to read from the Haggadah, and he didn’t tear his eyes from it.
Grandpa was reading and reading… And Yura and I, sitting at the other end of the table from Grandpa, squirmed on our chairs and kicked each other with our feet under the table. Our cousins also talked in whispers, kicked each other and giggled. The adults seemed not to strain their ears to hear the solemn words, they would rather have chatted and laughed with pleasure. They were more used to normal repasts than to the long and complex Passover ritual. Ilya, who sat next to Grandpa, even tried to turn a few pages of the Haggadah when Grandpa put it on the table. But could anyone throw Grandpa off? He remembered and saw everything, and he went back to the right part every time.
It’s not surprising that the Bukharan Jews had almost turned into Uzbeks. By a miracle, thanks to old men like Grandpa Yoskhaim and Grandpa Hanan, the majority of us preserved our faith. But the burden of everyday life, the absence of a strong religious community, and our Soviet upbringing gradually made the religious customs of our scattered people alien and incomprehensible to many of us.
There was one private teacher of Hebrew in the whole of Tashkent. Jewish culture was preserved under lock and key – no books, lectures or films about it were available. The adults at least knew something from their parents, but as for us children… Try to get a child to maintain a belief when at school they are constantly fed the idea that there is no God and that faith is savagery and obscurantism. Who cared that Grandpa uttered “the Almighty,” “Our Lord,” “Our Father in Heaven?” Why give thanks to someone who doesn’t exist and ask him for help? Did Grandpa really believe in supernatural forces? That was ridiculous. He was ignorant and uneducated.
However, something reconciled us to the Passover celebration. There were many activities in it that called for everyone’s participation. I began to understand the beauty of the rituals and their power to unite our people scattered throughout the world only when I became an adult. I think that the rituals were very clear to the Jews in the ancient times. They reminded them of real events that had happened not so long before. That’s why, most likely to make sure those events would stay in the memory of their descendants, they designed them in such detail, so that every small thing would serve as a landmark, a sign.
Yura, the youngest at the table, stood up and asked the family elder the four traditional questions – What makes this evening special? Why do we eat matzos? – and so on. That part of the Haggadah was called Ma Nishtana. Grandpa answered the questions, reading from the Haggadah. He told the story about the bitterness of Egyptian slavery (today it was symbolized by the bitter herb maror), and how the Angel of Death passed over the houses of Jews doomed to death (Pasakh in Hebrew) and how they had to escape with unleavened flatbread, matzos, for they had no time to leaven the dough. In a word, Grandpa presented the story of Exodus in brief as he answered Yura’s questions.
We all yelled joyfully and clearly, “Dayenu!” It was beautiful but incomprehensible. Perhaps Grandpa had explained its meaning, but I missed it. It means “It would have been enough.” The song of the Haggadah tells about the miracles performed by the Creator to get the Jews out of captivity. After each miracle is told, “It would have been enough” is proclaimed in unison. In other words, that one miracle would be enough for us to believe in His Power, even if we had failed to escape from Egypt.
How do you like that? How briefly and, at the same time, with what power and nobleness, those who had written the Haggadah, expressed their gratitude to God.
The Seder dinner continued. Yura and I were pleased with it: the table was loaded with tasty food, including dishes we only got to eat once a year. And we didn’t deny ourselves anything. We ate fried chicken legs, hard-boiled eggs, fish, and the wonderfully rich tasty soup maso dyushak, chicken or meat broth with potatoes, fresh eggs, chopped herbs and small pieces of matzo added to it. M-m-m! Even now my mouth is watering.
Mama and Aunt Valya brought the soup to the table. They placed a deep bowl from which steam rose in front of each of us, and noisy eating immediately filled the air. Noisy eating was evidence of poor table manners, but the soup was too good to think about that. And Grandpa, who had grown tired and hungry, was making more noise that anybody else. His white beard disappeared into a thick cloud of steam, and only his nose and thick eyebrows could be seen.