Every spring my husband and I discuss
\nthe long-dead animals in the Cadbury commercial
\nrunning since we were kids: pig, cat, lion, turtle,
\nbunny. The wrong animals audition
\nto become the clucking bunny. This is the American
\nsymbol of Easter, which I didn’t grow up with,
\nexcept for jelly beans and chocolate. (When my father
\nwas a boy he would use a chocolate bunny’s head
\nas a goblet for his milk.) Instead I had the ten plagues,
\nparsley dipped in saltwater, buttered and salted matzoh,
\nopened door. Judaism is all about the symbols
\nand the stories and the food and the funny-sad. The minor key.
\nThe tragic violin and exuberant clarinet, the klezmer absurd.<\/p>\n
Vegetarians, my family put a Milk-Bone on our seder plate.
\nThe Passover seder is the story of enslavement and then freedom,
\nand never forgetting that there were those who hated us
\nfrom whom we had to flee. And that when oppressors die,
\nwe must not rejoice in their human pain. Sure, sure,
\nbut who wouldn’t cheer as tyrants fall, as the waters
\nwhale-gulp them down. Saltwater means tears, food is a story
\nof survival, and parsley means the green coming back to the yard.
\nThe seder means, Here is who hated us and tried to kill us
\nand here we are still. Now, my sister chops apples and nuts,
\nbrings the haroset in the yellow bowl that Stanley, our terrier,
\nonce ate from. He\u2019s there, just outside my dad\u2019s kitchen,
\nour perennial digger and yard escapee, thief and planter of dolls
\nwhose miniature limbs would protrude from the dirt, the tiny undead.<\/p>\n
Stanley sleeps under the yard and not alone, long ago buried
\nand returning to us with the trees and grass and apples and spring.
\nWe will not forget. I will not forget Charna, my grandma’s spunky friend,<\/p>\n
jovial baker of mandel bread, and how she had survived the camps.<\/p>\n
Grinning, she divulged to me and my sister how she told
\nthe Nazis to their faces that they needed more food, thicker soup,
\nand her demands were met. What did she give up in negotiating this,
\nand what did she earn, a secret skeleton of steel and courage and love.<\/p>\n
We also learned that the women fashioned and passed around
\na bloody menstrual pad as protection, to try to ward off rape
\nby crafting the guards\u2019 disgust. What seeds existed in her
\nthat nudged her to ask Nazis for anything, to scavenge fabric
\nand blood and deliver it from woman to woman, clutched and folded,
\na love letter, a ballad about generosity and pain, lantern-bright.<\/p>\n
Where does this bravery in the midst of horror
\ncome from, and how can we get more. Why is this night
\ndifferent from all other nights, a question we ask ourselves
\nevery year, when we should ask, How is this time different
\nfrom all other times, how is this agony different from other agonies.<\/p>\n
When someone suffers, the Jew also suffers,
\nsays the Passover story. And we want this to be true.
\nBut between suffering and safety, there is a heavy door.
\nClosed. On this side, we eat apples and chocolate
\nand eggs full of candied yolk and drink simulated tears.
\nOn the other side, all we can barely look at or hold in our
\nminds, the flame-ravaged house we could be chased from,
\nthe thirst and loneliness of the exiled, the small hands
\nreaching up from yard\u2019s cold mud that we see silhouetted
\nin the twilight and call broadleaf, dollarweed, thistle.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
between suffering and safety, there is a heavy door.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6474,"template":"","categories":[9,49,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6468","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-literary-features","category-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n