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PASSOVER STORIES / American families and an ancient dinner : Memoir : Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?

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<i> Gerstler is a writer of fiction and poetry who lives in Los Angeles. Her most recent book is "Nerve Storm" (Viking/Penguin; 1993)</i>

While growing up, I found Passover Seders nothing less than mind-bending. Theatrical, darkly fascinating, full of strange imagery, these ceremonies (the pre-meal portion of which seemed to last for days before you actually got to eat) constituted a marked departure from our family’s customary modest, utilitarian suppers. In arranging and performing the Seder, I felt that my parents--my mother in particular--had mounted a small private opera starring familiar foods cast as characters quite different from their everyday identities. Certain foods were transformed at Seder from commodities judged solely by how they tasted, smelled or looked, into something like props at a magic show.

According to written directions, my mother prepared specific dishes that were displayed like museum artifacts on specially designed platters. These foods were presented to us not for nutrition’s sake or because they were someone’s favorite, but as illustrations. Because they were visual aids, we were encouraged to touch and examine them. On any other night, this would be considered playing with food, grounds for being sent from the table. But the Seder ritual forced my parents to turn many of their household rules upside-down. Since most children are anarchists at heart, my brother, sister and I reveled in this revolutionary aspect of Passover--religion-endorsed subversion of parental law.

And perhaps, although I would never have thought so at the time, the momentary relaxing of their rules in order to facilitate the unexpected gave my parents some secret pleasure too.

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One of the first precepts to be discarded at Seder was an edict I often ran afoul of while I was a kid: No reading at the table. Passover temporarily erased Mom and Dad’s notion that reading during meals constituted anti-social, borderline criminal behavior. Haggadahs, little 60- or 70-page books, were distributed at Seder, as part of the place settings. Not only were there what seemed like hours of reading from the Haggadah, but everyone took turns hamming it up--praying aloud, orating question-and-answer sessions, declaiming blessings or stories full of drama and violence.

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Seder was my first conscious introduction to the powerful notion of food as metaphor. This was a concept that would continue to reverberate in some useful--and other rather regrettable--ways throughout my life. But that’s another story. Usually the meaning of the Seder’s symbolic foods related to a literalization of some aspect of the lives of the biblical Israelites, or the story of their flight from Egypt under hotheaded, tongue-tied Moses’ leadership.

At Seder, we learned that the ancient Jews baked matzo-like bread because they were in a terrible hurry to escape once they were finally given permission to leave Egypt. Our ancestors, we read in the Haggadah, couldn’t hang around and wait for the dough they’d made to rise. Fleeing for their lives before the wicked Pharaoh might change his mind, they made do with unleavened bread. Soft, spongy, fragrant loaves were their last concern.

And when I was young, matzo did seem like a prisoner’s version of bread--big, dry, flat sheets too brittle for making proper sandwiches. Although I enjoy it now, matzo then looked and tasted to me more like some antique form of paper than an acceptable substitute for fresh, seeded corn, rye, or any other kind of bread.

But I knew I was being crass. My personal freedom was vast, circumscribed only by things like the fact that my parents limited my dessert intake and told me when to go to bed. I was utterly unfamiliar with the kind of oppression we were reading about.

My mother would get tears in her eyes when we got to the parts about conditions endured under slavery. She’d say over and over again “We have so much to be thankful for, living here in America.” I listened, and I knew I should pay attention, but her intense emotion at the table made me squirm. I concentrated on hoping it wouldn’t be much longer before we could dig into the dinner that I’d been smelling since late afternoon, now being kept warm in the oven.

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Matzo was certainly central. Before and after it, we were presented with a parade of cryptic ceremonial foods. A little custard cup on the Seder table contained not the usual pale, friendly blob of my mother’s chocolate-chip-studded tapioca, but salted water, meant to represent enslaved ancestors’ sorrowful tears. We dipped lettuce or parsley in the salt water and took a bite in order to taste those tears.

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A mysterious roasted egg and lamb shank sat in their respective depressions in the serving dish, lying on top of marks that looked like broken matchsticks but actually spelled out their names in Hebrew. The egg had a dichotomous symbology--eternal life, but also mourning, an odd duality I came to regard later as characteristic of Jewish temper or thought and maybe even my own, sometimes uncomfortable, darkish cast of mind. The lamb shank stood for the lamb sacrificed by the ancients on this holiday.

Poor, shriveled lamb leg and cracked, blackened egg! No one ever, ever ate them. They were picked up, spoken about, set down, as though they were plastic models. They were not even offered to our dogs.

We turned another page in the Haggadah and regarded the more palatable haroset: diced-up apple, cinnamon, nuts and wine, intended to recall the mortar the Jews used as they worked at forced labor. Amazing, I thought, to create a food meant to resemble cement, and then to eat it voluntarily! Due to my severe allergy to nuts, I was excused from tasting the haroset and did not much regret it.

A dollop of pink or white horseradish called “bitter herbs” conveyed the slaves’ bitter sufferings. We children made stupid jokes about how the burning throat and watery eyes caused by even the tiniest lick of this “herb” was indeed a form of torture.

There were occasionally arguments at the table, although not very heated ones, during which our parents would urge one reluctant child or another to taste one of these delicacies for the sake of the spirit of the evening, regardless of whether our youthful culinary analysis yielded the opinion that the food in question tasted “gross.” But it made sense that these “foods” were not really to be relished. When you took such a morsel in your mouth, it was not to satisfy physical hunger, or to get pleasure, but to eat meaning.

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Would the outcome of eating meaning be the growth of belief, I wondered later, as an adolescent? Was I chewing and swallowing ideology that would then enter my bloodstream? Did my cautious bites of these edible symbols imply some level of religious commitment? As I got older, these seemed to become weightier questions. I fretted when Catholic friends explained the seriousness of taking Communion, worrying about whether I should be participating in the Seder at all, since I was unsure about my relationship to Judaism and to God.

Throughout the Seder, stage directions in the Haggadah continued to instruct us to indulge in a host of behaviors my parents would never otherwise have permitted or participated in, even beyond reading at the table, or prodding food without eating it. For example, the man of the family is bidden to jump up from the table and go wash his hands several times during the service. This my father did, though during any other dinner his actions would have seemed absurd, if not pathological.

Equally unusual for our teetotaling home was the fact that everyone at the Seder table except infants was supposed to imbibe four cups of wine. By my dry family’s standards, this was a bacchanal. Kosher wine is so sweet it tastes like it should be poured over vanilla ice cream. Many children who don’t usually like the fume-y flavor of liquor gladly drain all requisite glasses of this grape-y syrup and whimper for more. I’ve heard numerous people raised as Jews recount tales of the Seder as a night crowned by their first inebriation--a semi-public drunkenness perversely taking place under their parents’ direction. I’ve even heard claims that this is how certain persons feel they learned to hold their liquor, whatever that means.

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Another Seder departure from normalcy also had to do with “the fruit of the vine”--the wine set aside for Elijah. A beautifully inlaid metal cup was filled to the brim, and the front door of the house was opened to admit the spirit of the ancient biblical prophet. Elijah was supposed to visit all houses observing Passover and take a token “sip” at each stop.

My siblings and I stared at the surface of this wine, mesmerized. Every time the liquid trembled, we gave ourselves chills of terror thinking about the bodiless wanderer who might be trying to slake his ageless thirst right under our noses. Whenever my cousin Alan was invited to Seder, he’d invariably attempt to jiggle the table leg with his foot without my knowing. Then he’d point wide-eyed at Elijah’s cup, exclaiming “Look! He’s really drinking it now!”

The Elijah factor ran counter to our parents’ constant admonitions not to waste a crumb or drop of food or drink. It also seriously undermined their efforts to steer three children with overactive imaginations and night fears away from their natural tendencies to believe in ghosts.

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Much of the Passover story haunted me, like pieces of an intense, half-remembered dream. I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby Moses set adrift on a river in a basket woven of rushes--or the moment, much later in his life, when he tried to impress the Pharaoh’s court by having Aaron turn a wooden staff into a snake. When was I going to acquire powers like that? I’m still waiting, I’m afraid.

And just as my mother used to get weepy during the sections on slavery, I invariably get teary when I think about the 10 Plagues. I don’t know why the litany of plagues was so moving and scary to me. I did like the idea of everything being covered with frogs, especially during certain years when I was fond of amphibians and kept them as pets. But the rest of the plagues sounded unimaginably horrible, though I obsessively spent an awful lot of time imagining that I was experiencing them.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the Haggadah’s text is part biblical primer, part songbook, part storyboard for an evening-length piece of interactive performance art, both morbid and joyous. Our Seder ceremony, or performance, was always followed by an extraordinary dinner, during which it was universally acknowledged that my mother, an excellent and adventurous cook, had outdone herself once again. That lovely meal seemed, especially after waiting so long with stomachs rumbling, like something to be thankful for.

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