Джеймс Миченер - The Source

She was standing thus when Gottesmann came back from the building for some food, and he pulled her hands down from her face and saw that she was crying. “What’s happened, Lan?” he asked.

“I struck …” She could not form the words, but her husband guessed that they had to do with the Vodzher Rebbe, so he kissed his wife and told her to stay where she was. Gently pushing open the door he entered to speak with the rebbe, and after a while came back, very soberly, saying nothing, to take Ilana’s hand.

“Where are we going?” she inquired.

“To apologize.”

“No!” she protested.

“You come here,” he whispered with fire in his voice. He dragged her back unwillingly and placed her before the old rebbetzin. “My wife wishes to apologize,” he said in Yiddish.

Silence. Twist of the arm. Silence. Another twist. Then in Hebrew, “I’m sorry …”

“In Yiddish,” Gottesmann whispered.

“I’m sorry,” his wife repeated in Hebrew. He twisted her arm again, hurtfully, and she said for the third time in Hebrew, “I’m sorry. In the street I cried for shame.” She pulled her arm away from her husband’s grip and covered her face.

Gottesmann, mortified by the scene, was about to take his wife from the room she had insulted when the old rebbetzin intervened, “Children, it’s Passover,” she said. “You shall greet Elijah here.” And she forced both Gottesmann and Ilana back into the center of the room to help her celebrate what she suspected would be her last Passover. “Find the leaven!” she whispered with the excitement of her youth, and Gottesmann felt a great lump rise in his throat as he realized that this old woman on this Passover of doom had secreted bits of leavened bread about her house, even though she could not possibly have known that she would have visitors. So, halfway between panic and fantasy, he poked into obvious places and cried, like a child years ago in Gretz, “Mother! I’ve found some leaven you overlooked,” and with embarrassment, as if she were a careless housewife, she burned it in the fire, as the Torah commanded.

Thus the house was purified. She brought her guests rickety chairs and served the pitiful shreds of food she had set aside for this holy feast: the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread, but no meat, for Safad was starving. She had, however, managed to find two beets, from which she had made one weak cupful of the traditional red soup symbolizing the Red Sea: in old Russia she had made bucketfuls for Passover. Then her husband tied his belt tightly, put on his sandals and took a stave, so as to be ready for immediate departure should the Lord command, and the four celebrants wrapped bits of unleavened bread in small parcels to be slung over their backs as if they, too, were fugitives fleeing Egypt. And finally the rebbe poured a little Safad wine into their glasses, after which he prayed, “‘Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive until this moment.’”

To Gottesmann the moment was unbearably painful. The last Jewish feast he had attended in Gretz with his large and illustrious family had been the Passover of 1935. His Great-Uncle Mordecai had read kiddush that night and fifty-five glasses of wine had been poured, for Scholem the novelist, for Yitzhak the professor of chemistry, for Rachel who had pioneered social work in Hamburg, for five rabbis, two poets, three musicians and a handful of honest businessmen. It had been a Passover of singing and sorrow, for Gottesmann’s father had foreseen what must transpire and later that week had sent his son Isidore to Holland. Fifty-five glasses had been filled with wine that night as the great family sang, “‘One kid, one kid for two zuzim,’” and of the fifty-five all but two were to die in the holocaust. “‘Who has enabled us to reach this moment,’” the Vodzher Rebbe prayed, and Gottesmann felt that he could not accept this moment; he experienced a recurrence of the dizziness that had overtaken him that morning in the heart of the Arab villages. Very carefully he placed both hands about his wineglass to control their shaking.

When the prayer ended the rebbetzin left the table and opened the door slightly, so that a stranger passing in the street might have access, while her husband poured a fifth glass of wine and placed it aside, should the stranger enter; and then began one of the profound, sweet moments of Jewish life, which that night saved Gottesmann’s sanity. At Passover, which is a joyous feast celebrating the deliverance of Jews from Egyptian bondage and their flight into freedom, it was customary for the youngest male child of the family to ask in a song-song voice four traditional questions whose answers would explain Passover, and having no male children the rebbe and his wife and Gottesmann turned to Ilana, as their loved child, and she blushed.

At the agnostic settlement of Kfar Kerem the Jewish holidays had not been celebrated, for the hard-headed followers of Shmuel Hacohen had come to believe that much of Jewish religiosity was both archaic and an insult to reason; but if individual families wished to observe Passover, which did memorialize freedom, they could. Netanel Hacohen and his wife had never done so, but at the homes of friends Ilana had several times celebrated the noble holiday, so she-at least knew the rough outline of the ritual. Hesitantly she whispered the famous preliminary question: “‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’” Then in a soft voice she asked the first question: “‘Why on other nights do we eat leaven, but tonight only unleavened?’” The other three Jews chanted an answer and she stumbled her uncertain way through the second question: “‘Why on other nights do we eat all vegetables, but tonight only bitter herbs?’” Again the listeners chanted the explanation and she started the third question.

She forgot what it was. Gottesmann blushed as if he were a nervous father whose child was being watched by hundreds. The rebbe fidgeted. Finally the rebbetzin pointed openly to her hands, whose washing was the subject of the third question, but Ilana thought she was indicating a chair. “Oh, yes!” she cried brightly, like a happy child. “‘Why on other nights do some sit relaxed and some sit uneasily, while tonight all sit back in comfort?’” It was the fourth question but no one corrected her, for a burst of gunfire came from the Arab quarter and Gottesmann leaped to his feet, grabbed his rifle and was gone through the open door.

Acting on reflex Ilana also jumped from the Passover feast and reached for her gun, but she was halted by the rebbetzin. “This is the night of Passover,” the old woman said, forcing Ilana back into her chair. Then she went to the door, and again cocked it open as her husband passed on to that portion of the feast at which he asked, “‘Why do we leave the door open? Why do we pour the extra glass of wine?’” and Ilana was required to answer in the lovely fairy-tale nonsense of tradition that the door was left open for the Prophet Elijah to join this feast, and by tradition all turned to watch the half-opened door to see if just once Elijah might appear; but when Ilana looked she prayed that it might be not Elijah but Gottesmann. The firing grew heavier.

When the legendary songs were ended, with the rebbe’s high voice singing of the joy the Hebrews had known when escaping to freedom, even though it was the freedom of the desert without water or food, the celebration reached that strange and very Jewish moment when all present chanted what appeared to be only a nursery rhyme:“One kid,

one kid That father bought

For two zuzim.”

With a joy unbroken by the hammering of Arab bullets the rebbe and his bewigged wife sang of “the angel that slew the butcher that killed the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the catThat ate the kid