that slew the butcher, that slaughtered the ox
that drank the water, that quenched the fire
that burnt the stick, that beat the dog
that bit the cat, that ate the kid
that Father bought for just two bits:
one kid, a lonely kid.
The stream of blood gushing from the throat of the ox was drawn like the water that put out the fire. The butcher’s knife was bigger than the sword of the Angel of Death. The fire and water seemed wrong squeezed in the middle with cats and dogs and sticks and people. The Holy and Blessed One who smote the Angel of Death—how could that be believed, what did it mean? A hand reached over the table, the fingers turning the pages to the right page. It was her father or an uncle giving her a significant look. “Rasha ma hu omer: What says the wicked son?” Her uncle from Sarajevo, the rabbi with the great rectangular beard, translated in his funny Hungarian the words of the wicked son, “‘Of what use is this service to you?’” To YOU and not to himself. By excluding himself from the community he has denied God, the Almighty. “Do thou, then, set his teeth on edge! Say to him: ‘This is on account of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.’ For ME and not for him; had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.”
A child is bound to be impressed by the passage in the Haggadah in which this cunning people predicts the deviant at every table, as if from the beginning; this too was a part of the Passover ceremony: the child who didn’t see the point of it, a Jewish child, because, as the saying goes, being a bad Jew didn’t make you any less of a Jew. It might very well make a child wonder what it means to be a Jew and it made Sophie, in particular, wonder if she owed the happy circumstance of being in Budapest to a chain of pious Jews beginning with some ancestor who went with Moses out of Egypt. For merely on the basis of the pictures in the Haggadah she would rather be herself than the Pharaoh’s daughter. She pondered the lines said of the wicked son: Had he been in Egypt the Lord would not have delivered him. The argument which rested on the if broke and sent her flying in all directions. If she had been there...was she...could she have been there? Where was she at the time of the Pharaoh?
She heard a boy giggle. Her eyes fastened on the page, she sensed looks crossing the table and wondered if she was their target. But perhaps it was only to the sons all this applied. It was different for the daughters. They had no choice. One way or another they had to be good Jewish daughters. They were dark, grave and pious like her two cousins whose father was a big rabbi in Transylvania. Or they were gay, blond, pretty liars like cousin Mitzi who could hug Omama on her way to see a movie or drive in the country with her boyfriend on the Sabbath. A Jewish woman had no choice unless she was very wicked and a whore, like the women Omama warned her against, quoting from the Bible. Her mother was like that, Omama said, and there was the mother of her classmate who was married to an industrialist, the wealthiest Jew in Budapest, about whom she heard even more shocking stories. But the wicked woman, the whore, met only with disapproval, scorn and disgust. She was not utterly disowned like the wicked son.
“Why is this night different from all other nights?” the Manishtana begins, and the rest describes what is different in the table setting from other nights and from the Sabbath; it answers the first question and yet continues asking, “Why is it so?”
A legend is begun, trails off in digressions, quote within quote, commentary around commentary, with comments thrown in. Are they translating from the Hebrew? Is this irreverent remark or the joke about two Jews in a concentration camp also in the liturgy like the part about the wicked son? Off and on, a Hebrew phrase thrown in has the same ring as a cynical aside.
The men keep leaving the table to wash their hands. The women follow Grandmother into the kitchen. The children may leave their seats till the soup is served. It’s all coming and going. Aunt Erzsi came by train from Transylvania with her husband and two daughters. And the man with the big gray beard came all the way from Sarajevo, which was in another country; and they would go back there and perhaps she would see them again next Passover at the same table or in Jerusalem; or perhaps they would all go to America or at least she and her father and Uncle Isidor and his family because Aunt Olga said Hitler would kill them and they had had enough. Grandmother wouldn’t go. Nor Aunt Lea—her husband had a fine hardware store and they wouldn’t leave that. Grandmother is hushing them, they should get on with the service, there has been enough interruption. The children will fall asleep before the meat is served if this goes on.
There comes the slow-paced chant, lovely like a long journey but again the voice breaks off—Uncle Jonas must tell an anecdote—it infuriates the child, even Grandmother is smiling. The men rise again to wash their hands. The roomful of people is transformed into those irreverent, scoffing, unruly Israelites, who grumbled against Moses for taking them out of Egypt, the land of plenty, who danced around the golden calf. Now it is Sophie’s father who tells them to stop fooling around and get on with the service. They want to hear the ten o’clock news broadcast.
