In the spring of 1938 Passover at Grandmother’s had the quality of a gathering for a massacre. And perhaps this is what being a Jew always meant. It began with slavery in Egypt and a God who led them out to be his chosen people, and then they were always strangers, wandering, remembering in the land of the stranger how God led them out; and waiting for the prophet Elijah to come through the door left open to him and drink the goblet of wine, and then he would immediately (or would they have to wait another year?) take them to Jerusalem, which was not a clear place—maybe in heaven where God was king, but also a country far away, the opposite direction from England and America, called Palestine where nobody really wanted to go; a place they joked about. It was always the strange stories and waiting for a prophet, but actually for something terrible to happen, a great punishment. The noise and confusion and joking at the table made her feel that: unruly children chasing around the apartment of the dead rabbi, both the grown-ups and the children screaming plagues of blood frogs, darkness on Egypt like in some grotesque comic opera.
THE RIPPERS were a funny, scattered family. To begin with, they didn’t all have the same mother. Grandfather Ripper was married twice, they never came together as a family and Sophie wasn’t quite sure how many they were; she heard stories about aunts in Serbia, Bosnia, Istanbul, and had a dim memory of seeing one or more as a small child, but it was not clear if they were her mother’s half sisters or sisters of her grandfather’s first or second wife. The one she heard most about was Buena Tante and probably she was her mother’s and not Sophie’s aunt.
The story they told about Buena Tante was that one day she got on a river ferryboat with a man without telling anyone, leaving her family just like that. Nobody knew what became of her till she wrote them a letter from Astrakhan some years later telling them she had a wonderful time going all the way to Kiev. And now she was very happy living in a fine house with someone else, a very rich man. And that’s how she lived. She came to visit her family one day to show them her baby; she wasn’t living with the rich man any more, she married someone else and she was very happy. Nobody ever met her husband. Nobody really knew anything about her life and perhaps when they didn’t hear from her for a long time they started making up stories like she did, which may or may not have been true. But she came and visited every so often, always looking splendid and expensively dressed, even if in a somewhat funny Eastern style, and she had fine and healthy children and was always very happy. Even Papi couldn’t explain Buena Tante. She was crazy, of course; the Rippers were all a bit crazy, he said, except for Rosa, and he’d talk about how old Ripper went cuckoo and how he’d driven his wife crazy and about Uncle Fritz who was a schizophrenic, and her mother—and then he’d tell the stories about Buena Tante; but when Sophie asked what was wrong with her, he shrugged, saying she had wanderlust, which didn’t sound like a sickness.
Grandfather Ripper was a mean man; he loved his first wife very much and when she died he was heartbroken and married just to have someone to take care of the house and his three or four children. He didn’t love his second wife; he kept her like a housekeeper and treated her worse than a servant. Grandmother Ripper suffered terribly from her husband but she was a fanatical woman and no matter how tyrannical her husband was, she outdid him in her obedience. She worked harder than even he could make her. The children wore only white and were always spotless, even if she had to wash and iron and sew night and day; and the girls were never permitted to do any manual work, to sweep the floor, or even enter the kitchen. Grandfather Ripper went cuckoo when he lost his fortune after the war. He spent all his time making complicated calculations to prove how rich he would be now if he had invested his money differently.
Aunt Rosa, her mother’s older sister, was considered a great beauty; she was the woman her father ought to have married. Everyone told the story of how she escaped from Budapest at the time when they were shooting down all the communists, leaping on a moving train in her nightgown. She had lived in different countries, married to different husbands. Aunt Rosa lived in London now, she had a baby but wasn’t married to anyone; she was a psychoanalyst like her father.
When Aunt Rosa came to visit them one summer with her little boy, who looked like a fat angel with blond curls and round blue eyes, and Grandmother Ripper, Sophie couldn’t quite believe it. Aunt Rosa was a smiling, dark-haired woman, slightly older and shorter than her mother; she wore a suit—it was hard to imagine her as a young girl, barefoot in a nightgown and leaping on a moving train—she had become a different person and wasn’t unhappy about it. It was upsetting the way Aunt Rosa and her mother hugged and kissed, her mother weeping how much it meant to her to see Rosa, how terribly she missed her, and Aunt Rosa’s good-natured acceptance of her mother’s adoration. She didn’t understand what it meant to be sisters. And she wasn’t prepared to see Grandmother Ripper,
