from his eyes with his handkerchief, stuffed it back in his pocket, then resumed grating. “Anat called an hour ago from the highway. The road out of Samaria is jammed. She’s not the only one with the sense to escape that self-made prison for a week. Between this freaky weather and the multiplying checkpoints, it will be amazing if she gets here before dark.”
“They’re staying the whole week?” I asked.
“She may be a religious fanatic, but she’s not crazy. You think she wants to prepare her own house for Passover when she’s got a slave of a mother who’ll do it for her?”
“How are you going to survive a week with Habakuk?”
“I survived Hitler, you think I can’t survive Habakuk?” He shot me a look. “You were no better, you know.”
“You were a bit younger then,” I said.
Before he could answer, his face convulsed into another paroxysm as the horseradish made its way back up his nose. I left him whinnying and cursing at the knobby root as I ventured into the kitchen to find my mother, aproned and mitted, bustling between bubbling pots and sizzling pans, the queen of her steamy domain.
“Kobi, you made it!” She beamed at me but never stopped moving. “And with this horrible weather. To the last minute, I told your father, I wonder if he’ll really come. He so hates being here, maybe he’d rather sit alone on seder night than be with his old parents.”
“Ima, don’t be ridiculous.” I reached over and pecked her on the cheek, the steam from the open pot fogging my glasses. “Everything smells so good. What are you cooking?”
“What, on Passover there’s a choice? Chicken soup, matzah balls, potato kugel, tzimmes, inedible pastries. Why do you ask? You don’t even remember what a Jewish family eats on Passover? What did they feed you in that sabra household?”
“Same thing. You’re right, a silly question.”
She took a sip from the soup pot, then shook her head in disapproval, scanning her spice rack for options as she spoke. “Kobi, it kills me, thinking of you living all alone in some horrible flat.”
“You haven’t even seen it.”
“You expect us to travel to Jerusalem at our age, with all that traffic? Never mind all the bombings, and the crazy haredim throwing stones at your car. I never understood why you wanted to live in that ghost-ridden city. You should move back to Petah Tikva, get your own flat a few blocks away. We’ve got plenty of crazy people here for you to cure. You could open your own practice. It’s not normal for a man to live alone like that, without a wife and family. How could she do that to you? And just a month before Yudit’s big party.” Having spiced the soup to her satisfaction, she pulled a kugel out of the oven, slamming the oven door.
“She didn’t do anything to me. It was a mutual decision,” I said. There was no point trying to explain. “Did you speak to Yudit when you called the house?”
“I never speak to Yudit; she’s always busy when I call. She already has a young, fancy-shmancy, Israeli-born savta—what does she need an old-world bubbe for?”
“Don’t be silly, Yudit loves you.”
“Yudit barely knows me, I see her so rarely. Now I’ll see her even less.” She sighed deeply, poking at the edges of the kugel. “Maybe she’s better off that way. Our generation, we only represent suffering and shame. That’s why your wife, that Nava, kept her away from us. And now we can’t even celebrate her bat mitzvah.”
“You’re being completely unfair—Nava never kept her from you. And besides, who says you can’t go to the bat mitzvah?”
She turned from the stove, brandishing her wooden spoon like an orchestra conductor. “What, you think we would go without you? So that Nava of yours can shunt us off to some distant, shadowy corner of the room? Far from her elegant, sophisticated parents? Just because their grandparents escaped the ghettos a couple of generations ahead of us, they think they can look down on us. Shtetl Jews, that’s what they call us.” I started to protest but she cut me off. “No, no, no—if you don’t go, we don’t go!”
“OK, OK, don’t get upset. Although what you’re saying about her parents . . .”
“It’s all true, and you know it.” Her face suddenly softened. “But still, that Nava was good for you. You would have never settled down without her. Kobi, what are you going to do to get her back?”
A whooping shriek saved me from having to answer. Habakuk, in a soaking yellow rain jacket, came bounding into the little kitchen, grabbing my mother’s legs in a brutal grip. She tried to shake him off, but he only dug his nails in harder.
“Habe’le,” she yelled, “you’re hurting your bubbe!”
In the living room I could hear my younger sister, Anat, lecturing my father at full tilt. I peeked out of the kitchen to see her huge form rooted in the center of the living room, her raincoat dripping audibly onto the floor tiles. She was already well into a detailed complaint about the soldiers at the checkpoints who’d caused the delay. Her skinny beard of a husband was dragging in stuffed suitcases and an odd lot of water-logged paraphernalia. Habakuk zoomed out of the kitchen, flung his soggy jacket and kipa onto the couch, and began racing figure eights around their legs, yelling wildly into the cosmos.
I followed him into the living room. “Hey, Habakuk,” I called out, grabbing him by the shoulder, wondering, as I always did, how anyone could give an innocent child such an unwieldy name. “Long time no see, buddy.” He stuck his tongue out at me, wriggled free, and continued on his dizzying course.
My father and sister were fully embroiled in their usual political argument: she trying to convince him that the settlements were the only bulwark against the erosion of the Jewish soul, he trying to convince her that it was immoral, post-Holocaust, to voluntarily choose to raise a family surrounded by barbed wire.
They were obsessed with politics, those two. What was the point? The more people argued, the more the conflict spun out of control. Arafat, Sharon, Bush—who would voluntarily watch a play with such an unappealing set of characters? From my father’s meager bar I searched for a stiff drink, but the Scotch had been packed away for the holiday. I settled for a shot of kosher-for-Passover vodka and sank into the omnivorous couch. Political arguments were worse than futile—they reminded the soldier in me of all the things he’d rather not think about. The terror of sniper fire. The hate-filled eyes. The children screaming hysterically as you cocked your weapon and handcuffed their fathers.
“Shalom, Anat,” I interjected, when they finally came to a break in the sparring. I knew she’d never say hello if I didn’t.
“Hey, Kobi. You actually have something to say about this? Some psychological insight, perhaps?” Her voice, as usual, was thick with sarcasm.
“Not really. Just thought it would be civilized to say hello.”
She stared at me for a moment. “So,” she said, “that wife of yours finally had enough of you?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered, avoiding her gaze.
“That’s the way it is in the secular world. Easy come, easy go.”
“Yeah, that’s just what it’s like.”
“You’ll
