Seared on to our Souls

It would happen every year, a week or two before Pesach. My parents would sit us kids around the table and sigh. They’d take deep breaths, force wide smiles, and ask for volunteers to spend the first days of Pesach with our grandparents in the Lower East Side, in their small apartment, away from the rest of our family and our friends, eating foods from the alter heim instead of the newest Pesach products.

Nooo.

We would groan and cross our arms in defiance. If we’d be forced to go, we’d go. But there was no way we would volunteer. We would mumble excuses like, “I think I’m allergic to Bobby’s charoses,” or “My rebbi said I am mechuyav to sit at my father’s seder,” or “I went last year, and you promised I would not have to go again.”

This was to no avail. My parents would wheedle and plead, threaten and bribe, until finally they would point to one of us and say, “No more complaining – you are going to Bobby and Zeidy, and we hope you realize how lucky you are!”

And then the waterworks would begin. “Lucky?” we’d wail. “How are we lucky?”

Don’t get me wrong. We adored our grandparents. Bobby spoiled us in the way only a Hungarian grandmother could: homemade sponge cake, crispy fried latkes, and oodles of love. She was hilariously funny, attentive and generous. We were each absolutely certain that we were her favorite. Zeidy was serious and stern, but we knew he loved us more than anything in the world.

On a regular week, we fought like cats and dogs to spend Shabbos with them, but not for Pesach. On Pesach, all of our cousins got together and had the best time. The sedarim went on well into the morning, with Ma Nishtana marathons and afikoman hunts, slumber parties, and the kind of fun you have when you’re too tired to see straight.

When I was younger my grandparents would join us, but as Zeidy got older, he became reluctant to sleep away from his bed, his shul, and his routine. My parents and their siblings couldn’t bear the thought of my grandparents sitting alone at a seder, so they decided to send two grandchildren to join them, one from my family and one from another family.

My grandfather’s seder could not have been more different than ours. From the minute he came home from shul, he was in a rush. He’d call out “Kadesh!” as he walked through the front door, and he was already washing for Urchatz when I took my first sip of grape juice. There was no time for chit-chat. His seder was serious business; there was nothing playful or fun about it. We only spoke when we were spoken to. We could barely follow along with his Haggadah reading because of his heavy accent, so we were always playing catch-up to keep pace.

And though it was late when we got to bed, it wasn’t late enough to brag about to our friends, so what was the point?

It’s been 14 years since my grandfather passed away. It’s been a few years longer since I last sat at his seder. And there was no one more surprised than I was last Pesach when I found myself awash in nostalgia, wishing I could be back at his seder in his small apartment in the Lower East Side, one last time.

Now, when my kids sit at a seder with their cousins, running raucously around the table as they hide their afikoman, I wish they could witness the gravitas my grandfather brought to his seder.

Last year, when we reached “Pesach, Matzah, Marror,” the words caught in my throat. I saw my grandfather in front of my eyes, whispering the words “Vayimarriru es chayehem,” a faraway look in his eyes and a strange catch in his voice.

“The work we did was a lot like avodas perach,” he’d murmur. “What we did was just as useless. They would tell us to carry a heavy boulder on our backs from one side of the field to the other. Then, they would tell us to carry the boulder right back to where we had taken it from.” He’d shake his head like he was still trying to make sense of it all. “We would do it again and again and again. For nothing. To help no one.”

We kids would sit frozen, without breathing, waiting for the moment to pass. And it would. But that heaviness hung over the table, testifying to “Vehi Sheamda” – making everything real.

Now, as my kids play with plastic frogs, I remember the look in his eyes that transported him back to another time and place, to another world. A time when his parents were marched through the gates of Auschwitz, when his sisters’ lives were snuffed out almost before they had even begun. To the sedarim of his past that could never be revisited.

So now, in my thirties, it finally hits me. I thought going to my grandparents was a punishment. Now I understand that it was a reward. My parents were right: I was lucky.

And in a strange way, it gives me hope. Because when my kids cross their arms in defiance, when they don’t understand my motives or agree with my decisions, maybe one day, im yirtza Hashem, it will click for them the way it has clicked for me.

You can never know how deeply a memory can be seared onto your soul.