by toby axelrod
jta
Zayde fell into a deep sleep at the seder table one Passover. We were too busy clearing dishes and gabbing to notice.
Suddenly came the shouts from the dining room: “Pa? Pa?”
I still feel the sudden cold, I still see everyone moving to the kitchen door.
Zayde was sitting at the head of the table in his chair with the wooden arms. His face was pale, his black kippah rested on wisps of white hair, his chin on his chest.
Zayde was our patriarch, a rabbi, a storyteller, a bridge to our lost family. Leading the seder was his job for life. Not only was the entire hagaddah chanted, family legends were repeated and old shtetl melodies were sung. We made “lightning rods” out of the afikomen — scraps of matzah into which we bored holes for lightning to go through. Zayde would keep them until the following Passover.
He had left the Polish village of Luboml in 1925 and come by ship to New York. Two years later, through an ad in a Yiddish paper, Zayde found his pulpit at Ahavas Shalom, a synagogue in a former bakery in Great Barrington, Mass. My bubbe and my father, then 4, crossed the ocean to join him.
Until 1984, Zayde led services, taught the bar mitzvah boys, gave advice. Zayde was also a kosher butcher, a gas station operator, a winemaker during Prohib-ition and an amazing storyteller.
But now he was silent.
Uncle Duddy shook him, exclaiming, “Get him up!” The table was shoved aside, splashing wine onto the white tablecloth and shaking the candlesticks. Zayde was carried into his room and placed on his bed with pillows under his feet.
We gathered at his door. Zayde looked like a marble statue. My cousins Benjy and Danny rubbed his feet. Slowly the color returned. He opened his eyes.
“What happened?” Zayde asked.
“You fell asleep,” he was told.
“That kind of a sleep I don’t like,” he said to laughter.
We dragged a wooden chair into his room and placed an old yahrzeit glass on it with just enough wine for him to dip his finger. From his bed, Zayde concluded the seder. Lightning did not strike — not for nearly two years.
In our family — in many families — leading the seder seems to be a job for life. First it was Zayde, then my dad. Now I am the one. Our family’s haggadah grows another story longer.
Toby Axelrod is JTA’s correspondent for Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
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