Passover Seder with Harrison Ford

 by Dana G. Peleg - All rights Reserved

            It was at the family Passover meal, the seder, that something began to creep irritatingly into his mind. Just after making his traditional Passover joke,  Mr. Keren – or rather, Attorney Keren, as he was more commonly known - noticed a little spat about movie stars or something of the kind, carrying on at the other end of the table, where his older daughter, Tamar, was sitting with her guest, the American girl who had been spending all the holidays with for the last year, His younger daughter was there too, with her boyfriend, and across from them sat his German-Jewish – Yekke - mother-in-law, who had already lived sixty years in Israel and was still unable to speak proper Hebrew.

            “Can I have some quiet, please?” he raised his voice, and seemed to hear his eldest daughter saying something about some movie star, then there was a restless kind of silence, and he thought she stole a glance at him, which he interpreted as apologetic. Yehoshua - formerly Kornfeld, or Keren, as everyone including his wife called him - had lived in the country for forty years, a man who had achieved everything he had with his own two hands, without any help from his parents, because he had been providing for them, too, since he was still in his teens in the ma’abarah - immigrant transit camp - as had his friend Ben Lulu, for his own parents.

Seizeing the lull, Yehoshua announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, you may not have noticed, but the seder has begun.”

Oma, the grandmother, mumbled something that sounded like Keine Respekt  no respect, only after which was it possible to proceed to the next joke.

“The Torah speaks of four sons: the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who does not know how to ask. Nu, so he shouldn’t ask.”

That same something was still edging into his mind, but it needed some more time in order to settle in, and the sentence had not even budged since entering Attorney Keren’s head. He had made no connection between the words, when he had first heard them, as one does when one hears disjointed pieces of remote conversations and almost immediately forgets them. But then, after everyone had finished their soup and eaten their gefilte fish, and after Tamar had driven Oma - whom Keren affectionately called “Mother” - back home, and placed the car keys down on the table, he suddenly remembered the words of that sentence, and associated the sound with the picture he had in his mind’s eye of Tamar. The words were not as important this time as their meaning, which penetrated deep into his consciousness. He looked at her, at his little Tamari, who had somehow made her way to real womanhood and had already graduated from university. Of course, he had always believed that it was no way to make a living, this cinematology that she had insisted on studying, but she had made it  as a producer, and was actually making good money, even though she was still living in a rented apartment with that American roommate of hers.

“Everything all right, Tamari?” he asked, looking at her. “No overdrafts?”

“No,” she smiled. “Everything’s fine. Goodnight, Daddy.”

“Goodnight, sweetheart.”

He felt the need to kiss her on the forehead, as he had when she was little, but knew it was inappropriate. For many years now, since she had grown up, they no longer hugged, only exchanged a small peck on the cheek, and then only when the occasion required it. But now he suddenly found himself carried away with longing for his little Tamari. He remained sitting in the living room and almost dozed off. Then he stood up, unknotted his tie, and on his way to the bathroom stopped for a moment in front of her room, the room Tamari had occupied in her childhood. He thought he could hear whispers, and other sounds.

He lingered no longer than a second, before quietly entering his own bedroom, and undressing silently, taking care not to awaken Mrs. Keren, who was a light sleeper and suffered from hot flashes. As he lay down in bed, and just before falling asleep, the sentence echoed in his head. Tamar’s resonant voice saying, “Harrison Ford? Who cares about men, anyway?”

Pnina Keren, a practical and determined woman, had also heard. She was sitting at the seder table, next to her husband, and the first thing that occurred to her was the hope he hadn’t heard it, and the next thing she thought was how dare Tamar say such things at the table, and she wanted to take her oldest daughter aside for a talk, as she had every time Tamar would come home from grade school, scratched and bruised from playing with the boys, or brought notes from her teacher about being a disruptive influence in junior high, or when she grew up and started going out with boys in high school and in the army. Of course, it was Mrs. Keren, Pnina, who explained to Tamar, in practical and determined terms, that she had to be careful, she told her about AIDS, the new illness that was beginning to be talked about in those days. She suggested taking her to a gynecologist, to get a prescription for birth control pills. She would certainly not allow boys to sleep with Tamar in the same room at home; it was out of the question, with the little one around. To tell the truth, Pnina Keren was not crazy about the idea of her daughter having a sex life at all. Things were different in her day, and she wasn’t at all keen on all this modern permissiveness, this talk of a woman having a career and a family, all that nonsense dished up in women’s magazines. She herself had married at twenty-one, after all, had her first baby at twenty-two, and graduated from university when her first born started first grade. Now, at almost fifty, she held a senior position with the Ministry of Finance, the kind of job no-one talks about, and doesn’t get  her interviewed on TV, but a job that was important enough to assure herself and her mother that she had done very nicely, without neglecting her family. Two daughters, born exactly as planned, and, so far, living up to all their parents’ expectations.

The fact is that she had guessed long ago. This thing, of which nobody dare speak, kept churning through her brain. That [1]Yael Dayan gay-and-lesbian- rights bumper sticker on the motorcycle, suddenly deciding to join Dayan’s Labor party, after all those years in Meretz  and civil rights activism, all those video movies Tamar kept bringing home, her familiarity with all the gays and lesbians on TV. Because Pnina Keren, nee Morgenstern (women weren’t hitching up their names like a long train of hyphenated carriages, when she got married), wasn’t born yesterday. She started understanding, and hoped it wasn’t true, but got it, long before it reached her consciousness, that this friendship between Tamar and that American girl was actually a relationship, that there was a special bond between her daughter and that quiet woman with the crewcut, who looked a bit like a teenage boy and always spoke softly and politely, calling her “Mrs. Keren,” even though it’s something that’s just not done in Israel, where it’s first names only, right across the generations. And under all her layers of starched clothes and good manners and her strict Yekke upbringing, under it all, she even liked this girlfriend of her daughter’s with a strange affection, as if for the son she had always wanted.

Yet it was inconceivable for Tamari to ever say that sentence to Keren or to Mother. She always had been a strange girl, with all sorts of odd ideas. Just as well Mother never really got the hang of Hebrew. How much Hebrew did she need, anyway, as a piano teacher? Well, Pnina thought, she can’t have understood anything, and, just as she was falling asleep, she allowed herself a sigh of relief, at the very moment that her husband finally absorbed what Tamar had said.

Tamar’s little sister, Tali - the eternal “little one” - the only one who knew firsthand, was so angry. She was furious at herself for starting that conversation about movies at the seder table, and remembered, too late, Tammy’s  nasty habit of tossing out idiotic hints. Daddy will have a heart attack, Tali thought, and Mummy will probably kill herself. Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but I’m the one who has to live at home, while she’s out there in Tel Aviv. What does my intellectual lesbian sister know about provincial life, anyway? Where does she get off bringing her girlfriend Ellen home to every family holiday? “Life partner,” my ass. As if anyone will ever let them get married. But when I dare bring my dark-skinned, not-exactly-European boyfriend home, they make all sorts of faces. Not that they’d ever say anything.

My big, talented sister is a lesbo. Right, what with all that fucking she did when she was in school and the army. Like I don’t know. I’ve been around. Suddenly she turns lesbian on me, all active in the “community” and she has a girlfriend, too. Well, to each his own, what’s it to me? Let her fuck sheep for all I care. But why does she have to flaunt it in front of the whole world. And to Mom and Dad!

But maybe they should know. All her life they’ve been amazed by how wonderful she is. Big deal. She barely managed to get through her math’s exam. I’d’ve told them a long time ago, f I didn’t think they’d completely flip out,. They’ll know in the end, though, my friends all do. Actually they think it’s quite cool. I’d like to see them – my friends - sitting next to the lovebirds at the seder table, arguing about Glenn Close and Susan Sarandon.

I often think about my Oma. My grandmother – maybe no one, except her, remembers her real name any longer, and I doubt if even she does; she seems to have been slipping away from us lately, becoming  more and more vague. Her skin’s pale and very fragile, and she’s got so many new wrinkles; her hair is so sparse, and she seems to be getting smaller. Maybe I’ll be like that too, in the end. Only her Yekke demeanor remains stronger than ever. She’s still able to bake her heavenly apple strudel. She once told me she had learned how to make it from this Viennese friend of hers who, apparently, had lived next door to the Freud family. She hasn’t touched the piano for years, and that just breaks my heart. She was the only one I agreed to take lessons from. Three times a week, for seven years, from when I was six, until I got sick of it, I’d go to her house. Fortunately  she didn’t live too far away.

It was from my Oma that I learned German, real Berliner German, not like what they speak in Austria and Romania. In her soft-accented German, with the umlaut that purses your lips, and the refined ‘ich,’ she would tell me wonderful stories about Berlin. I’ve never been there. I don’t want to go, and I don’t ever want to ruin Oma’s stories for myself. She never went back there either, for the same reason. Whenever I visit her - to this day - I love to look at the pictures in her living room, old brown photographs in wooden frames. Grandma as a young bride with Grandpa who died when I was little; Grandma with another young woman, her friend. She told me so many stories about that friend of hers, and there was always something secretive about them. Who can tell now if she was only kidding, or not. It’s impossible nowadays to talk to Oma, she’s so shut up inside her old age.

I often ask myself what it was about those stories. Everything’s a blur now, mixed up with other childhood memories. In time I learned a little about Berlin in the twenties and thirties, before the Nazis rose to power, the years when my grandmother was growing up. It was a wild city, Berlin. Expressionist art, fringe theatre, Döblin, Elsa Lasker-Schüller. And now, in Oma’s living room, a tall young woman - Perla is her name – Germanic, like my own mother’s, in a small hat and veil, lifting her head with a kind of Marlene Dietriche look, as she holds a long cigarette in one hand and clasps Oma’s shoulder with the other. Back then Grandma was simply Greta, before she became Morgenstern, a tiny woman in a black dress and wedge-heeled shoes. In the background, under the linden trees on Unter Den Linden Boulevard, hovers the great question that I no longer dare ask.