Seders, Sewing, Running Threads

Traditionally, there is no time for sewing between Purim and Passover.  No, I’m not all that traditional… not one of those competitive-cleaning Jews who start at the furthest point in the house from the kitchen and just keep sweeping and scrubbing in the direction of the breadbox for a solid month.  But somehow, between the shopping and planning and complaining and the cleaning I do, and the switching food and dishes around, no sewing gets done.

Authentic Grandma Dishes

At this point the average American Jewish reader raises an eyebrow and thinks… “switching dishes? Not traditional? Excuse me?” Well, yes, it’s out of scale with the rest of my relatively skim religious observance and rare among non-Orthodox Jews, but I started switching the kitchen around ever since I helped my grandmother fetch her Passover dishes from over the fridge 20-something years ago. I stood on a chair in her tiny kitchen, she and I wrapped them in late-eighties pages of the Star Ledger, put them in the carton and I took them to my home with all the storage space. 

Vogue 8772 and
 this week's breading

They’re a little chipped and veined and were never fine china to begin with. But what else could I do but give them a good, kosher-for-Passover home? Like Brigadoon, they come out into the light one day a year, looking traditional on the Seder table and reminding the over-forties of my grandmother. (Actually, Brigadoon was one day every hundred years, but who’s counting.)  They then go back into hiding for another year in the old kitchen cabinets that hang in the garage. The rest of the Pesadik dishes, the pots, pans and silverware, the placemats, oven mitts and the napkin holder spend the rest of the week.

Day before yesterday, on the first Saturday after the Seders, I indulged in a trip to Joann’s, ostensibly for buttons
(50% off), and fell prey to three bolts of fabric (30-40% off).  Yesterday I cut out another McCalls 6579 skirt, same fabric as the first, to sew and send daughter #1 in Indianapolis.  I also cut out the Vogue 8772 blouse again, for myself, this time in a bright cotton print that’s probably meant for quilting. 

Since I had the first shirt made already, I thought I might perfect the fit by learning how to insert more ease in the armhole. Looked for relevant video instruction in this Craftsy online course daughter #2 bought me.  Instead I found the instructor slicing patterns up and taping them together again, drawing lines and moving darts around, which looked like way too much work for a blouse that already fits fine as long as I don’t raise my arms like Horschack. 

Blouse or Quilt?

My sister and I and our spouses have Seder production pretty well in hand by now, having taken the baton from our mother and aunt maybe 20 years ago.  My sister’s is remarkably traditional, her husband being remarkably qualified, for a non-Orthodox, non-professional Jew, to do a very good job of leading, complete with fluid Hebrew, nice melodies, and supplemental readings that he refreshes every year. He can also carve turkeys, which comes in handy twice a year.

Our Seder reflects my Jewishly mixed marriage; my husband being a fervently Secular, active Jew paired with my mainstream Conservative upbringing, fortified with immigrant grandparents who I saw on half the Sundays of my childhood.  We read the blessings, some of the Haggadah text and the highlight songs, but we also actually insert the Exodus story -- something the Hagaddah doesn’t do -- and we throw in Go Down Moses, the Partisan Song that’s the anthem of traditional lefty Jews, and a few Yiddish songs and readings, too.  

In our own ways, my sister and I both run steadier Seder ships than the ones we remember from home, where one aunt was always nibbling the haroset from the Seder plate by the fifth page, an uncle was getting too far ahead in the wine cups, the text was straight Maxwell House, and everyone tended to ignore and talk over my father, who stumbled along in slow, mistake-filled Hebrew. (My mother’s cooking got the respect it deserved, though.)

  

We had 15 this year.  I miscounted and only set for fourteen.  I explained to the non-Jewish guests that in our tradition, the Seder starts with a round of musical chairs.  No fooling them, though.  Actually, there’s little left to teach the Episco friends and the presumably baptized nonbelievers. They’ve all been to other Seders already, and this isn’t their first with us, except for Fred’s new girlfriend.

It’s been painfully long since there were any children among us to introduce anything to. Having not procreated myself until past 30, I cannot point the finger at my kids.

The chairs that have been left empty by departed relatives are being filled not with new little Jews, but by non-Jewish friends and boyfriends.  The good part is that these are friends whose company we like, whose interest in our Seder is a compliment to our program and my cooking.  Then there’s the whole ecumenical thing, the openness, the sharing.  We also behave better when it's not all family. The bad part, of course, is that we're shrinking in the numbers by which we -- at least up till my generation here -- count ourselves. 

Somewhere between good and bad is a new self-consciousness about what's in the text, if we hear it through non-Jewish ears.  My brother-in-law, for example, as part of his annual commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- which took place on Passover -- had his daughter's boyfriend read aloud this long sad list of pogroms and exiles from the beginning of Jewish recorded time.  And Josh, being direct, finished reading it and said, only half joking, "I'm feeling like the bad guy here."  

Now of course a) he’s not the bad guy but b) the list is quite personally true, despite our own safety and comfort. My brother-in-law’s own mother made it out of Vienna on the second-to-last boat leaving from somewhere in Europe. We are missing all this old-country family whose pictures and even letters we have; people we might have known, visited and even brought here or at least Skyped and spoken Yiddish/Russian/English with, if not for that terrible history. But I wonder if this long, much-recited litany of persecution is what makes the world so eager to catch Israel discriminating against others.  To unseat us from our high horse. To say, see, it's what countries/people do. 

Either that, or I’m falling into the all-about-me trap, again.  Other peoples have histories of loss, escape, victimization.  On the third hand, they all try to memorialize it.  Is our list just longer?  Should we skip a few?