A Chosen Few by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page A

Orthodox, but above all it had to be a good evening in which things kept moving. None of her guests at this seder were religious. She was trying to build up a Jewish nucleus and did not want to alienate these people with religious discussions; for many of them, it would be their first seder. If a law was inconvenient, she felt, it should be dropped. The ritual washing of the hands in the middle of the seder was to be skipped. “We can’t have fifty people running to the washroom!” said Irene.
    “We could carry a basin to them,” David suggested.
    “There’s no room!” she shouted, as though from an uptown New York window.
    “It’s not optional,” David mumbled softly. But in the end he gave in.
    In addition to the difficulties involved in getting a group of volunteers with little experience in large-scale cooking to turn out a kosher meal for fifty, Irene faced the problem that David Marlowe was not only schooled in Jewish dietary laws but had once been in the catering business and had taken a course in hygiene. He searched for invisible salmonella with the same zeal with which he pursued unseen chametz. With the combined forces of science and religion at work, it was not certain that any food was edible, but somehow an odd and inelegant meal of salads, chicken soup, and prepackaged gefilte fish was produced.
    The guests arrived at eightish, which seemed to Irene a reasonable hour to invite people for dinner. But David would not start until the official sunset, which was at 8:45. In the meantime he locked himself in a room dressed in his dark suit and hat and prayed, while the guests were left to roam the Kulturverein wondering what was wrong. A heavy-set woman who had survived the entire Nazi epoch in Berlin by hiding, furtively unwrapped a hardcandy and popped it into her granddaughter’s mouth, whispering in German, “Eat it quickly, it’s not kosher.”
    Finally the Haggadahs, the books containing the seder ritual and the story of the flight from Egypt, were passed out to the guests in German, English, Russian, and French with accompanying He-brew. David Marlowe took his place at the head table in front of a bay window, from which the women in tights and sequin strings could be seen taking their work positions on the street one story below. Irene sat next to David so that she could translate into German as he read through the Haggadah, pausing to explain and invite questions. “We say ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ but there is a Jerusalem we could go to this year,”—and he explained that the current State of Israel did not follow strict religious practices and so Jews must wait for the Messiah.
    The seder crowd on the first night of Passover included many old-line Communists like Mia Lehmann and an East German authority on Sartre who had been born in France while his father was fighting with the Resistance. These people were strangers to religion, but they understood intellectualism and were prepared to listen to David’s explanations. The first night went fairly smoothly, in part because there were a number of German Jews present who had lived in Israel, and being fluent in Hebrew, they could lead in the singing of songs and reciting of prayers. There were some minor language problems, as when David told the participants that they should feel free to schmooze, which in Yiddish means “to chat” but in German means “to neck or make out.”
    The second night, the crowd was largely Russian, including many sophisticated Muscovites such as Stanislava Mikhalskaia, an attractive young architect who could get no architectural work in Germany, and Kima Gredina, a doctor and novelist who had traded partial censorship of her books in Russia for no publication of them at all in Germany.
    David carefully explained each step of the seder, while the Russians expectantly stared at their wine glasses. He recounted the Passover legend of the four sons who ask the questions—the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the