The Secret Cookie Club by Martha Freeman

Author:Martha Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books

CHAPTER 27

Emma

“I hate searching for things,” my mom said, “and I’m bad at it too. Never once in all my years as a kid did I find the afikoman.”

The afikoman is a piece of matzo cracker that the grown-ups hide during the Passover holiday. Usually, the kid who finds it gets a prize. The afikoman symbolizes something or other, but really the point is to give kids something to look forward to during the boring parts of the long holiday meal.

I dunked a cookie in milk and said, “That’s pathetic, Mom.”

It was half an hour after FedEx delivered the box, and already Mom and I—sitting at the kitchen table—were making solid progress on the cookies. They were made from Hannah’s grandpa’s recipe for sugar cookies. Grace had cut them out in Hanukkah shapes—dreidel, menorah, Star of David—and frosted them in Hanukkah colors, blue and white with silver sprinkles. At first, we could hardly bring ourselves to eat them they were so pretty—but that feeling lasted only about a minute.

Mom and I knew we would have to set some cookies aside for Dad and Benjamin soon, but we weren’t ready to deprive ourselves yet. Fighting had given us both an appetite.

The note in the box said the flour power was supposed to “promote good feelings between you and your mom.”

Isn’t that weird?

How did Grace know that would be required on the day the cookies arrived? All I had told her was that I misplaced an envelope.

“In my defense,” Mom continued, “I do have a lot of cousins. But the point is that’s why I go to so much trouble to keep track of things. Because once I lose them, I will never find them.”

“I get it,” I said. “You’re like a bat. Bats have bad eyesight so they compensate with good hearing.”

Mom stopped chewing and frowned. “I’m like a bat?”

“Never mind. Are you still mad?”

Mom swallowed, then shrugged. “It’s hard to be mad while you’re eating cookies.”

This gave me courage. “So, do you want to work on GG’s book without the photos? We could write down some memories. It would be a start.”

Mom didn’t answer yes or no. Instead, she said, “What do you know about GG, anyway?”

“She was born in Europe”—I did the subtraction— “in, uh . . . 1926. And then her family came to the United States when she was around my age, around ten.”

Mom nodded. “She was born in Germany. Her family had some means and, luckily, her parents recognized how dangerous the political situation there had become. GG’s father had relatives in the United States, so he and the family were able to leave and come to New York. If they hadn’t, GG and the rest of her family probably would have been killed by Hitler and the Nazis.”

“If that had happened, Grandma would never have been born,” I said.

Mom nodded. “And then there wouldn’t have been a me or a you either.”

I knew about the Holocaust—when the Nazis killed millions of Jewish people and others they considered “undesirable.

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