We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie

Author:Alex Leslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2018-10-03T00:10:04+00:00

Charna

For a time, when I was a small child, I hardly went to school at all. I hated the orderliness, the English, the rude shout of the bell, the way the English teacher drew out my name: Cha-ahr-na. I preferred the Yiddish of our home. So when I wanted some time to myself, I left our apartment in the morning and went to sit on the synagogue steps. If someone passed and asked me what I was doing there, I would report confidently, “My tateleh is inside saying Kaddish for my dead mother,” and the person would nod and continue walking. Nobody wants to interfere in a family’s mourning. Stick fingers into the grease trap of private ritual. Mishpocheh is strange, but untouchable. Family. My strategy worked for quite a while. A number of times, my father’s friends from shul passed and raised their eyebrows at my response, knowing I was lying. But they did not question me. My small body perched on the stone steps of our shul. “My tateleh is inside reciting Kaddish for my mother, who has died,” was my refrain. Of course I knew the words to the Kaddish, heard it every week at shul. We are so used to death that everyone knows the mourner’s prayer. Or we are so in awe of death that we mark its passing as often as we can, while we meet on this side of life. One day I was sitting on the steps while my classmates were taking a geography test about the prairies when I saw my tateleh’s brimmed black hat at the end of the street. Here it comes—his hat like a solar eclipse. He never walked this direction during the day. He stopped at the foot of the steps, looked up at me, bowed, and recited, Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra, and continued until I joined in. I yelled the ameins. My small high voice rebounded from the stone. I shook and I shook and I shook. My father carried me back to our apartment on his back.

Hannah hosts the next meeting of her group at Tateleh’s. The apartment she has with her husband, Joshua, is tiny and prepared for the baby, a cradle beside their bed with a blessing nailed above it. Tateleh locks himself in his room with a peace offering of cake and applesauce and tea. Hannah rushes around and opens all the windows. “You two live like a couple of old spinsters,” she hisses at me. “I don’t know how you’ll ever raise a family of your own.” I fill in the next words myself: with that man. Marrying a non-Jewish man is an act of leaving—my marriage would not even be recorded at shul. I will be an invisible Jew if I let Louis have his way. And I want him to. Sometimes when Louis holds me, I am full of dread, and then flooded by an unbearable joy. Basha’s women arrive shouting news. The paper and envelopes and book of addresses are set out on the table.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.