PREVIOUS    NEXT 

  A Shiksa's First Seder

I had always feared Passover. Not because I harbor latent anti-Semitic feelings; not because of my loathing for holidays in general; not even because I never have anything appropriate to wear. No, I'd always feared Passover because I'm a lesbian, and lesbian gatherings usually mean only one thing: excruciating dullness. Recreating family holidays with a room-full of gay women can be less fun than putting up with your own family throwing a kegger in the mobile home to celebrate your brother's release from jail. A lot less.

This is how I'd always pictured it. I would attend a Seder dinner, most likely as the guest of a Jewish lover or friend. We would get together with a group of six to eight women with bad haircuts at the home of someone who relied exclusively on the Pottery Barn catalog for home decorating — and bragged about it. After exhausting designer household goods as a source of conversation, we would sit down to supper.

The swaggering butch partner of our hostess, wearing a yarmulke, would preside over the formal portions of the Seder in a proprietary way. But, as the event progressed, various shows of dominance from the more insistent dykes in attendance would stall the proceedings until a consensus could be reached about the division of power. Our hostess would have cooked or, more likely, bought the main dish and prepared the ritual foods. Other guests would provide tasteless vegetarian potluck. (Visualize tempeh surprise and tofu-beef casserole.)

At first, the ceremony would seem novel and captivating. But, after numerous readings in Hebrew and the singing of songs I didn't understand, the novelty would begin to wear off. A feeling of alienation brought on by being the only gentile in attendance — and not just a gentile, but a German, raised by atheists and a former Hitler youth, to boot — would begin to saturate my reservoir of good will. The savorless feast and the overconsumption of almost undrinkable, sweet wine would only deepen my feeling of gloom.

While I rearranged the vegan mish-mash on my plate, I would listen to these women discuss who was sleeping with whom, which anonymous celebrity they'd seen at a 12-step meeting and where one could order the Xena collection on DVD. I would secretly think about hollow chocolate bunnies, Peeps® and baked ham. I would leave hoping to never see these people again, yet coveting their semi-distressed, Nantucket-style, patio chairs with their washable, striped seat cushions.

The bleak specter of this imaginary, humorless holiday has spooked me for years. However, last year, I had a new girlfriend who, despite her lack of religious feeling, was going to want to celebrate her culture at Passover. As the time approached, I began clipping coupons for Manischewitz food products. Though I felt self-satisfied about my contribution, I also knew that the impressive assortment of flavored Matzos I'd stockpiled was not going to cut it in terms of revelry.

I worried that it was somehow my responsibility, as a good girlfriend and a guilty German, to get us invited to a Seder. I considered asking my friend, Janet, who is the publicist for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah foundation. But the last time I called her was to cancel my tour of the Holocaust memory recovery tour — which I never rescheduled. It just didn't seem right to bother her now.

I next thought about asking my old friends, the Manocchias, what they were doing. They are a wonderful couple who are like second parents to me. Both are former Catholics. John stunned everyone when he converted to Judaism over a decade ago. Mary has recently joined some liberal Christian sect and is practically a Unitarian by now, but likes to celebrate everything from Chinese New Year to Hanukkah. I knew they would probably be hosting a Seder. Yet, when I spoke to them I found out they were holding their dinner on the following weekend, a night more convenient than Passover Eve. Somehow, that didn't seem quite right either.

My lover, Carey, it turns out, likes plodding lesbians as little as do I. And, because she is a recent immigrant to our fair city, even had she been so inclined, she would not have had enough time to cultivate a group of gay peers before the holiday. In the midst of my fretting, she took matters into her own hands and got us invited to share the Seder at the home of a work friend, Gregg Canes.

Carey assured me I would like Gregg. She was right. How could I not like someone who acted as if it wasn't a problem that we arrived at his house 45 minutes early, long before he and his wife, Anthea, were dressed?

"You're just in time," he said, as we stood in the doorway, sheepishly holding out an offering of wine. The well-worn crinkles around his eyes accented his smile of greeting.

The Canes' are South Africans who live in the San Fernando Valley with their seven-year-old daughter, Liat, and twin sons, Gillead and Ethan, now three. Their home is casual and reflects the presence of children with its decided lack of breakable knick-knacks and decorative clutter. I, who am usually stilted in social situations, even when visiting my own family, felt immediately comfortable in their home.

Perhaps it was Gregg and Anthea's personal warmth, or the ready smiles worn by their energetic kids that put me at ease. But I believe that what really toasted the cockles of my icy heart was the smell of cooking meat wafting from the kitchen.

I, who knew little about Jewish conventions, other than what I had gleaned from watching "Fiddler on the Roof" a dozen times, had always instinctively felt that there was no such thing as a tofu substitute in ancient Jerusalem. As I watched Anthea's mother remove a brisket from the oven, I silently praised these people for holding on to tradition.

It is a fact that all the nicest holidays my family has spent together during the last two decades have included my nieces and nephew. Children, with their exuberance and expectation of pleasure, make holidays worth the effort. Maybe this is why lesbians have become obsessed with reproduction of late Ð the parties were too dull.

In addition to the Canes' children, Anthea's sister, Sherry and her husband arrived with their son, Gerry. He was born the same week as the twins and the three cousins ran, played and hung together like triplets. Another couple soon arrived with an infant.

As we sat down to dinner, seven adults and five children, I noticed booklets lying next to each place-setting. They were copies, I discovered, of the "Maxwell House Guide to Passover." Inside were English, Hebrew and phonetic Hebrew translations of the Seder service. Gregg leafed though his food-stained copy, his yarmulke askew. I dreaded what looked like a long series of readings.

"Okay, I think we'll just skip some of these sections," he began matter-of-factly, leafing through. "Go to page twelve."

He began the reading, and then indicated, at intervals, when it was time for someone else at the table to take over.

"Suzanne, skip five pages and start again at the top of 23."

The adults at the table made a special point of explaining what was going on as we rapidly worked through the booklet. Though they made it seem as if their clarifications were for the benefit of the raucous children, I suspected they were for me as well. The Canes' attempts to include and inform me were deeply comforting, and I never felt a moment of the alienation I'd feared.

By the time we got to the part of the ritual where Gregg was to ask, "How is this night different from any other night?" the boys had wandered into the living room to watch Barney on TV. I could hear them boisterously singing along with the show. Anthea and Sherry herded them back to the table, laughing.

"Barney is part of every traditional Seder," Gregg told me.

Following a surprisingly brief rite — Gregg had skipped a lot of pages to accommodate the kids' waning attention spans — it was time for the food. We began with ceremonial bitter herbs, boiled eggs and a delicious apple mash on matzo. Then, it was time for the brisket. It did not disappoint. I complimented Anthea's mother at least three separate times before we left.

When I think back on that first Seder, I remember four main things: the unfamiliar Hebrew ritual, the succulent beef, the medley of Barney's hits playing in the background and the constant laughter. All in all, that night could not have been further removed from the arid event I had invented.

This year, Carey and I were, once more, invited to the Canes'. Apparently, we had been inoffensive enough the last time to warrant another invite. Actually, I'm told that Passover Eve is the one night Jews aren't supposed to turn anyone away. Theoretically we could have just shown up at the door and knocked until religious propriety forced them let us in. It didn't come to that.

To make up for last's years hideously early arrival, we managed to leave the house late, lose Gregg's address and get stuck in a traffic jam on the Ventura Freeway This time we arrived an hour late. We were mortified.

Carey had left numerous phone messages, as we sat idling in traffic, begging them to begin without us. Yet, as we walked up the driveway, we could see the intact dinner table through the window. The door swung open before we knocked and Gregg stood there smiling.

"You're just in time," he said.

As we circled the table to find seats, I noticed Anthea's mother in the kitchen removing the brisket from the oven. Ahh, tradition!

In addition to the crowd from last year, Sherry had a new infant son, Jesse. And another couple was there with their 6-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. At the table, Gillead sat near me with a handful of balloons, which he kept worrying inside his little fist. Ethan sat in his mother's lap and banged on the table with a knife in each hand. Cousin Gerry, round-eyed, giggled from the opposite side. Liat, at the head of the children's table with the other kids, had a sweetly grave look on her face, fully prepared, as usual, to play her role when the time came.

I was ready, too, and dutifully picked up my familiar Maxwell House primer. I didn't think it possible that any Seder could be less serious than the previous year's had been. I was wrong. Though Barney was no longer the popular distraction, the twins were now on to "Peter Pan," with a particular affection for Captain Hook. As Gregg began the readings, the boys gestured to one another with their tiny hands crooked into hook shapes.

If conceivable, the ritual seemed even more truncated than before. After a couple of short ceremonial readings, Liat and the others were already answering the four questions and drinking the four glasses of wine. Ethan demanded refills of Mogen-David, gesturing with his cup like a tiny pirate. The kids sang "Go Down Moses," and other songs about the nasty old Pharaoh — which I didn't know, but had at least heard about during the yearly broadcast of "The Ten Commandments."

Half way through dinner, Michael, another of Carey and Gregg's co-workers arrived.

"The traffic was terrible getting out here, wasn't it?" I asked conversationally.

"No, I got here in 20 minutes."

By now, we were on to our unleavened dessert of macaroons and Maxwell House coffee. Anthea's mother kept asking when we were going to finish the Seder readings, but Gregg deflected the questions by hiding the matzo for the kids to find for the third time. He knew they had already exceeded their limit for participation in organized ritual.

The meal wound down with Gillead, on Michael's lap, blowing up one of his balloons and persistently letting the air out so that the stretched rubber would make a sound akin to a gaseous expulsion. Gerry laughed so hard the marshmallow he'd been eating flew from his mouth.

"The boys are in the phase when all bodily functions seem hilarious. Butt is their favorite word," Gregg said shaking his head.

Ethan emerged from the bedroom where he had been hitting his baby cousin, Jesse, with a pillow.

"Butt!" he cried with glee.

Meanwhile, serious Liat, leading the older kids, had found the hidden matzo — yet again. We helped clear the table while the boys got into their pajamas. Again, I thanked Anthea's mother for cooking a fabulous dish of beef.

The drive home took 20 minutes.

I don't know what other people's Seders are like. I don't know if my future Passovers will be as charming as the last two have been, or as chilling as the scenario I long feared. Maybe lesbians are more fun than I remember. The Caneses invited us back, didn't they?

What I do know is that I am grateful to have experienced my first Passover with a group of lively people who made me feel included and welcome. The Canes' Seder may lack formality, but it brims over with an abundance of heartfelt laughter, generosity of spirit, good company, Captain Hook, delicious brisket and blessed brevity. In the end, what could be holier than that?

April 6 , 2002 © Suzanne Rush 2004

OWLCAT ARCHIVE -CURRENT-2-3-4-5-6-7 8-9-10-11-12

Copyright© 2000-2008, Suzanne Rush, Boy, are my arms tired.com! All Rights Reserved. E-Mail the Editor.