Samuel Feckett

Italo Calvino reading from Invisible Cities, Mr. Palomar and other collections, Recorded March 31, 1983, 92Y Readings

The grocery store in the goyish neighborhood is overflowing with matzah. Every shelf is full of matzah. There is matzah spilling out of the front door. You ask to buy the matzah. The cashier does not know what matzah is. You gesture towards the shelves, but they stare on, unseeing, and ask you to please finish your transaction.

Your child takes the candle, the feather, and the spoon from your hand. You have not yet lit the candle, but it is glowing anyway. They locate the crumbs with uncanny speed, but they are not where you placed them. Nothing is where you placed it. You just finished cleaning, but the entire house has rearranged itself.

The youngest child begins to sing the Four Questions. As she opens her mouth, the voice of your oldest child rings out. Your oldest child is an adult and hosting her own seder in Queens. No one else notices.

You begin to pour out wine for the plagues. “Dam”, you say. The smell of iron is in the air. All of your guests are staring straight ahead, unblinking, chanting “Dam” repeatedly under their breath. There are no other plagues. There is only blood.

You’re on the third verse of Dayenu. The fifth. The twelfth. The nineteenth? Does Dayenu have this many verses? Have you restarted? It keeps getting faster. You can’t understand the words anymore, but the children continue, their mouths moving at inhuman speed. You speak to tell them that this is enough, but the only word that comes out is “dayenu”. You cannot stop them.

You open the door to let in Elijah. You return to the cup, and it is empty. A smile spreads across your face. The time of the Messiah is upon us. You open your mouth to sing Siman Tov. The words come out backwards, and the cup begins to fill with wine.

The search for the afikomen begins. Quickly, your oldest child returns with half the middle matzah. Then your middle child. Then your youngest child. Each piece is identical, and all the boxes of matzah were empty. Each child demands the sum total of the reward. You look on helplessly.

The Hebrew on the back of the box of macaroons says they are pareve. The English states they are not kosher for Passover. You read them again. The Hebrew on the back of the box of macaroons says they are not kosher for Pesach. The English states they are pareve. You place the macaroons back on the shelf.

ladyhawke

Apocalypse (‘The Cloisters Apocalypse’), Normandy ca. 1330

Understandably, the Jewish community — particularly people who have supported the Women’s March and other social justice causes — wanted answers. We also wanted something that most thought would be pretty simple for a bunch of women who spend their days parading around their intersectionality: We wanted them to denounce anti-Semitism and the words Farrakhan said against Jews. This isn’t a new thing; after all, we ask public figures to denounce awful people and hate speech all the time.

To say we didn’t get that is an understatement. Instead, we got Tamika Mallory posting a bizarre series of tweets calling valid criticisms “bullying” and refusing to apologize for her support of Farrakhan and her lack of denouncement regarding his words. Linda Sarsour suddenly decided that she was very cool with silence and just retweeted one of Mallory’s tweets, as did Bob Bland. Carmen Perez took it one step further, quote-tweeting Mallory and saying something about the national organizers’ “lifetime commitment to liberation.” Missing from that? A condemnation of Farrakhan.