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signify our affliction in Egypt….’ He enumerated
the items on the Seder table, the eggs, the cake, the paschal lamb.
    She was
familiar with the scene from previous Seder nights, but her grandfather,
knowing she had not been formally instructed and had no Hebrew, was careful
each year to explain everything. There was always a great deal she was ignorant
of, which the other grandchildren, her cousins, took for granted. But she recognized
the excitement of this Feast when, as a child, she and the other children had
sat up late with their elders at the exotic table, every face shining with
candlelight, every morsel of food giving a special sensation to her mouth, not
only because it tasted different from ordinary food, but because on this night
every morsel stood for something else, and was food as well. The children drank
wine and deliverance with it…. The unleavened bread, crisp matzho that made
crumbs everywhere, was uncovered. ‘This is the poor bread which our fathers ate
in the land of Egypt.’ Barbara had understood from her fifth year that it was
not actually the same wafery substance, here on the table at Golders Green,
that had been baked by the Israelites on the first Passover night, and yet, in
a mysterious sense, it was: ‘This is the bread which our fathers ate …’
    ‘This
is the night,’ said her grandfather, an unageing man, to Barbara, now so
conscious of having turned sixteen, ‘when we give thanks to God for our
ancestors’ redemption. He split the sea for us and we passed over on dry land.’
She listened, as if she had not heard it before, while her cousins, now grown
old, between eighteen and twenty-one years of age, took their places. Like
herself, they had been recognizably intellectuals, with an additional bent for
music, before they had turned fifteen.
    The
cousins, undergraduates in philosophy, law and medicine, were gathered in
purposeful concentration round the Seder table, where usually, on summer evenings
after supper when the table had been cleared, they leaned over the shiny wood
surface far into the night, loquacious on the subjects of Nietzsche, Freud,
Marx, Mussolini, Hitler, and the war impending. Now they were about to intone
in due order the responses on the subject of the Exodus from Egypt into the
Promised Land.
    A small
dark girl of eight was present, a refugee orphan from Germany who had been
allotted to this family in the emergency parcelling-out of rescued children in
those late nineteen-thirties. Her eyes were wonderful pebbles in the
candlelight.
    The
young men pushed back their skull-caps, for the room was warm with mesmeric
ritual as much as with actual heat.
    It was
only a few months ago, in the Christmas holidays, that Barbara and these alert
young men, her cousins on the Jewish side, had reached the conclusion one
evening that agnosticism was the only answer, their atheist mentors having
erred on the dogmatic side. But here and now they were suddenly children of
Israel again, Barbara always included, because, after all, blood was blood, and
you inherit from your mother’s side.
    In
former times, Barbara, being the youngest member of the Feast, yet knowing no
Hebrew, had repeated after her grandfather the euphonics of the question reserved
to the youngest of the company. But tonight the German child was repeating in
Hebrew the question:
    Why is
this night different from all other nights?
    It is
different, Barbara had thought. The elder Aaronsons hoped she would one day
marry a Jew, a doctor or a lawyer, somebody brilliant. They did not believe
that her Gentile relations could be particularly well-disposed towards her. As
for love, how could you expect it? The elder Aaronsons said, Barbara, bless
her, she’ll make a nice match in five, six years’ time. They felt she would
compensate for her intractable mother, who now never came to the family
gatherings but only wrote letters from Paris.
    Her
grandfather intoned joyfully. He was in good voice. The very old