Day 19 of Nat'l Emergency: Mah Nishtanah

“Mah nishtanah halielah hazeh mikol haleilot?”

Why is this night different from all other nights?

As they have for decades if not centuries before each seder, briskets will simmer awaiting the conclusion of the first part of the Passover story related in the haggadah. Matzo balls will swim in chicken soup. Horseradish will sit next to slices of gefilte fish. Wine cups await to be filled four times over.

The sweet voice of a grandchild singing the “Mah nishtanah”—what is different—should be lilting through my home next Wednesday, April 8, the eve of the first day of Passover. One of the youngest at the table would recite the Four Questions that distinguish the evening. It is how Jews have marked the seder for generation after generation, for millennia. But not so this year. 

The Angel of Death has upended tradition. Indiscriminate fear of the novel coronavirus will keep families apart. Our children and their families live in Massachusetts and Nebraska. Coming home for the holiday does not qualify as essential travel during a pandemic. Better to seder-in-place than risk contamination on the trip to Westchester from their homes.

Envy is a vice frowned upon by God. But I do envy my friends with year-round access to children and grandchildren who live nearby. Hugs and kisses are not meant to be limited to holiday visits and family vacations. Their absence at the seder table is all the more painful when catastrophic events prevent physical togetherness.

We will Zoom the Four Questions and the rest of our seder liturgy. It is better than nothing. We will see and hear them but won’t be able to touch our legacies. We will miss their frantic search for the hidden pieces of matzo, the afikoman, required to be eaten to conclude the seder banquet, and the squeal of joy when it is discovered. Perhaps we will have each family hide an afikoman in their own homes. Again, better than nothing.

Jews can find humor in almost everything, even life threatening, tradition-busting situations. Coronavirus is no exception. Making the rounds on the Internet—“Biblical Irony: Passover Seder may be delayed by a plague.” Of course, comedy is no match for reality. “Thousands of locusts swarm over Israel, Egypt — just in time for Passover,” headlined The Daily News on March 6. 

Growing up in Brooklyn my parents’ seder attracted 25-40 celebrants depending on how many guests they invited to augment the 18 in our immediate family of aunts, uncles and cousins. Led by my father and his brother, the seder was a raucous affair. Reading from the Maxwell House haggadah, the brothers would drone on in an Eastern European trope that befuddled my brother, sister and me and anyone else who tried to follow along in Hebrew (no English to be heard except for the chattering among my mother and her three sisters which prompted my father’s repeated unsuccessful appeals for them to be quiet). 

The seder back in the 1950s and 1960s was a time of family ingathering. Everyone lived in the New York Metro. By the time my wife and I took over seder chores some 30 years ago, family togetherness had dissolved. My sister had moved to Los Angeles. Her family stays there for Passover. My brother’s family in Maryland kept coming north until about 10 years ago. 

Our seder ritual has become more universal. Over the years, aside from incorporating English, themes covering the emancipation of Russian and Ethiopian Jews as well as the treatment of refugees from all zones of conflict have become integral parts of the haggadah we have fashioned. 

In an ironic way, conducting a virtual seder via Zoom reinforces a central theme of the seder to be kind to the stranger among us. It took Zoom founder Eric Yuan nine attempts to earn a visa to emigrate from China 23 years ago. He spoke little English. He might not qualify for a visa under the current, more restrictive, admission standards. Today, Yuan is a successful technology entrepreneur worth an estimated $3 billion.

As we peer into the Zoom-enabled camera of our computers, tablets or smart phones we must remind ourselves that the Torah admonishes us no fewer than 36 times to treat the stranger fairly because we, our ancestors, were strangers in Egypt. Not slaves. Strangers.

Passover teaches us how ephemeral the status of our existence might be. Originally invited by Pharaoh to live as guests in Goshen in Egypt, the Israelites were considered dangerous aliens by a successor. Though God smote the ensuing Pharaoh and his subjects for enslaving the Israelites, he commanded the former slaves to welcome the stranger, to treat him “as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. “  

It is a lesson to be imparted from generation to generation, in person and, this year, virtually. 

Day 6 of National Emergency, 3 Weeks Till the Seder

Three weeks from tonight, April 8, Jews will gather for the seminal holiday ritual of their religion. Or will they? While for many of today’s chosen people the seder remains a religious experience, for many others it is a secular reaffirmation of their primal heritage. More Jews gather to attend a seder than congregate for any other religious observance. It is so powerful a symbol that even in Auschwitz Jews assembled to observe the Passover seder.

Religious practice—the comforting rituals that have bound parishioners of all faiths to their chosen deity—has been traumatized by the coronavirus. Decades-, centuries-, even millennia-old protocols have been temporarily shelved as clerical and lay leaders improvise alterations to communal customs and religious ceremonies (https://nyti.ms/2vqXY5Y).

Barring a miracle as equivalent as the series of wonders that preceded the Exodus from Egypt, Jews the world over will celebrate the Passover seder in relative solitude, likely not surrounded by the usual numbers of family and friends for fear of viral transmission, unless they defy government and health authorities to gather in numbers larger than ten. 

(As a point of interest and information, the Torah made provisions for the inability of celebrants to attend a seder at the appointed time. Passover could be observed a month later. Of course, there is no surety the pandemic would be tamed by May 7.) 

My earliest memories of a seder are from my pre-bar mitzvah days. In our two floor row house in Brooklyn my parents would convert the ground floor into an open space with a U-shaped dining table that would seat as many as 40 participants depending on my father’s success in adding guests—second or third cousins, friends from Israel or from the “old country”—to the 18 members of our close relatives, aunts, uncles and cousins. 

Even when the seder moved upstairs to our living room after my bar mitzvah and shrank to a more manageable 25, the seder was a raucous affair. Reading from the Maxwell House haggadah, my father and his brother Willy would drone on in a trope that befuddled my brother, sister and me and anyone else who tried to follow along in Hebrew (no English to be heard except for the chattering among my mother and her three sisters which prompted my father’s repeated appeals for them to be quiet). 

Gilda and I took over seder chores about 30 years ago. By then family togetherness had dissolved. My sister Lee moved to Los Angeles 47 years ago. Her family stays in L.A. for Passover. My brother Bernie’s family kept coming north from Maryland until about 10 years ago. 

For more than 3,000 years Jews—religious and sectarian—have gathered from near and far for a seder meal, a symbol of congealed peoplehood.

Our children and grandchildren have joined us from Massachusetts and Nebraska. But will they this year? Is traveling hundreds of miles by car or plane an essential trip during a pandemic? I just don’t know.

Repurposing Stories on Passover and Kutsher's

I don’t know if NBC News and ABC News do this, but CBS News is a practitioner of “repurposed copy”. In other words, stories done for the daily evening news often find their way onto CBS Sunday Morning or some other news broadcast. It’s all part of the new dynamic of trying to fill airtime devoted to news, which seems to be expanding, with staffs that seems to be constantly contracting. Nothing wrong with that, especially since we repurposed all the time on Chain Store Age, using material from our Web site in the monthly magazine. More to the immediate point, I’m about to repurpose two posts from my first year of blogging, posts chosen because of their link to current events. The first commemorates preparations for Passover which begins tonight. The second also comes from that first year and is reprinted because of the death of Helen Kutsher, matriach of the Catskills resort Kutsher’s Country Club.

Gilda and I figured out this morning it is 25 years since she began cooking and hosting the annual Passover seder for some two dozen family and friends. Back on April 2, 2010, I paid tribute to my mother’s yeoman prior work for this most Jewish of all holidays:

Passover Wonders

How did she do it?

How did my mother, who worked full-time with my father in his business, manage to cook and store food for 20 to 30 people for our annual Passover seders when all she had was an old oven and stovetop and a small International Harvester refrigerator-freezer?

It’s always baffled my brother, sister and me, especially when I see the preparations Gilda makes each year for our seder of equivalent size, the food she cooks in advance and stores in our two fridges with their freezers and our stand-alone freezer.

Our mother no doubt bartered space in neighbors’ kitchens in exchange for portions of gefilte fish and matzah ball soup. I’d be in charge of delivering the goods each year, not one of my favorite chores as I was rather possessive of her handiwork. Her gefilte fish was an exquisite blend of pike, carp and whitefish she personally bought from the fish monger’s truck at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Avenue W, a block and a half from our home in Brooklyn. Simply put, her gefilte fish was to die for.

My sister Lee loved her matzah balls (I was more partial to the kreplach she made for Rosh Hashanah). Each matzah ball was exceptionally soft and fluffy. So it was more than surprising when one year everyone almost broke their teeth, literally almost broke their teeth, on her matzah balls. Without telling anyone, she had hidden a blanched almond inside each sphere. Her unsuspecting family and guests assumed their knedlach would easily melt inside their mouths. The crunch and resistance we all felt made everyone uneasy. Too embarrassed to say anything, we wondered if she had somehow mixed chicken bones into the matzah ball batter. When she finally noticed everyone avoiding finishing their knedlach, she volunteered that she had hidden a “surprise” inside each matzah ball. Enlightened and relieved, we gobbled up the rest, and thereafter joked about it at all subsequent seders.

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, we lived in an attached two-story row house. Before I turned 13, we’d hold the seder in the basement. Tables would be arranged in a U-shape. Our immediate family, aunts, uncles and first cousins totaled 18. On top of that came mostly people related to our father by kinship or friendship, swelling our numbers to 25 or more, as many as 40 one year. Uncle Willy, who ran a dry goods store on First Avenue in the East Village in Manhattan, always brought us new clothing for the holiday.

In the 1960s, after the seder moved upstairs, my brother Bernie and I were tasked with rearranging furniture to accommodate a long table run down the center of the living room. We moved the couch and chairs into the dinette. Our father presided at one end. Willy sat a few seats down. Our mother sat at the far end, gossiping with her three sisters. In between, the nine cousins, two more uncles and assorted guests, most of whom could not read Hebrew, and even if they could they would find it hard to follow the melody Dad and Uncle Willy brought with them from Galicia. But that didn’t stop our father from plowing ahead in Hebrew, expecting participation from his Hebrew school-trained children and at least silent devotion from everyone else. He didn’t skip a word in the haggadah. It was an excruciatingly long service, broken up by the not-so-occasional remonstrance from Dad to be quiet. When the noise overwhelmed him, he’d threaten not to continue, which made us all the more fidgety and anxious to get to the midpoint of the haggadah so we could eat.

Food. It always came back to the food. No matter how long the service, no matter how many at the table, the seder hinged on the quality and quantity of the food. Mom piled on the food. Each year she’d make a crown roast, until she traded that signature dish in for rack of lamb. Same meat, different presentation. Almost 25 years ago, it became too much of a burden for her to prepare the seder. We knew it was time to transfer the torch, er, spatula, to the next generation, to Gilda, when there wasn’t enough meat to adequately serve everyone. Because there were no leftovers, Mom thought she had ordered “just enough.” It was one of the first signs she was failing to appreciate reality.

Over the years, the cast-in-stone liturgy of our haggadah has changed as we graduated from the Maxwell House version Dad used to a text assembled by Bernie, then me and now our daughter Ellie. The themes of liberation, equality, emancipation, egalitarianism remain constant, updated to reflect current humanitarian concerns. Constant, too, has been the function of the meal, a celebration of plenty, a symbol our generation are not slaves in Egypt, or shtetl dwellers in eastern Europe, or refugees squeezed into Lower East Side tenements.

I witness how exhausted Gilda is after preparing the seder meal, how taxing it is for her to do this while working full-time, how physical it is even with all the modern day cooking conveniences. And I wonder how our mother was able to do it all. It was, no doubt, another miracle of Biblical proportions.

********************************

Helen Kutsher was proud of her resort, not the least for being the last of the “grande dame” hotels that transformed the Catskill Mountains surrounding Monticello, NY, into a Borscht Belt of oversized, cholesterol-filled meals and nightclub acts featuring mostly Jewish singers and comedians including Alan King, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. The heyday of Kutsher’s, Grossinger’s, The Concord, Brown’s et al was the 1950s and 1960s. All but Kutsher’s have closed. As a youngster, I tagged along with my parents to many of these hotels. Gilda never experienced the Catskills. Here’s what happened 25 years ago when she suggested we spend a romantic weekend at Kutsher’s:

Borscht-Belted

In 1988, when our son, Dan, was 9, he went to sleepaway camp for the first time for eight weeks. With the assistance of a neighbor who agreed to watch the then 6-1/2 year old Ellie, Gilda planned a romantic weekend getaway for us. Having never experienced a Catskills resort when growing up, Gilda craved the experience. She had seen an article in The NY Times describing a renovation of Kutsher’s in Monticello. She made a reservation and sent a $50 deposit.

Now, I had accompanied my parents to many Catskills hotels when growing up. They were generally pleasant, but by 1988 I had been exposed to, shall we say, a more refined world. I traveled across the country for my job, staying in many first class hotels and resorts. Gilda had often shared the resort trips with me as they centered around conferences where the presence of a spouse was a definite advantage in meeting and mingling with sources. Despite Kutsher’s renovations as described in The Times, I was less than enthusiastic about trekking off to the Catskills. Having just mastered riding a bicycle at age 39 (a subject of a future blog), I was happy to learn Kutsher’s had it own bike trail around its lake and provided bikes free of charge.

The fateful weekend in early July came. I admit I did not muster much enthusiasm. Gilda was rightfully upset with my attitude. As we pulled onto the hotel driveway, the same canopy depicted in the picture in last Friday’s paper appeared. It was not the equal to the Del Coronado outside San Diego. Or the Boca Raton Country Club. Or the Arizona Biltmore, the Scottsdale Princess or the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, all hotels Gilda and I, often with our children, had enjoyed. I sensed her trepidation as we entered the small registration desk just inside the front door.

She wanted to see the room before we officially checked in. The registration clerk asked why. Just to be sure. We didn’t want a room with double beds. Reluctantly she agreed to show us the room. As we walked across the lobby, I detected a strange odor. It reminded me of a used kitty litter box. I suggested perhaps the carpet was mildewed and was immediately rebuffed. It was new flooring, I was told. New or old, I said, the carpet smelled.

I glanced out the picture window and saw the “lake” with the bike path surrounding it. It appeared to be about a half acre in size. Yes, bikes were available, but they couldn’t be ridden anywhere off the paved path around the lake. So much for any biking expedition.

We arrived at our room and stepped into the 1950s. It had separate beds; the carpeting was a long shag of deep orange. We demanded a different room. Reluctantly Kutsher’s agreed. We asked to see it. Again the clerk was less than enthusiastic. The second room had a single bed and decent carpeting. But its only window was higher than six feet from the ground. Standing on the bed I could see out the window. If I craned my neck I could see part of the pool. But most visible was the building next door. Had I wanted to see a building when I looked out the window, I told the clerk, I would have stayed in Brooklyn.

Gilda was now convinced Kutsher’s was not going to be part of our weekend escape. We were prepared to forfeit the $50 deposit, but amazingly Kutsher’s refunded it. We weren’t ready to return home, so we decided to check out the Concord in Kiamesha Lake. Before registering, however, we opted to scope out the hotel. It seemed acceptable until we came upon a yoga class in progress. How can I say this delicately? The yoga instructor could be a contestant on the show,The Biggest Loser. No way, Gilda said, was she staying in a hotel that disrespected its clientele with such an instructor.

Disappointed, we headed homeward till I remembered about the Inn at Lake Waramaug in Litchfield County, Conn. It’s a beautiful setting, with individual cottages. No TVs. No phones. Just the opportunity to commune with nature. That is, unless it’s pouring rain, which started to fall right after we arrived and kept coming down well into Saturday morning, by which time we decided that White Plains wasn’t too bad a place to spend a romantic weekend by ourselves, with Ellie down the street playing with Issa and her mother, Angeles.

Random Thoughts

Less for More: The Commerce Department reported this morning retail sales rose 0.4% in August, a better than expected showing, indicating consumer spending and the economy might be firmer than originally thought. Among the sectors of the retail industry said to be doing well are dollar stores, department stores and warehouse clubs.

I can vouch for the warehouse clubs. I’m a big Costco shopper, but I did notice one troubling change in the retailer’s merchandise offering. In case you’re not aware of it, bathroom tissue—toilet paper, in the more common vernacular—is among the best sellers at Costco. A bundle of Charmin Ultra Soft contains 30 rolls. But the Charmin rolls now being sold are just 173.2 sq. ft. long, down 7.6% from the 187.5 sq. ft. of two months ago. The price, however, has not gone down. It’s gone up, by 50 cents (2.6%) to $19.99.

Costco is not alone in practicing a strategy of reduced content. Indeed, it’s most often the supplier that makes the decision to package less product (e.g., that 13 oz. can of Maxwell House coffee is history; it now holds just 11.5 oz.). Some companies are honest enough to reduce the container, thus alerting the buyer to the switch. Most, however, just give you less for your money. They usually couch their actions by claiming less product is preferable to higher shelf prices.

Of course it’s a bogus claim, since the actual price per unit goes up. They just assume most consumers will be too dumb or indifferent to notice their wallets are being wiped clean.


Sports Break: There’s no better way to watch a football game than to pre-record it. You can zip through commercials and, more importantly, minimize the air time of the inane announcers (this also works for baseball games. Just remember to record the show following any game as extra innings, overtime, or just slow execution usually means the game runs longer than the allotted broadcast time. You don’t want to miss out on that, hopefully, exciting finish).

When I began following football in the early 1960s, I used to watch the NY Giants on TV with the sound off (sorry Chris Schenkel) while listening to the radio broadcast of the game. Marty Glickman did the WNEW Radio play by play, Al DeRogatis the color commentary. DeRo analyzed the action and often predicted what the next play would be. One of the worst losses in Giants football history was the day in 1968 NBC tapped DeRogatis as the color analyst for its national broadcasts.

It’s generally agreed football is more action-packed than baseball. Each game takes roughly three hours to complete. Yet, if you do a time and motion study of the average nine inning baseball game and four quarter football game, they contain about the same amount of real playing time, about 15 minutes. That’s leaves about two hours and forty-five minutes spent thinking about what pitch to throw, meeting in the huddle, television timeouts for commercials, and changes of sides each half inning and football quarter.

In other words, you can save about two hours of your life by recording a baseball or football game and watching it later. As long as you keep yourself in a media blackout, your pleasure will be sustained. During last year’s World Series, I set the DVR to record Game 3 and told my dinner companions I was on a media blackout. One of them didn’t hear, as she cheerfully informed me on the drive home she just checked her Blackberry and the Yankees were winning 6-2 (on the way to an 8-5 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies). Needless to say, I was more than a little upset. But at least the Yanks were winning.

I’m not too sure about this year. After the Yanks’ fourth straight loss (and third walk-off loss during this road trip) and their displacement from first place by the Tampa Bay Rays, I’m not too confident about their chances in the post-season. They just don’t seem to be a team of destiny this year. Suspect starting pitching and nagging injuries might do them in. Plus, their batters seem to go through sustained cold spells. After being super in August, Mark Teixeira is back to his early season funk. Derek Jeter is decidedly not Derek Jeter these last two months. And Robinson Cano has lost his batting eye discipline.

Getting back to football, I thought the Giants-Carolina Panthers game was as professional as watching two junior varsity teams play. It’s a long season. Hopefully Giants receivers will hold onto more balls and the offensive line and running backs will show more life. The defense, however, looked decent. But they were going up against a less than great quarterback. This Sunday against Peyton Manning will be more instructive.


Evidence suggests that hummingbirds have returned to White Plains. But I’ve yet to have a sighting.

White Plains is a stopover on their migration south for the winter, so I put out the red liquid food in late August. The nectar keeps dropping in the bottle, but so far not one hummingbird has chosen to hover when I’m around.

I’m getting lots of other birds dropping by the birdseed feeders even though I stopped the handouts about two months ago when coyotes started prowling the neighborhood. About 5 am I heard one or more coyotes howling (don’t ask why I was up at such an ungodly hour).