SPECIAL EFFORT I can’t hurt her feelings. She made a special effort to come; there’s no way I’m going to tell her to leave. I feel that way with everybody. They take time out of their busy schedules to be menachem avel. I refuse to intimate in any way that I am tired or that I have just repeated the same story 25 times

N oiselessly they enter and remove their coats. Tucking them over their arms they sit on folding chairs placed around the room around the mourners. From my low perch on my stool their faces loom above me.

“How old was he?” a neighbor ventures.

“Ninety,” I answer.

Faces relax.

Oh, he was old. It’s not that sad, their faces are saying.

Others, like my old school friend, Sasha, takes my hand in hers, “I’m sorry,” she says simply.

A family friend walks in and I want to beg her, Please stop looking like you’ve just gone to your own father’s funeral. Her expression of overwhelming sorrow as she sits down, never taking her eyes off mine unnerves me. Uh-oh, I’m not feeling overwhelming despair, I think, why is she looking at me like that? If I don’t mirror her feelings, she’ll think I’m a terribly unfeeling daughter. I mean, maybe the loss will hit harder after shivah, maybe it won’t. But I’m okay now, stop looking at me like that! I shout in my head.

Some invite conversation. They want to hear all about him, all about his long, amazing life. They know he was in both the American and Israeli army when he was younger. They want to hear the stories.

I look over near the lamp table. My sister Frieda is holding court, entertaining neighbors and business associates. “After my father came back from fighting in the Philippines in World War II,” I hear her say, “he wanted to fight for Israeli independence. So he joined the Irgun, an underground group committed to rousting the last of the British from the land. He called his mother as the boat was leaving for Israel to say goodbye, but she refused to come to the phone. She was so upset he was once again leaving for war.”

When my sisters and I begin with the stories, we’re performers on the stage of shivah stools. The audience sits with faces alternating between awe and, when they think of it, sorrow. I usually begin with my American-born father’s burning desire to fight for the Jews being exterminated in Europe. Sometimes, I start with his early life growing up in prewar Williamsburg and the romantic story of his parents’ marriage.