The choking guilt would incapacitate me for hours at a time. G-d is in charge, they’d all tell me, and while my mind knew they were right, my heart countered with But what if…, and it always had the final say.

My love for chraime comes from my mother’s side of the family: full-blooded Moroccan going back centuries. My mother learned to prepare this dish of spicy fish, special for Shabbos, on an outdoor firepit in her hometown of Marrakesh; thinking of it now makes my mouth water. I’m just as crazy about chicken paprikash, a gift from my deep Romanian roots on my father’s side. I’m the quintessential galus Yid/Yahud.

By age ten, my mother worked odd jobs to earn a coin a week to buy fish and flour for Shabbos. Their poverty was beyond imagination — their rat-infested hut had nothing in it, not even beds — and at 17 my mother was married off to a man from Spain 15 years her senior. His abuse brought the family’s desperation to the next level, and so one dark night a few years later, my mother and her three children, her sister, brother-in-law, and parents sneaked across the border and made their way to Eretz Yisrael in search of a fresh start.

At the same time but worlds away, my father grew up sheltered in the comfort of a warm, close and well-to-do family on the outskirts of Cluj (Klausenberg), in Transylvania. He’d reminisce about traveling with his father to daven with the Satmar Rebbe, and about his family’s unique Melaveh Malkah meals that could only exist in a vanished world: eight children around the table, each awaiting their turn with excitement, as Zeidy would play his violin and sing each one a song composed just for them. Years later in Auschwitz, my father’s brother would sing him these songs to remind him of home.

Just before the end of the war, my 13-year-old father was thrown into a gas chamber. There he sat for four hours, sure that each breath was his last as he waited for the gas that he knew would asphyxiate him to death.

Eventually the door opened and the guard announced, “You’re the first ones ever to get out of here alive.”

Apparently, a death march was thought to be less incriminating to the retreating Nazis than piles of human remains. My father survived the death march due only to the strength and heroism of his brother, who schlepped him along the entire way. After the war, he settled in Eretz Yisrael and eventually married my mother (who had received a get when her former husband also arrived in Eretz Yisrael).

I was born in Ashdod in 1971, a cherished son to adoring parents, and when I was nine, my family moved to Los Angeles. My parents opened a series of kosher restaurants — including the first kosher Chinese restaurant in L.A. (called Golan, you might remember it) — and for nine years, life was sweet. They spent all their waking hours at work, “mitzeis hachamah ad tzeis haneshamah,” as they liked to say of the restaurant business, but I couldn’t have asked for more wonderful or loving parents. Not only wouldn’t they shoo away tzedakah collectors who wandered into the restaurant looking for donations, and not only would they always give some money, but they’d treat each collector as an honored guest. My mother herself would serve them a full meal, with dessert always included. Every single day.

Motzaei Pesach 1989. Good Moroccans that we are, Mimouna is one of the highlights our year; families get together to bake and eat sweet chometz pastries called mofletas, and many symbolic items are displayed, such as coins as a siman for parnassah, and hamsahs to ward off the ayin hara. Lots of flour, honey, and milk are placed on the colorfully dressed table — I don’t recall why — as well as mint leaves, dried fruits, and candy — all consumed, of course, in traditional Moroccan garb. It’s festive and social and fun, but this year I wasn’t interested. A few weeks earlier my father had bought me my first computer, and it absorbed me completely — no Mimouna treat could compare. The festivities were at my married brother’s house, and I told my family to leave without me. Shortly before they left, my mother came into my room and did a pirouette.

“What do you think of my dress?” she asked. It was brown, and looked okay to me.

“You look fine, just go,” I answered, barely taking my eyes off the computer. Lackluster response noted, she changed into a white dress with a black belt.

The only thing more heavenly to me than computer programming was computer programming along with a bottle of Coke. Problem was, my mother would hide the Coke from me, knowing I’d finish a whole bottle in one sitting. So about a half-hour after my family left, I called my brother’s house to beg my mother to tell me where the Coke was hidden (much later, I found it in the giant soup pot).

My sister-in-law picked up the phone. She sounded hysterical.

“Come right now! Your mother died!” I thought I heard her say, but of course that made no sense — she was perfectly fine when she left the house.

My sister took the phone. “Just come, it’s very important,” was all she’d tell me.

I heard weeping in the background. My 17-year-old brain mostly succeeded in convincing me that they were probably pulling a prank to get me to come to the Mimouna celebration… but I was still very shaken, and asked my neighbor to come with me just in case.

We raced down Victory Boulevard, turned right on Coldwater Canyon Avenue… and came to a sudden halt. The road ahead was barricaded, the area too-brightly lit. I desperately tried to cling to denial, but the sight of ambulances weakened my grip. We approached the cop diverting traffic, and he barked at us to leave the area. He looked mad as a rabid dog.

“Was there an accident with a Chevy Blazer?” I asked, my heart pounding like a jackhammer.

He took a closer look at me and then asked me my name. When I said “Berkovits,” he pointed up Coldwater, in the direction of my brother’s house.

“Go over there, your family’s waiting for you,” he said, suddenly poker-faced.

Maybe there was a car accident and my mother is just hurt, I thought. But as we went around the barricade and got closer to the house, things were eerily silent. No paramedics bent over stretchers, no frenzied rushing about, no sign of a mangled Chevy Blazer, just a man handcuffed on the ground, and a yellow taped-off area with a white cloth in its center.