T

he square of grass is shorn to the ground, balls resting in its grooved border. Maurice leans on his club; the boys haven’t all arrived yet.

“Maurice, what you been up to, mate? Haven’t seen you around all that much these days.”

Sheldon’s an old friend. “Nothing much, just business trips. It’s the season, that’s all.”

“Yeah, yeah, they all say that.” Sheldon grunts. “And here I thought you were helping Annie clean for Passover this last week or two.”

“Cleaning? Over the game? C’mon, Shel, you know me better than that.”

Sheldon slaps him on the shoulder. “So, you’re back on terra firma for the next while, eh? Not that same without you here, pal.”

Maurice doesn’t reply, there are figures in the distance, walking toward the bowling green. Is it the rest of their group? He squints and the people take form — a Hassidic man and his children, overdressed for sunny late March. Distaste flavors his tongue and he looks away too fast.

“Hmm, Maurice, whaddaya say? No more business trips and leaving us missing our best man here? Leave off the slogging till next winter?”

Maurice forces a laugh. Where were the others? If they didn’t get here soon those Hassidic oddities would be asking to join, that’s what would happen.

“Wait until winter, you think? Tell that to the boss.”

Finally, there they are. Howard and Jack and the rest of them. He should make the most of this game, his last for the next while. 

“I won’t be here tomorrow, either,” he tells Sheldon. “Got another trip to fit in before the holidays. Only back right before Passover.”

“I should’ve gone into business,” Shel grumbles. “Accounting is so boring. We never get to go anywhere.”

Maurice tries to smile.

“Where’re you off to, anyway? Hong Kong? Pakistan? South Korea?”

Maurice gives a little snort. “No. Nowhere as interesting as that.”

Sheldon gives him a wink and his paunch wobbles a little as he leans in closer and puts on a fake Shakespearian accent. “Oh, pray tell, dear friend of my youth. To where dost thou seek to journey?”

To the land of shattered glass and blood.

Maurice swallows.

“Berlin.”

Ever since he showed Annie how to use Whatsapp, she likes to video-call every time they speak. Maurice rolls his eyes before swiping the screen.

“I’m about to take off, is everything okay?”

Her voice is bright and too loud in the hushed business-class seating. “That’s super, Maurice, I caught you just in time, I wanted to tell you…” 

He quickly adjusts the volume, pops in earbuds.

“Yeah, go on, what’s that about the Seder?”

“They’re coming, they’re all coming, isn’t that nice? Everyone together for a change…”

Apprehension steals from stomach to throat and sears his tone. “Annie? Who is ‘everyone’?”

“What do you mean, who is everyone?” she looks affronted, mouth turning downward. “Our children. Sarah and David and their baby, and Jason, you know.”

There is a sick, sick feeling in his gut.

“Jason… what?”

Annie’s voice is suddenly small. “You know. Jason and… her. Penny.”

“Penelope.” He drops the word with some distaste. “No. Not at our Seder.”

Her face is distorted by an awkward angle and the camera lens, but he can still see it darken, the eyebrows draw together, lips stretch tight. “Moe, face it, they’re practically engaged, they’ll likely get married. She’s going to be our daughter-in-law. You have to start—”

There is a stewardess coming up the aisle, checking seat belts.

“She is not our daughter-in-law,” he hisses. “Not now. Not ever. She’s a—” He stops short, mainly because he’s in public and needs to watch his language. 

“I don’t understand you!” Annie shrills, her face all eyes, opening too wide and then blinking rapidly. “All along you preach acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. Everyone has a right to choose their own path, you said. And suddenly it’s no. I don’t like Sarah becoming more religious. I don’t like Jason dating a non-Jew. You didn’t follow in your father’s footsteps, did you?”

“Excuse me, sir, please switch off your phone for takeoff.” The stewardess is standing over him. 

“Annie, I need to go.”

“…so accept it, okay? He’s an adult, he’s choosing his own way, so let him choose! He’s—”

“Annie. I need to hang up.”

“Sir, if you don’t mind, please finish your conversation.”

“…and we need to be welcoming, not any of that Cold War act that you did last time, really, Moe.” She pauses for breath. Finally.

“Bye, Annie, I need to go.”

He gives the stewardess an apologetic smile. When she’s flounced on up the aisle, he quickly Whatsapps Annie: I’m sorry but we’re taking off. We’ll speak later.

Her reply is instantaneous: Okay but please please remember what I said, okay?

His head is aching. Aching all the way to his chest. He won’t forget.

He doesn’t bother replying.

His time in Berlin is marked with restlessness. The days are long and exhausting, the nights spent working until he dozes off at his desk. The queen-sized bed remains untouched for two nights. It’s hard to sleep in luxury in the city that killed your grandparents.

Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and the childhood he might have had.

The third day, he is suddenly empty. Finished. The meetings are over, he’s taken the CEO of their biggest client out to brunch, and the paperwork he had pored over until the wee hours is done. 

His flight is late at night; he’ll leave to the airport sometime in the early evening. And now he has six hours in Berlin, six hours and nothing to do with them.

Sleep, says his body.

Annie, says his mind.

But the bed, with its perfectly pressed linen, disgusts him. He saw the chambermaid making her rounds this morning, crisp uniform and flaxen hair. And those watery blue eyes, of course. He’s seen too many blue eyes here. It makes him want to scream.

And he has barely spoken to Annie since their aborted conversation on the airplane. At a meeting, sorry, back home tomorrow, he messages her with a twinge of guilt. Sometimes a man had to protect his sanity.

His limbs ache, agitated. He needs to get up, go out, do something. Bowling, golf. Yeah, right. In Berlin. Playing with his grandparents’ murderers, that’s all he needs.

Maurice opens Google and types in attractions in Berlin. Instantly, he faces an array of options. He clicks one at random.

Berlin. The capital of Germany. Politics, culture, media, the Philharmonic Orchestra.

No. He doesn’t want music from the beasts who sent babies to their deaths to the strains of Mozart.

The Brandenburg Gate. Museum Island. The rebuilt Reichstag, perish the thought. The Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, now that interests him. He scrolls down quickly, parks and palaces and museums and — wait.

The seventh entry catches his eye. A picture of a jagged building, all steel and glass. A plane of grass, a few skeletal trees. And the caption: Jewish Museum Berlin.

There is anger and vengeance and blood rushing through his veins. 

He grabs a water bottle from the mini-bar in his suite and leaves his briefcase behind. Out, out, he needs to go somewhere. He’ll go to that park, the one with that palace, he’ll walk paths beside manicured flowerbeds and benches and he’ll think about nothing.

There were signs by the park gates, says his father’s voice, grating and hollow. No entry to dogs or Jews. 

The receptionist gives him a reproving look, like he’s disturbing her. 

“Taxi, please,” he says. 

“To where?” Her accent is harsh, guttural. 

His phone screen is dark and his mind goes blank.

“The Jewish Museum,” he blurts.

The museum is a cavern of ghosts, whispers of death echoing down long, empty hallways. He has made a mistake in coming here, a terrible mistake. Maurice turns to leave, to find his way through the maze of stairs and underground tunnels that led him inside.

“Man, this is eerie,” yelps a boy in an Abercrombie sweatshirt. He’s part of a group, teenage boys and girls and two or three jovial counselors somewhere at the back. They fill up the stairs and entranceway, settling down to hear their guide speak.

Maurice inches closer, tries to part the sea of humanity. Futile.

“Guys, quiet, let the guide talk,” calls one of the group leaders.

“…to memorialize the Shoah, the Holocaust.” The guide’s voice is reedy, thickened with an accent. 

“When did all this happen?” calls a girl, jean miniskirt and long, loose hair. Dark hair. Brown eyes. 

When did all this happen?

The guide stops short.

“1939.”

He states the year with emphasis, disapproval. 

“Oh, about 80 years ago, then? Wow.” The girl shakes her head and swipes a quick code into her smartphone. “I wanna video this. My Mom will love it. She’s so into these history things.”

Maurice feels sick.

The guide coughs and waits for silence again.

“See how the architecture of the building itself tells a story,” he says, voice rising and cracking a little. “See how it’s designed, the dim lighting, the atmosphere. And the two hallways. See.”

He gestures, and as one, the group turn heads in Maurice’s direction. Instinctively, he looks too. 

“You are standing at a crossroads,” intones the guide, his voice now deeper, a little stronger. “You are a Jew in the 1930s. There’s writing on the wall, inscribed in blood. There’s broken glass and rabbis being beaten on the streets. Some want to run, leave their homes and families and properties behind, but others say they’re fools. Keep your head down low, wait it out, the bad winds will pass and life will resume. And the choice is memorialized and embedded within the very structure of this museum: the split into two paths. One, leading to Exile. One, an inevitable track toward the Holocaust.”

The group is finally silent. He, too, is drawn into the story. He can’t leave now, not before he’s seen it all. Maurice takes a step forward, toward the sharp corner where two paths diverge beneath thin strips of illuminated bulbs. Right path, left path. The Axis of Exile. The Axis of Holocaust.

So this is the choice. This is what it all boils down to.

Maurice breathes past a squeezing in his chest. Exile. Extermination. Confusion. Destruction.

He turns right. 

The corridor is narrow and winding. There are steps and turns and strange twists where he wonders if he is going back on himself. The building is quiet, like it’s sucking in breath and holding it. Like it has strangled life inside a chokehold and released the remains: fear, despair, grief.

The Axis of Exile. A million steps to nowhere.

And then, suddenly, a door leading out to a garden. The Garden of Exile? How bizarre.

He wonders what Annie would think, if she would see the paradox like he does, or if she would just smile and say, Well, a breath of air can’t hurt, or My, the sun after that dark hallway hurts my eyes.

The garden is lined with steel pillars, massive hulking things that tower up to the sky and swallow the weak sunlight. Maurice walks between the pillars, touching their cold silence. He cranes his neck, searching for a crack of sky. And then he sees that the tops, the very uppermost peaks where ice metal meets blue sky, hold plants. The seeds have sprouted, green shoots and branches and dozens of little leaves. 

Growth after exile.

So that is the Garden.

The building is too warm after the long minutes he spent outside. Too warm, and too dark. Maurice almost runs back to that split in the hallway. The group has gone, presumably up route of the foreboding Axis of Holocaust.

He should leave now. 

Disquiet is bubbling up inside him. He is compelled forward, onto the path his father walked. Toward his doom.

Maurice takes a step into the narrowing corridor. Every breath tastes of fear. The path ahead darkens. Single spotlights illuminate showcases: one woman’s personal effects. A tiny girl’s dress. A letter from a relative, begging Aunt Frieda to leave Germany for the safe shores of America.

Relics from Auschwitz. The lone witnesses that survived. 

His father survived too, but his spirit — if he had ever had one — had been burnt on the pyres with his parents’ ashes. Miraculously, Papa had remembered the Holy Law — but he had forgotten how to live, to love, to smile.

His way is not his father’s way.

There is a steel door ahead. Maurice wonders if it is locked. But faintly, he hears the echo of voices. The group of teenagers, he realizes. They are inside. 

He leans against the heavy door and it opens.

“The Holocaust Tower,” he hears the guide intoning. “Look around. You’ll see there is nothing here. No items, no displays. Only powerful, evocative expression in the architecture itself.”

The tower is tall. Concrete. Windowless. There is a draft though, and grayish light. Maurice cranes his neck, up and up. And his heart jumps to his throat. The walls of the towers are leaning in, four walls thinning to a narrow opening that is unroofed. Open to the sky.

His skin is cold and clammy and he needs air.

“The steel door and the concrete walls are designed to seem like the gas chambers of the concentration camps,” explains the tour guide. “They recreate the feeling of being compressed, closed in, trapped.”

“Ugh, I feel claustrophobic.” It’s the dark-haired girl again. “Can we open the door already?”

“Yeah, I can’t, like, breathe,” complains a boy wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. “It’s been ages. We get the feeling, man.”

The group murmurs in agreement.

There is blood rushing to Maurice’s face, his throat, his heart. He feels every bit of churning emotion that has been unearthed today, and it is all pounding inside him, roiling to the surface, exploding outward.

He stands by the door, almost blocking it, and he opens his mouth without knowing what he is going to say.

“What are you even doing here?” he bursts out to the group of teenagers.

Instant silence, then a snicker.

“Yo, mate, I had the same question this morning,” mutters Short-Sleeves.

“I don’t understand you all,” Maurice says. His voice is low, but the sound doesn’t have far to carry, and the walls echo his words back to him. “Don’t you realize people died in the gas chambers? They choked to death, they scraped at the concrete walls and steel doors with bare fingernails and they gasped for air, and they died. This isn’t claustrophobia. This isn’t I can’t breathe in here. You don’t know what can’t breathe means. Or what starving means. Or torture. Or watching your family being burnt to ashes.”

“But nowadays, it’s not like that anymore,” says a girl with a wad of chewing gum stuffed in one cheek.

“Right. This all happened like a hundred years ago,” the dark-haired girl agrees. 

Years and decades and a lifetime of confusion and pain and shadows of murdered ghosts thunder through his mind. “A hundred years ago?” he splutters. “It’s our parents! Our grandparents! Our national history, the tragedy of all those who could’ve lived, who could’ve been born! The babies! The children! The unborn families of one and a half million children who never grew to adulthood! It’s our past! How can you not care?”

The boys and girls shrug and titter. One of the leaders, a gangly, ginger-haired boy who looks not much older than the group in his charge, takes a step forward.

“We’re sorry we upset you, sir, but it’s not the time and place for a debate on Jewish heritage. We’ll be going now, if that’s alright….” And he tactfully, patronizingly, opens the steel door, and ushers the teenagers through.

Maurice leans against the wall, deflated. Defeated. 

Mortified.

The boy in the Abercrombie sweatshirt is the last to leave. He casts a look back at the older man, hunched against the concrete, and his eyes hold pity.

“You know, you’re right that we’re not so concerned with the past,” the boy says quietly. “But we’re a youth group that focuses on building. On the future. That’s what we care about.”

And then he, too, steps out, and the guide follows. The steel door clangs shut, and only Maurice is left, locked in a haunted past.

Annie is sitting at the kitchen table, fingers wrapped around a pencil and her brow furrowed.

“We have a problem,” she says as soon as he walks in.

“Hello to you, too. How was your day?”

Annie waves a hand. She doesn’t go for formalities when she has something important to discuss. “Moe, come look at this.”

The paper is neatly penciled; a ruled chart with a few boxes filled in. But Annie’s cursive script looks darker than usual, pressurized.

“Sarah, Jason, Penny… what is this?”

She purses her lips and flips the notebook shut. “I thought it was obvious. A seating plan, of course.”

“A seating plan.” He repeats, voice dry. “For… what? Six people?”

“Seven, counting baby Shimmy.”

“Simon,” he corrects automatically. Shimmy tastes of past, of forced rituals, of his father’s sharp gaze. Simon, now that’s a fine Jewish-themed name, with no sour memories to go along with it.

Annie rolls her eyes. “Whatever you want to call him.”

“So what’s the issue? Seems easy enough to me. Put everyone in any order you want.”

“As if it could be that simple.” Annie gives a bitter laugh. “Jason won’t go near David. And Sarah and David need their strictly kosher paperware, like they don’t trust my cleaning. And Penny, she has to feel comfortable, maybe between Jason and me? Or do you think Sarah will be better, she’s close in age….”

Seating arrangements, she’s worried about. Like that’s the problem.

“Annie. For the millionth time. We don’t need this… girl… to feel comfortable.” His voice is low, but there’s no way to keep the ice from his tone. “She doesn’t belong at a Passover Seder, don’t you see? Invite her for a regular meal if you need to, tell Jason we’ll take them out to a movie or something, but to bring her into… a religious celebration?”

She looks at him while he speaks, and stays quiet till he’s done, but the expression in her eyes is as blank and not-understanding as the snickering teens he faced in the museum two days before.

“Really, Moe, I don’t see the difference. If you’ll accept her, invite her for other meals or take her out, why is the Seder different? I think it’s just a matter of semantics. How much religion is there involved in the Seder? It’s a traditional family meal, that’s all.”

“That’s right. The Seder is about tradition and family. It’s not the place for a non-Jew.”

“One who is going to become part of our family?”

The words hit so hard, he almost staggers from the force.

“She will not,” he spits out. “Never. I won’t — I don’t allow it. We are Jews, we’re part of something. We have a history. She isn’t part of that.”

Annie looks pained. “But Moe, so what? I know all this, we have a past, national history, looking back and all. But seriously? You need to accept this. It’s Jason’s choice, not ours. He wants this. We owe him our support.”

“We owe it to him to be parents. To tell him what we think. Not to support something that — that goes against — everything that we are.”

“But it doesn’t,” she says in that irksome voice that’s meant to sound reasonable. “We raised him to make choices he believes in, to be ethical, to work hard… and he does. So does Sarah.”

To put their two children in one sentence seems impossibly ludicrous. But she states it so matter-of-factly.

“Then what’s your problem with the seating, if you think everyone’s so similar?” 

She doesn’t even hear the sarcasm. “Just making sure it’s comfortable. That everyone has someone to talk to…” She opens the notebook again and scribbles something. The conversation is over.

Who am I going to talk to? he wants to ask.

“Got it,” she says with a snap of the fingers. “You, David, baby, Sarah, Penny, Jason, me. Everyone should be happy with that… right?”

Suddenly he realizes that Annie truly believes the issue is technical, just a matter of clever place-card arrangements. As far as she is concerned, Penny and her lineage and their legacy and all the confusion in his mind — they’re not even part of the equation. 

He sits with his wife of 33 years, watching her draft a seating plan, feeling indescribably lonely. 

David and Sarah arrive with more suitcases than he and Annie took on their month-long cruise last June. Sarah gets busy in the kitchen, pots and pans and special round matzos that David baked himself with a group of rabbi friends.

Maurice grunts a hello and goes to seek refuge in his office.

Annie serves an early lunch, eggs and salad and crispy fried potatoes. He looks over at David, daring him to ask questions, but his son-in-law seems satisfied.

See? We keep kosher, too. We’re all clean for Passover.

Simon starts to cry from upstairs and Sarah jumps up to fetch him. Maurice sits at the table, staring at his plate. It’s just him and David. The silence is thick with tension.

Annie sits back down, a plate heaped with salad in front of her.

“So, how’s the studying going?” she asks conversationally. 

David looks relieved.

“Great, ba— thank G-d. I’m really enjoying it.”

“Lovely!” Annie chirps. Silence falls again.

“I wonder when Jason’s arriving,” she says a moment later. The atmosphere plunges.

“Look who’s up!” Sarah announces cheerfully. “Say hello to Grandma and Grandpa, Shim-Shim!”

Maurice tries to smile.

There’s a quick knock at the front door, then the sound of someone punching in the code.

“Who’s hoooooooome?” booms Jason. “We’re here!”

We.

Until now, he has fantasized. Maybe, maybe, Penny wouldn’t feel comfortable coming, maybe Jason would realize on his own how wrong it was. Maybe. 

But he is here, and she is behind him, a shy slip of a blonde girl in jeans and a white-and-silver T-shirt.

“Jason. Good to see you, son,” he manages, gruffly.

“Jason! And Penny! Welcome, welcome,” Annie enthuses, sending Maurice a brief glare. “Come sit down. Are you hungry? Would you like an omelette or something?”

Sarah and David exchange glances and move away from the table. “Taking the baby upstairs,” Sarah explains, trying to sound apologetic.

Maurice is angry — angry at their close-mindedness and angry at Annie’s overeager acceptance, angry at Jason’s disregard for his heritage and at Penny for invading their home.

But mostly, he is angry at himself.

The Seder is a study in contrasts.

Annie is quiet, smiling serenely while Maurice stumbles over the words of Kiddush, awkward in front of his son-in-law. David is wearing a velvet yarmulke, a black suit, and a too-serious expression. Jason, across the table, sports a light-blue polo shirt and dark jeans — his formal wear, apparently. 

“Maggid,” announces Sarah.

Jason clears his throat. Penny looks confused, ill at ease. Next to her, little Simon sleeps in his mother’s arms, oblivious.

“Father, may I ask the Four Questions.” He is reading from the script. Maurice nods, playing along, playing his part, the part of thousands of fathers all over and stretching back in time. 

Why is this night different than all the other nights?

In his heart there are so many whys. Why pain and suffering? Why exile, why Holocaust? All the broken pieces of the past come together in a three-letter question against the One Who created it all.

Best to ignore the questions, to shut his heart to the doubts and close his eyes to the jarring image of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed non-Jew celebrating the birth of a nation from the flames of slavery.

“We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” he reads. The words are dusty on his tongue. How does this answer the Four Questions? He doesn’t know. Does it matter?

David takes over. His reading is fast and fluent. Sometimes he reads in Hebrew, which makes Jason crack one-liners and Sarah blush. 

The meal is Annie’s turn in the spotlight. She hovers over her offspring, offering seconds and thirds. She doesn’t notice that he can’t touch a thing.

It’s nearing eleven at night when he clears his throat, makes a motion to move on. He’s getting old, after all. He has a right to be tired.

Penny, ironically, is the only one still fully alert. She’s full of wide-eyed curiosity that makes him feel exposed.

“Why do we get up now?” she asks when they rise to open the door.

Jason stands and stretches. “We’re opening the door for the angels.” He laughs. “The prophet Elijah, actually, to be specific.”

Penny’s eyes widens. “We’ll see him?”

Maurice watches Annie’s eyes crinkle up in a laugh. Sarah is the one to answer, quickly. “No, we don’t see him. But we believe he’s there. And if we look carefully at the big cup of wine, it looks like it’s emptied, just a little.”

“Superstition,” Jason mutters, but he follows his father to the front door nonetheless.

Sarah’s husband does the honors, reciting the paragraph in a sonorous voice.

“Sh, the neighbors are sleeping.” Jason pokes him.

David shrugs and finishes a single decibel lower. “…from under the heavens of the L-rd.”

The heavens of the L-rd. 

Maurice stands outside, letting the night wash over him.

“Dad?”

From inside, he can hear Sarah talking, his wife’s laugh in response. Penny is probably twisting in her seat, wondering whether to follow her fianc? outside or leave him be another few seconds.

Time, a tiny slice of time. It is all he has.

“Jason.” He puts out a hand, touching his son. Words, where are the words? They are floating away, ephemeral on the night breeze. And he has so much inside him, so much pain and confusion and somewhere, buried, the tiniest pearl of truth.

“Everything okay, Dad?”

The last few grains of sand are slipping through the hourglass. They are running out of time.

Where are the words?

There are four sons in the Haggadah, but only one father. Four ways to answer. Four stories to tell. But what to do when the father is confused and small and doesn’t know the answers? And paths diverge before him: exile, extermination, eternity.

“Jason. After Passover… in a week or two… Will you come on a trip with me?”

His son looks down at him, confusion glinting in hazel-brown eyes. 

“Um, maybe? I guess? I’ll check my calendar….”

“Come. Come to Berlin with me. There’s somewhere I want to take you.”

Once we were slaves. To Pharaoh in Egypt. To Hitler in Germany. And… to ourselves, our confusion and questions and yearnings and brokenness.

They step inside, over the threshold and into the light.

And the L-rd took us out, with a strong hand and a mighty arm and many wonders.

And he realizes that the boy in the sweatshirt and the chewing-gum girl, and Annie, all of them, they have it wrong. Because going back is intrinsically linked to moving forward. Facing the past is the best way to create a future. It is the crucible of exile that leads to the shocking, wonderful dawn of homecoming.

But looking back without ever turning to the future will leave life steeped in darkness, and the sunrise of new promise remains elusive.

At the table framed in a halo of light, Jason scrapes his chair back, Penny’s hair glints under candlelight, and tiny lips part in a baby’s cry. Exile, extermination, eternity. For a moment, the world is unsteady beneath his feet, the walls seem to cave in like a dozen steel pillars, but way up high, their peaks sprout hope. ? 

(Excerpted from Calligraphy, Issue 757)