1
Aunt Masha was furious when Uncle Eli, a furniture seller by profession, spilled wine on the white tablecloth while praising the sturdiness of his table. “Only as sturdy as the mind of the man who sits at it,” she admonished, taking his silver wine goblet away, and mopping up the spill with her napkin, as the lights of the Shabbat candles shimmered in her eyes.
But Uncle Eli wasn’t bothered. He didn’t reproach her or answer back. He just smiled, reached for the bottle of his homemade sweet wine and poured some into his water glass. No matter that the wine was diluted. He lifted his glass and winked at me across the table conspiratorially. “L’chaim!” he said, and downed the contents of the glass. His daughter, Raizel, tried hard to hide her giggle across the table, and his son, Hirschel, the talmid chochom of the family, looked up from his sefer, cleared his throat and stuck his nose back into Rav Yisroel Salanter’s discourses on piety.
Uncle Eli used to teach me how to make kosher origami animals by the dozen out of butcher paper (God forbid Masha should ever see a traif animal in the house) and when I was little I would play with the spirals of wood that fell off the intricately carved animal-shaped wooden mezuzah cases he used to make. They always looked like corkscrew pig-tails to me, but I never told him that. I don’t think he ever sold any of those cases. He would place the little white bundles of animal parchment, snug as babies in their coffins, into the hollows of those cases, and they would rock like cradles when he put them down. Then he would line...
Subscribe now to keep reading
Please enter your email to log in or create a new account.