The Shabbos dinner dishes had been cleared from the dining room table along with the candlesticks and replaced by a light blue plastic tablecloth and two decks of sealed Bicycle playing cards. There was a dessert plate, fork, spoon, coaster, and napkin at each place at the table. The aroma of roast chicken and potatoes was slowly displaced by the bouquet wafting from the freshly baked cinnamon-sour cream coffee cake and rugelach on the kitchen counter, which were patiently waiting to be part of a coffee-tea- cake-Crown Royal combo to be served later in the evening.
It was a ritual: every Friday night I had dinner at my parents’ house. As soon as it was over, I’d kiss Mom and Dad goodbye and leave. Usually I left before the guests arrived but tonight I was hanging around, sipping a beer, killing time before meeting some pals.
I was in the den watching the Tigers take on the Yankees. It was a cool May evening, early in the season, the windows were open, and I could hear the cars pulling into the driveway. My parents’ friends were arriving for Shabbos poker.
The players were Holocaust survivors. Four or five couples. My mother and father weren’t concentration camp survivors, but they were of that vintage and lucky enough to have gotten out of Poland just before the war started. They made it to Palestine, and stayed there long enough for it to become Israel, then capitulated to relatives’ pleas and came...
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