The Search for Ernesto Gonzales

A week before Passover, Pacific Parkway is a slapstick of shtetl chaos. Mothers beat rugs with bungalow tennis racquets while fathers reach for the year’s Tim Tams that have fused with their van’s carpet. Inside the staggered buildings, each with its terrace just wide enough to build a sukkah in the fall, daughters tend to carp in bathtubs while sons drag furniture and slide over the floor, sweeping up dust mites and any other chometz looking molecules. Wealthy residents turn to professionals, wheeling their cars to the Forman Street Car Wash for the Passover Special. The manager caught on a few years earlier when a bearded man in white shirt and black pants tipped him fifty dollars to take special care of his Town & Country. Now he hangs a sign in his window every April that reads Best Passover Cleaning In Town. April is always his best month.

In yeshiva, the children cut and dot construction paper into matzoh while joyously singing of the ten plagues of Egypt that killed thousands and set millions free. They repeat the Four Questions and list the foods of the seder plate. They are taught the dangers of chometz, the forbidden bready foods of Passover. They are taught that, more dangerous than swallowing an unchewed grape or crossing the street without looking both ways, simply seeing chometz on Pesach can lead a child, even an adult, to kareis, spiritual or physical exile from God and the Jewish people — a fate, the Talmud tells us, much worse than death by choking. Parents tie their pantry knobs together with a piece of baker’s string, not to keep the children out, but to keep the chometz in. Families shoo rice and beans from the houses, for one might mistake a wayward noodle for a grain of rice and eat chometz by accident.

Every year, a few days before Passover, the Jews of Woodsberg sell their chometz through Rabbi Teitelbaum, the town’s head rabbi and most joyous figure. Short, pot-bellied, with a wispy beard and a smile for everyone, he sells the chometz in every Woodsberg pantry, restaurant and supermarket without removing a single item. This is accomplished by way of a trusted and ancient Judaic loophole in which a Jew along with two witnesses present a Chometz Sales Contract to a non-Jew. In this case, that non-Jew is Sergeant Mike Winslow, one of the few non-Jews on good terms with what lesser civil servants have referred to as that cultish horde. After signing the contract that gives Sgt. Winslow legal ownership over all of Woodsberg’s chometz for the duration of Passover, thus legally disavowing all Jews from the chometz in their homes, a donation to the police benevolence fund is left on his desk as a gentleman’s guarantee that the sergeant won’t actually eat or sell any of the chometz he now owns. The exchange, worth over two million dollars, is complete when Sgt. Winslow hands Rabbi Teitelbaum a one-dollar bill, the amount for which he has agreed to buy...