In the years just after World War II, the Passover seder pressed into service every seat in my aunt and uncle’s house, down to the nicked and crayon-stained furniture from my cousins’ bedrooms. Included, of course, were the massive, upholstered oak chairs that completed the dining room set, one of the first major purchases that clinched homeownership for this first American generation. The sticky, vinyl-seated chairs from the kitchen dinette were also jammed around the table, and the wheeled office chairs that had to be lugged from the basement—which occasionally took an elder on an unexpected ride into a wall.
The aging immigrants who gathered rarely spoke of their own flight, at the turn of the twentieth century, from Polish anti-Semitism or the Czar’s army; nor did they connect their escape from Europe to the story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt that they read in stumbling English from the...
University of California Press