By then he was in his fifties. My grandmother’s seders were the same as her Thursday-night dinners with the addition of the three M’s: matzo, macaroons, and Manischewitz. And everybody got a hard-boiled egg. An egg has no beginning and no end. It symbolizes eternal life. You dip the egg in a finger bowl filled with warm salt water, tears of mourning shed by Jews. You dip life into tears, then eat it. We set a place for the prophet Elijah and left the back door open. Elijah was the Jewish Santa, dropping by every house on the big night. We didn’t have a Passover service. We didn’t have prayer books. Our religion was getting together at my grandmother’s to eat. Once, on the swings in the playground, a little girl said to my sister, “I’m Catholic. What are you?”“I’m Jo Ann,” my sister said.Hank showed up at the seder with his wife, Hedy. He nodded in an Old World way when we were introduced. He looked more like my grandfather than my grandfather’s son did. Their eyes were the same gray.
