purim ), and choose the date for this genocide.
Esther, learning about this plan, bravely runs to the king. Esther knows that it is dangerous to enter the royal chambers unless Ahasuerus has allowed it by showing his golden staff, but she enters anyway.
She finds him in a loving mood.
“Why, Esther, my beauty, what is wrong?”
“What is wrong is that Jewish people are going to all be killed soon! And no one is going to stop it! God might be busy, you never know! Maybe you should do something!”
And he says, “But Esther, my love, why do you care?”
And she tells him, “I care because these are my people. I, the woman you love, am actually a Jew myself,” she says, “a Jew like my mother’s father, the one with the blonde moustache and cornflower-blue eyes.”
The king does not dip her head in the trough over and over, nor send her or her relatives to their deaths in Dachau. Instead, he immediately saves the Jews and sends their enemy Haman to his death. Because of Esther, all the Jews in Persia are saved. Purim is celebrated on the day that the Jews were meant to be destroyed. It is a happy day of mischief and masquerade. Jews are even allowed, no, urged, to get drunk on that day.
At Yeshiva Soloveitchik, every girl dressed up as Esther on Purim. Since we were all fairly poor, we’d portray our beauty queen in our mother’s lipstick. Bunny Milcher wore a hot magenta, like Jayne Mansfield. I wore Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, and was sure that I was transformed into an irresistible future queen when I rubbed it over my lips (perhaps a bit of tooth as well). Then we girls would add a bobbly beaded necklace (in the Wilma Flintstone vein) and a golden paper crown with square, plastic gems in it. Some preferred a woolen, paisley scarf slug over their hair like babushkas, tied under the chin. Bunny added sparkling white cat-eye sunglasses without the lenses, broken shades her mother had once worn in Miami. Glamorous.
The boys wore paper eye-masks, which, with their gold and purple swirls surrounding the eyeholes, were meant to evoke the exoticism of the famous king of Persia. Most also wore their clothes backward, a witty fillip to the art of masquerade. Buttons down the back of a boy’s shirt or cardigan! Like a girl! You can just imagine the merriment.
One day, I mused, tar-head crushed under my cardboard crown, I too would capture the heart of a savior, my own potentate. I would make him love me and my people—and that is how our suffering would end. All I had to do was grow up and become beautiful. Which was not easy, because I was developing into quite a scrawny and pale girl, with thick glasses and buck teeth. When I’d keep asking my father if I was beautiful, he’d still answer, annoyingly, “There are more important things than beauty.”
What, in heaven’s name, what?
A Lament for Esau
M y BROTHER’S BIRTH was a grand consolation to my mother and grandmother. Gita had lost not only a father but two teenage brothers, who had been shot by the Nazis while still in the Kovno ghetto. So this little boy, Manny, who bore her father’s name (embodied in the first initial “M”) and carried his faded memory in a boy’s healthy body—what joy!
On the other hand, Manny tended to irritate my touchy, proud father. He was a spirited boy, full of humor, sass, and challenge. Nowadays, he might have been labeled “hyperactive” before he finished a single zigzagged lap around the block, but at that time, he was simply a typical, mischievous boy. My father, however, saw him through God’s judgmental eyes. He had bought into Judaism’s dualities—day and night, Jacob and Esau, right and wrong, us and them. My brother, to him, was “them.”
Having known no father himself, he saw his boy as Esau: threatening, wild, and primitive. Dr. Benjamin Spock was on most night tables in those days, but not on my parents’. Thus, unlike the indulgent and stage-sensitive developmental pediatrician, my
Esther, learning about this plan, bravely runs to the king. Esther knows that it is dangerous to enter the royal chambers unless Ahasuerus has allowed it by showing his golden staff, but she enters anyway.
She finds him in a loving mood.
“Why, Esther, my beauty, what is wrong?”
“What is wrong is that Jewish people are going to all be killed soon! And no one is going to stop it! God might be busy, you never know! Maybe you should do something!”
And he says, “But Esther, my love, why do you care?”
And she tells him, “I care because these are my people. I, the woman you love, am actually a Jew myself,” she says, “a Jew like my mother’s father, the one with the blonde moustache and cornflower-blue eyes.”
The king does not dip her head in the trough over and over, nor send her or her relatives to their deaths in Dachau. Instead, he immediately saves the Jews and sends their enemy Haman to his death. Because of Esther, all the Jews in Persia are saved. Purim is celebrated on the day that the Jews were meant to be destroyed. It is a happy day of mischief and masquerade. Jews are even allowed, no, urged, to get drunk on that day.
At Yeshiva Soloveitchik, every girl dressed up as Esther on Purim. Since we were all fairly poor, we’d portray our beauty queen in our mother’s lipstick. Bunny Milcher wore a hot magenta, like Jayne Mansfield. I wore Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, and was sure that I was transformed into an irresistible future queen when I rubbed it over my lips (perhaps a bit of tooth as well). Then we girls would add a bobbly beaded necklace (in the Wilma Flintstone vein) and a golden paper crown with square, plastic gems in it. Some preferred a woolen, paisley scarf slug over their hair like babushkas, tied under the chin. Bunny added sparkling white cat-eye sunglasses without the lenses, broken shades her mother had once worn in Miami. Glamorous.
The boys wore paper eye-masks, which, with their gold and purple swirls surrounding the eyeholes, were meant to evoke the exoticism of the famous king of Persia. Most also wore their clothes backward, a witty fillip to the art of masquerade. Buttons down the back of a boy’s shirt or cardigan! Like a girl! You can just imagine the merriment.
One day, I mused, tar-head crushed under my cardboard crown, I too would capture the heart of a savior, my own potentate. I would make him love me and my people—and that is how our suffering would end. All I had to do was grow up and become beautiful. Which was not easy, because I was developing into quite a scrawny and pale girl, with thick glasses and buck teeth. When I’d keep asking my father if I was beautiful, he’d still answer, annoyingly, “There are more important things than beauty.”
What, in heaven’s name, what?
A Lament for Esau
M y BROTHER’S BIRTH was a grand consolation to my mother and grandmother. Gita had lost not only a father but two teenage brothers, who had been shot by the Nazis while still in the Kovno ghetto. So this little boy, Manny, who bore her father’s name (embodied in the first initial “M”) and carried his faded memory in a boy’s healthy body—what joy!
On the other hand, Manny tended to irritate my touchy, proud father. He was a spirited boy, full of humor, sass, and challenge. Nowadays, he might have been labeled “hyperactive” before he finished a single zigzagged lap around the block, but at that time, he was simply a typical, mischievous boy. My father, however, saw him through God’s judgmental eyes. He had bought into Judaism’s dualities—day and night, Jacob and Esau, right and wrong, us and them. My brother, to him, was “them.”
Having known no father himself, he saw his boy as Esau: threatening, wild, and primitive. Dr. Benjamin Spock was on most night tables in those days, but not on my parents’. Thus, unlike the indulgent and stage-sensitive developmental pediatrician, my
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