AMBIVALENT THINGS by Jehanne Dubrow
Kiddush Cup
It sits on a high shelf. The cup is positioned among the other pieces of Judaica I have bought over the last two decades. It is tulip-shaped, as if belief were a flower I might drink from.
I like to look at the cup and its companions. I didn’t grow up in a house with a collection of antique silver displayed on the dining room credenza. No pieces tarnished sepia-brown. No candlesticks and platters smuggled from Europe during the long years of extermination. Instead, there were towers of mid-century porcelain plates, crystal vases bought tax-free in airport gift shops, tchotchkes my parents picked up during their years posted overseas. In the 1930s, their parents entered the United States as refugees with almost nothing. And in the decades
after they became Americans, all four of my grandparents acquired possessions that had no provenance.
I’m reminded of a passage from Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, a memoir in which the author attempts to uncover how six of his relatives were murdered in the Shoah. Mendelsohn frequently brings his training as a classicist to his search for the dead, as when he recounts a moment from The Aeneid to explain what he calls “the poignantly unbridgeable distances created by time.” Aeneas and his companion arrive in Carthage and walk through the town:
Suddenly, in a magnificent new temple, the two men stop dead in their tracks in front of a mural that is decorated with pictures of the Trojan War. For the Carthaginians, the war is just a decorative motif, something to adorn the walls of their new temple; for Aeneas, of course, it means much more, and as he stands looking at this picture, which is the picture of his life, he bursts into tears and utters a tormented line of Latin . . . sunt lacrimae rerum, “There are tears in things.”
When I look at the Kiddush cup, I feel the unbridgeable distance, not so much between the vessel and me, but between who I am and the Jews who prayed with all sincerity, somewhere in my family’s past. Every week they bowed their heads and said the blessing over the cup to mark the start of the sabbath. They followed strictly the 613 mitzvot prescribed by the Torah, their bodies and days governed by intricate laws.
Shabbat Candlesticks
We keep the burning in ourselves.
We’re paired: one of us made
to remember, and the other to observe.
Some nights we grasp the glow forever,
each wick a disappearance of the day.
Dripping wax resembles tears.
But soon it hardens to the faint
translucence of a piece of stone, marble
carved to look like something liquid.
We hold you to your word,
that every week contains a small apportioning
of joy. We never leave you
sitting in the dark. You strike the match –
we lift the tender flames.
Mezuzah Case
There’s a company in Poland that sells mezuzah cases made from the impressions left on the doorways of Jewish houses. First, the company creates an imprint of the spot where the original mezuzah case was once nailed. At the foundry, a mold is then made from that impression and filled with molten bronze. Later, the bronze is polished, the edges rubbed to smoothness, and the case engraved with the Hebrew letter Shin, which stands for the word Shaddai, one of the names for god.
On the computer screen, the bronze mezuzot are stout rectangles, ugly but well-made.
They retain the texture of wood, stone, or brick. For $240, customers can buy the bronze impression of a mezuzah that once hung near the entry of a building in Krakòw, Warsaw, or even Kielce – the site of a vicious pogrom in 1946 that killed 42 Jews and hurt 40 others, in a fury of gunshots and the jab of bayonets.
These cases are fashioned out of absence, uncanny inversions of the past. They are ghost mezuzot, miniature caskets.
For $40 more, one can order a kosher scroll known as a klaf. When rolled, the piece of parchment is small enough to fit inside the case. Every case needs a klaf. Without the holy words handwritten by a scribe, the mezuzah is only a container holding nothing but a tiny pocket of dark air.
Challah Cover
Once there was a baker renowned in the village for her breads. Some she scattered with rye, as if the loaves were open fields that needed planting. Some she knotted into rolls. And a few she braided like a girl’s fine hair.
In the late mornings, after she laid her goods on long, wooden trays, the people came as though they were starving birds. Even while the breads were still warm, they tore through the crusts, eating straight to the center, like rabbits burrowing in a hole. The woman loved her work, but she hated to see the food treated with such hurry; we are commanded, she knew, to savor every bite.
And so she thought to conceal her most treasured breads, at least until they had time to cool and the sun was lowering beyond the trees, the way a bubbe might lower herself slowly onto a kitchen stool. After a few days, the baker had an idea. She pulled on a little thread of moonlight. She stitched a cover that gleamed with early evening. Every Friday after that, she placed two braided loaves beneath the piece of fabric she had sewn, as if tucking two children into bed. In this way, she made sure there was always enough bread saved for the Sabbath, the sweetness of challah sprinkled with salt, a small reminder of the possibility of tears, even in the times when we are blessed.
Never mind the other stories you might have heard about breads and why we guard them. On this matter, I swear by the trout that swim in the Vistula River, I have heard the truth from the baker herself.
Ketubah
Dearest, I betroth you to me for as long as we can stand the other’s breathing. I will take the garbage out on Wednesday nights. I will make you pancakes on Sunday mornings. Set me as a pillow beneath your heart, for love should be a cushioned place to rest. And I will laugh when you laugh, will quiet when you’re reading, will bring you a blanket when the room goes cold. I will respect the unruly coiling of your hair. I will understand sometimes you want to be alone. May I like you even before your first cup of coffee, when the sleep is still crusted in your eyes. May our hearts be joined by the small arguments. Let our home be modest enough that
we cannot hide ourselves in distant rooms. When we have offered jagged words, let our home be rich with making up and up again.
Seder Plate
First there are bitter herbs.
And then there are more bitter herbs, this history a long list of bitterness that never leaves the mouth.
Next there is a shankbone cleaned of meat. Remember the blood on the lintel and death winging over in the night.
There is a vegetable that might mean hope is a green tendril growing from the earth. Don’t forget to dip it in the little bowl of weeping.
There is a paste of apple, nuts, and cinnamon, sweet though it represents the memory of enslavement, the mortar used to build the pyramids.
And last, a roasted egg. Some say it’s for the sacrifice in the temple. Some say it’s for mourning that refuses to end.
Yes, there are cups of wine. There’s unrisen bread. There’s a plate of food for the prophet who might never arrive.
Menorah
When I was a child, my parents had a menorah, which they displayed occasionally during the eight nights of Chanukah. It was made of iron nails welded together with bright drips of brass to form each stem, a Brutalist design, hard and modern.
I would sit before the unlighted menorah, my chin resting on my hands, and stare for many minutes at its outline. Occasionally, I pressed a finger against one of the iron nails. The metal tip had been smoothed out but, if I had pushed hard enough, I could have broken my skin.
In an essay titled “Thing Theory,” scholar Bill Brown explores what he calls “the thingness of objects.”
As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects . . . but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.
The Kiddush cup and the challah cover and the Seder plate are full of their own thingness. They have stopped working for me.
No, that’s not right. I have never allowed them to work, never asked that they function as more than the kind of decorative motifs that once made Aeneas weep in Carthage. I have only looked at them, never through.
These things are meant to come after the idea of belief. They are supposed to concretize faith. If that devotion doesn’t exist, then the cup and the cover and plate can still be touched. But do they weigh an ounce less? Do they shimmer less? Delight less?
I didn’t know the word ambivalence when I was small. If I had, I would have pointed to the menorah of nails and named it my family’s ambivalence. We were Jews without belief, but still believed ourselves Jews, angry at a god whose presence we doubted, our faith abandoned a generation ago, in the ghettos or at the border crossings of another continent. This menorah said, belief is rigid and piercing. It will hurt you to believe.
What does the writer know about belief? In this opening passage we see that, yes, she trusts her eyes. She has faith in the weight of the cup in her hand or the hardness of its lip when placed to her own lips. But she can’t remember the last time she filled the cup with wine or recited the usual blessing to sanctify the Sabbath – in English, of course, because the only Hebrew she can read is a transliteration. Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, borei p’ri hagafen. If she sounds out the words carefully, we might almost suppose these words come from knowledge.
A reader might wonder: why keep a cup from which she hardly drinks? We should understand that even secular families own pieces of Judaica. These things are reminders of pain that refused to stay buried, the Shoah continuing to unearth itself across Europe. Somewhere in Poland, a set of silver Torah finials are found beneath the floorboards of a former synagogue. Every year, a dented Kiddush cup is discovered in a Ukrainian field. The ground is constantly offering up sacred books, dishes to serve honey in the New Year, even a gold stylus sculpted to look like a pointing finger.
No tears fill the author’s Kiddush cup. After her wedding day, this goblet was used only once for a Shabbat dinner a decade ago. We conjuncture that if she were to fill the cup to the rim with wine and drink from it, the liquid would likely taste of itself or of new metal, that unmistakable sharpness that resembles the tang of blood.
There is an obscure story about the author. She once recited the Mourner’s Kaddish at her Oma’s funeral. Yitgadal
v’yitkadash sh’mei raba. When she read the phrases transliterated from the Aramaic, the sounds felt briefly familiar in her mouth, as if grief could teach a language her ancestors spoke. As she stared at the sheet of plastic grass that had been laid around her grandmother’s coffin to hide the open hole and the wet, fresh dirt, she realized she was swaying back and forth, suddenly pious, if only for the few minutes of prayer. What can we make of this wavering in the body? Scholars have yet to agree. We do not know why the Kaddish can move even those unmoved by the idea of a power beyond and above.
Imagine the candlesticks on the shelf could speak. They would say the author is good at remembering. But observing the sabbath? Well, not so much. Here is a story the author has omitted from the text. When her father was twelve years old and studying for his bar mitzvah, each time he made a mistake with the cantillation, the uneasy chant of the Torah, the rabbi would press a sharpened pencil point into the boy’s palm. By the end of each practice, her father’s hand was inscribed with a precise and pulsing wound. This was his earliest lesson about religion, that it is cruel, that it leaves a painful mark. He bequeathed this memory to his daughter. Please, take this, he said.
The author owns a mezuzah too. It was not made from the impression of a phantom case. Instead, it is new and American, a silver branch adorned with a metal orchid, so detailed that the flower seems about to bloom. We should note the author has never removed the mezuzah from the cardboard box in which it came. Like other scholars, we interpret this fact as evidence she’s too afraid to affix it by her front door. Better, she thinks, in a world of synagogue shootings and new blood libels, if her neighbors don’t discover they’re living near a Jew.
An enticing tale, yes? The author is skilled at mimicking the voices of writers like I.B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem, although she knows no Yiddish. She once received a recipe for challah from a family friend whose kitchen contains two stoves, two sinks, meat and dairy kept separate as strangers. As for the author, she has never baked a single loaf. She doesn’t want to give the long hours required of this art, the knead and the rise, the brush of egg white on the dough. She cannot show such devotion to the braided bread, which is not so much food but a commandment or a symbol of the miraculous. And the silk challah cover that the author bought years ago – appliqued with the luminous shapes of fruit – remains folded in a drawer.
Long before she wrote this essay, the author searched for a ketubah with the most progressive language she could find. Her future husband was a lapsed Catholic, and she was a Jew who struggled against tradition, how it constricted like the boning in a wedding dress. The ketubah they chose is a liquid field of yellow floating above a plain of purple; it could have been a painting by Mark Rothko, a nonbeliever too whose thinking was also deeply Jewish. The text they selected avoids the Orthodox avowals of virgins and silver zuzim. Nonetheless, she resisted the lets and mays even of the ketubah they finally settled on, the phrases borrowed from the Song of Songs, the milder imperatives of the contract to which she signed her name.
Scholars have observed that, of all the Jewish holidays, Pesach is the one toward which the author feels the least resistance. Perhaps it is because Passover recounts the passing on of pain. Moses negotiates freedom for his people by wounding Pharaoh, because sometimes the only answer to a wound is to wound the wounder tenfold. This the author appears to understand, even if a man like Moses – someone called by god as the desert bramble bursts into flames – mostly resists her comprehension. When Moses and his people finally escape across the torn seam of the Red Sea, they remain stitched to their old suffering, uncertain of their god. They are lost in the
wilderness of their trauma for forty years. As for the Seder plate in the author’s house, it has six concavities, each one shaped like a pomegranate. Maybe belief isn’t a flower but a piece of fruit dangling from a branch. We might say she’s not standing too far below to reach it. She has simply never wanted to stretch her arm toward something so equally astringent and sweet.
Consider how this menorah evokes the word stigma, from the Greek meaning “mark of a pointed instrument, puncture, tattoo-mark, brand.” In another religion, stigmata are a body’s evidence of devotion. To own such a menorah, iconography of torture and redemption, a savior rising from the dead . . . we wonder what the author’s parents felt in selecting this thing for their home. Maybe the choice was aesthetic; they liked its barbed silhouette. Maybe they wished, in some way, to belong to a later faith, one demanding love instead of the old obedience, to a different god perhaps, who didn’t command, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac,” Mount Moriah a grim shadow in the distance. Or maybe they understood that Judaism is a religion of sharp questions. Scholars write commentary in the margins, accumulating centuries of inquiry and argument.
Look how the author has named and ordered these many pretty things. Cups and cases. Covers and candlestick holders. They make lively shapes in the world. Her hand wants to touch them, pick them up, study them from all angles. In a different home, she asserts, faith would transform these things back into objects. Someone would use them across the year, from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the fall to Passover in the spring. Without the cohesion of belief, the author argues, they are disparate things – however beautiful – positioned on a shelf.
But we might reach a different conclusion here. We say she is the cup waiting to be filled. She is also the empty case and the bread uncovered. Used or not, a thing of the old world or the new, she too is made to hold the burning, to lift the light with her soldered spikes
Works Cited
Bible. King James Version. www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+22&version=KJV.
Bill, Brown. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Harper, 2013.
“Stigma.” Online Etymology Dictionary. www.etymonline.com/word/stigma.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Pleiades.