Ruth’s unwillingness to accept her brother as a paragon did not begin when Bernie opposed her marriage to Francisco Neruda. No, it originated (what does not?) in childhood. She felt slighted by their parents in his favor from infancy on; and she felt slighted by Bernie her entire life. Her gift for music and acting wasn’t taken seriously and was sometimes actively thwarted by their immigrant parents. Later Bernie himself, when he was father pro tem, insisted Ruth give up the dance and music lessons she was taking after school and get a part-time job. Of course, Bernie received nothing but praise and encouragement from their parents.
My mother believed that she and Bernie battled as children because he had usurped the role of their father. Bernie believed paternal responsibility was thrust upon him. The rest of the Rabinowitz siblings believed Bernie had saved them from a family calamity in the midst of a national disaster. The event in dispute was Bernie’s assumption of the role of breadwinner following Papa Sam’s non-fatal, but temporarily crippling heart attack. His coronary was blamed, in those days, not on Papa’s relish of chicken fat, but the failure of his third grocery store in the Bronx. It was the trough of the Great Depression. Bernie, accustomed to putting in long hours after school at the family store, was sent out to work full-time. He was thirteen. For four years he was to be the household’s sole support — until his brother was old enough to help. By then, although only seventeen years old, Bernie was well on his way to making his first million. All their lives Ruth and Bernie considered each other opposites; everyone who knew them thought they were as different as could be. As early as age eight, I would have disagreed. I think their natural conflict was intensified because they were so much alike. It was simply unfortunate for my mother that she was born into a society that discriminated against independent and innovative women while Bernie was born into a culture that favored men who were bold and determined.
By 1960, Uncle Bernie had led the Rabinowitz Seder for more than two decades. That year, after the ritual was over, as two uniformed black women began to serve the real food, he shocked the assembled parents with an announcement. He said the reward for finding the Afikomen (a piece of the blessed matzo hidden by the Leader during the early part of the ritual and then hunted for by the children later on) would be twenty dollars. In previous years it had never been more than five — already an extravagant prize.
“Twenty dollars!” Aunt Sadie exclaimed. She covered her mouth with a hand; whether to stop a criticism or to express shock, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t know much about the relative value of money at eight. Anything over twenty-five cents was a lot. Anything over a dollar was infinite. My older cousins (whom I envied and loved and wanted to impress) cued me that twenty dollars was in the upper range of the infinite category. They made a collective sound of their longing to win — a chorus whose parts were gasps, giggles, wows, and one piercing whistle from my cousin Daniel. He was two years older than I, Aunt Sadie’s youngest. I admired Daniel. He seemed to disdain me; he delighted in besting me, especially at such things as football or tennis, sports which, coming as I did from a working-class city neighborhood, I had never played before. Earlier that day we had competed in both games on Uncle’s grounds. I was so bad at them, particularly tennis, that Daniel said I was a spaz — short for “spastic.” This hurt my feelings and my pride. Not only because I knew it to be unjust (I was good at the athletic games of my class: handball and stickball) but because I longed — with the passionate heart of a child — for Daniel to like me.
“Well,” Uncle Bernie said. He pushed himself a little ways from the long Seder table. The gold wedding ring on his left hand, fashioned with twists like a sailor’s knot, rested on the shiny white tablecloth. The yellow metal called my attention to his fingers. The skin was dark. Above the knuckles were long tufts of black hair; the same thick black hair covered his large round head. When he smiled — bright teeth against olive skin — his wide features stretched and gave him the friendly appearance of a well-fed baby. Not that his nose or eyes or mouth were infantile. On the contrary. But there was an oval beneficence to the general shape. The deep brown eyes, however, were keen with authority, calculation and a gleam of mischief. “I have a reason for making the reward so high,” Bernie said. He played the table with the fingers of his left hand. Not an impatient drumming, but a pianist’s melody. That kept his ring in motion. I was fascinated by how the gold encircled the finger’s tuft of hair. The fine silky hairs were gathered into a knot underneath the ring; once free of the band they fanned out. I tried to remember if my father had that much hair on his fingers. Francisco had been away in Havana for only a month, but to an eight-year-old a month is very long. At that moment I couldn’t remember my father’s face that well, much less details of his fingers. The answer happened to be no; my father’s fingers were virtually hairless. In fact I have never met a man whose hairs had such length and thickness as Bernie’s. Again, I don’t mean to suggest there was anything ape-like about my uncle. Rather the tufts were cropped and handsome in appearance. I wondered if they had been intentionally groomed to be decorative.
“It’s a test,” Uncle said. He surprised me by looking right at me. Surprised because, during all the time I had been in his presence that day — from the gathering in the den for the adults to drink cocktails and fuss about the children having messed up their clothes playing, to the transition to the table and the start of the Seder — Bernie hadn’t looked at me. I was glad because there was too much of him. His voice was too resonant, his head too large, his gray suit’s fabric too thick, especially on that day, an unusually hot April day. (In fact while playing tennis with Daniel I took off my shirt. “You sweat like a spic,” Daniel commented.) Bernie’s stare at me, as he told Aunt Sadie the hunt for the Afikomen was a test, seemed to be the first time he noticed me at all.
I lowered my eyes immediately. I was annoyed at myself and quickly looked back. Too late — I had lost his interest. He had shifted his intense gaze to Daniel. If I knew a harsh curse to abuse myself with, I must have used it then because I can still remember the sharp disappointment I felt that I had failed to hold my rich and powerful uncle’s eyes. I vowed not to make that mistake again.
“Aren’t you going to negotiate with them?” Uncle Harry asked. That was the tradition in our family and in many others — namely, that the Leader hid the Afikomen and bargained the amount of the reward with the child who found it. This is a fractured version of the correct tradition: in Europe, Jews did not have the Leader hide the Afikomen; rather the children (males only, of course) stole it and refused to make restitution until the Leader paid a ransom. Afikomen, by the way, means “dessert” although it is a symbolic treat, another Seder reminder of the deprivations of the Hebrew slaves of Egypt, since it is in fact nothing more than a piece of plain matzo. I find this change in the Passover ritual interesting because it reflects the shift from the harsh demands made upon Jewish children in the ghettos of the Old Country to the comfort and dependence of their lives in the United States. The original tradition placed a value on initiative, independence and ability to earn a living — even to the point of larceny. That must have been necessary to a Jewish family’s survival in Eastern Europe. The revised tradition is a hide-and-seek game created and controlled by adults, symbolic of the prolonged childhoods of my generation of Jews in the New World. (The stereotype of the overprotective Jewish mother is, I suspect, an American phenomenon.) I’m sure my uncle preferred the old Afikomen ritual and that night hoped to restore a little of its former character, to once again make it a test of manhood. Bernie, remember, had had to go to work as a child. (Thirteen, in spite of puberty and Bar Mitzvah, for the majority of boys is still essentially a time of childhood.) He believed, as do most unanalyzed people, that the misfortune of his life — his premature role as family wage-earner — had been good for him. He argued that all children should be responsible and self-reliant as early as possible. He often quarreled in public with his wife that their children — in college by 1960—were spoiled. I, of course, did not know that, or anything else about the inner life of my uncle. All that mattered then was his challenge, “It’s a test,” followed by a stare right at me. Then he looked at Daniel, and one by one at my other male cousins. He skipped the girls, although they would also be searchers.