Kaddish

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? — Hillel

Editor’s Note: A short story by Jaime Levy Pessin about assimilation and the illusion of safety —David Michael Slater

At services a few weeks ago, I heard the rabbi call out Sidney Blake’s name in his list of yahrtzeits for the week. I hadn’t thought of Sidney in years—and that lovely wife of his, Shirley, oh, she really was a darling. Out of habit, I looked around the sanctuary to see if their pretty daughter was at shul, but then I remembered, we hadn’t seen her in ages. Sad story, this one.

Oh, you never met Carrie. She grew up during that idyllic time when folks assumed everyone hated Nazis, what with Indiana Jones always punching them in the movies. Sure, there was the vandalism at our synagogue—spray-painted swastikas and a couple of broken windows discovered on a Sunday morning as Carrie and the other kids showed up for Hebrew school. But as far as threats go, it felt tepid—the son of a school board member acting out his teenage angst. At any rate, the kid did his community service, the father was elected to city council, and we all moved on mostly unscathed.

Anyway, the Blakes had one of those High Holidays and seder houses—Jewish enough to make sure Carrie was bat mitzvahed, assimilated enough to serve crab puffs at her party. Delicious, mind you; her parents knew their way around a cocktail hour. Once her thirteenth birthday had passed, she opted to spend her time at tennis practice instead of confirmation lessons, and Sid and Shirl didn’t force the issue.

Sometime during her junior year at Florida State—endearingly, they never could agree on whether they first made eye contact in their poli-sci or econ course—she met Jim Hannaford, the lacrosse-playing scion of a lumber family in Marietta, Georgia. Not Jewish, obviously; Episcopalian, in fact, and from money. Real money, not like the doctors, lawyers, and accountants who populated Carrie’s parents’ Super Bowl parties. No, this was skiing-in-the-Alps money. Summer-cabin-in-Bar-Harbour money. The kind of money that gives you the chutzpah to call it a cabin when it’s got seven bedrooms, eight baths, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a live-in caretaker. Generational wealth.

Jim charmed Carrie with his Cheshire Cat smile and his Southern-bred sophistication, borne of a childhood spent clad in a miniature sport jacket and tie for family dinners; she entertained him with her light-hearted sense of humor and perfect boobs. By senior year, they had coordinated their applications to law school. When their acceptances to the University of Miami arrived in the mail on the same day, they celebrated with some fancy-schmancy champagne that Jim had bought during the Hannaford family’s annual summer tour of France. All very ooh-la-la.

Jim’s parents, Lillian and Thomas, welcomed Carrie in their cautiously WASPy way, recognizing that the last name Blake—combined with Carrie’s straight brown hair and athletic frame—didn’t garner too many questions from friends who would have raised eyebrows at her exotic ethnicity. (Of course, this worked exactly as Carrie’s grandfather had intended: Blumenkrantz-to-Blake seemed an obvious change in 1928 as he disembarked the Leviathan at Ellis Island.) Though Sid and Shirl had hoped for a Jewish match for their daughter, mostly they were happy that Carrie was happy, and so they gave their blessing when Jim knocked on their door with his Grandma Cecile’s three-carat ring. The couple married at the Biltmore with one of their law school professors officiating, avoiding controversy on either side about whether a chuppah or altar would be the site of their vows.

And from there, their life was golden. Two jobs at prestigious Miami law firms. Three tow-headed boys attending private school, financed, in part, by Jim’s parents. A home in Coconut Grove, a small boat for weekend excursions, a goofy golden retriever. Jim listened and offered savvy advice as Carrie navigated the politics of her old-school law firm; Carrie nursed Jim through his recovery after surgery for his torn meniscus; they crafted developmentally appropriate punishments for their rowdy boys, played in a neighborhood tennis league, hosted poolside barbecues, and maintained a weekly date night.

Look, they weren’t protected from all tragedy. Shirley died young and unexpectedly—a congenital heart defect undiscovered until it was too late. A decade later, Sidney passed after a brutal bout with chemo. At his funeral, with a torn black ribbon pinned to her cardigan, Carrie gripped a trowel in her hands and lifted the heavy soil piled beside his grave. Shovelful by sniffling shovelful, she dropped a layer of dirt over the coffin. Many of us stepped in to help with the mitzvah of ushering a soul to rest; Jim, the children, and his parents watched solemnly as we worked together to fill the hole.

For a few years, Carrie stayed in touch with the extended family, schlepping Jim and the boys to her aunt’s house in Boca for school-night seders that left everyone dragging the next morning. But the first year that Passover and Easter collided, the Hannafords insisted on a trip to Marietta for the long weekend. The next year, her oldest son—Parker, or Tucker, or Huckabee (who can keep track of such names?)—had an important baseball game on the first seder night, and with the coach threatening to bench anyone who missed a game for any reason, the kid wasn’t exactly inclined to take a Sandy Koufax stance. Jim offered to stay behind with him, but Carrie had a brief due the next morning, the little one needed to finish his Jamestown diorama, and all in all, despite the crunchy temptation of Aunt Linda’s hand-chopped charosets, Carrie decided it wasn’t worth contorting themselves—they were juggling enough already. So, Carrie got older, her highlights got blonder, and on one Christmas Eve, she unwrapped a box from her husband that cradled a hand-painted ornament in the shape of a menorah. Carrie admired the delicate detailing and placed it lovingly on the tree between baubles her boys made out of pipe cleaners and macaroni. The menorah Carrie crafted as a toddler in the synagogue’s nursery school? That project sat in a box tucked high in the guest room storage closet, nuts and bolts and mosaic tiles hot-glued to a wooden plank caked with years’ worth of candle wax.

A couple of times a year, we’d see Carrie at services for her parents’ yahrtzeits, or at the cemetery to place a small rock on their headstones, mumbling the kaddish she had memorized at Hebrew school so many years ago. Jim and the kids never joined her visits to synagogue. Still, when the son of her last remaining childhood friend got bar mitzvahed, she insisted on showing up as a family out of simple respect for the only person in her life who remembered her parents when they were young. Carrie buttoned the boys into blazers, and when they arrived at shul, she bobby-pinned the embossed suede kippot onto their fair heads. Sure, they squirmed in their seats during the unintelligible-to-them Hebrew sections, but you had to hand it to those kids: Under the watchful eyes of the Hannaford clan, they certainly had learned decorum.

This was April 2016, as the election lurched toward its inevitable conclusion. Carrie and Jim considered themselves philanthropic, not political: When they thought at all about big societal issues, they didn’t take bold stances—or any stances, really. They supported noblesse-oblige causes like ending illiteracy or childhood leukemia; Carrie served on the host committee for the Junior League of Miami’s annual gala, raising money to plant pink begonias in traffic circles to remind rush-hour drivers that breast cancer was bad.

So when the rabbi took to the pulpit at Ari Bernstein’s bar mitzvah and resumed his weekly denunciation of the far-right forces bubbling up in American politics (hard to remember that in 2016 the far-left Hamasniks were barely visible in our peripheral; such innocent times!)—well, it was the first time since her childhood spent reading Holocaust novels that Carrie felt the full weight of our people’s past pressing on her shoulders. Her eyes burned as she remembered her grandfather’s stories of the old country: the daily indignities, the fiery pogroms, the family left behind. She began to connect the dots between the faraway history she’d learned as a child and the simmering ugliness threatening to boil over at home. As the sermon reached its blistering crescendo, Jim leaned his head to her ear. “This is a bit much, isn’t it?” he said, the cool sting of his aftershave pressing against her cheek. She didn’t respond.

Carrie felt a corset of unease lacing around her as she began to notice things she hadn’t seen before: a stray comment from a senior partner about how their accountant, Isaac Horowitz, was always nickling and diming them on his hourlies; or a PTA mom’s complaint about how that loudmouth Mimi Cohen always pushed her way onto the bake sale committee; or Jim and their eldest son’s observation that a famous Jewish sitcom actress would be so much hotter if she’d only get her nose fixed.

Carrie had corrected her own deviated septum at 19 years old, just before meeting Jim. She wondered whether these slights were intended as insults or power plays, or whether she had so fully assimilated that her friends, her colleagues—even her own family—had forgotten where she came from. And she wondered which was worse.

**

In the weeks following the election, Carrie decided to drown her rising concerns in a cascade of day-to-day tasks: pitching new clients, arranging the boys’ carpools, training young associates, and making sure the boat got its yearly maintenance at the marina. What’s done is done, she thought, and tried to keep her eyes off the news. Occasionally, though, something entered her deliberately narrow field of vision. In December, kids in Tallahassee formed a human swastika on the lawn of their high school; in April, a group of spring breakers decked a Hasidic man walking home from a wedding. With Jim’s help, Carrie did her best to rationalize these incidents: Kids are such idiots, they said, and why do the Orthodox have to call so much attention to themselves?

In July, someone called a bomb threat into the local JCC’s day camp, causing a rush of panicked parents to abandon their desks and collect their children, smothering them in hugs and taking them for sundaes out of sheer relief. Carrie had spent many summers weaving lanyards and licking drippy popsicles in the itchy grass between the JCC’s buildings; in a sliding-doors version of her life, her kids could have spent their summers there, too. Jim tried once again to categorize this as a one-off event, some disaffected misanthrope seeking attention—this time, she felt annoyed, even angered, by his attempts at justification. But she stuffed those feelings down inside and went back to chopping carrot sticks for the boys’ lunches.

Then came August. None of us could avoid the headlines out of Charlottesville: tiki torches and polo shirts, Confederate flags and red caps, hundreds of men marching and brawling and sieg-heiling and shouting their paranoia while the president declared them very fine people. Upon arriving home from work, Carrie dropped her bag, slipped off her pumps, and turned the living room TV to CNN. Her sons, sprawled on the couch, bleeping and blooping on their new Nintendo Switches, groaned.

“C’mon, Mom, do we have to watch the news?” her middle son, whatever his name was, whined.

“Cool torches,” said the youngest, glancing up from Mario Kart for a half-second.

“Huh, that’s nuts.” Jim took in the images from the screen as he walked in from his own commute, sinking into the sofa and giving a good-natured noogie to the little one. “Hey, are we taking the boat out tomorrow? Should we invite the Tysons?”

For months, Carrie had buttoned her rising dread into a small pouch inside her, a pocket in her gut where she kept other bits of unpleasantness, like the time in elementary school when she made fun of her grandfather’s old-country accent to a group of her laughing playmates, or how she had edited her vocabulary during rush upon noting that her use of the word “schmooze-fest” elicited the tiniest raise of the eyebrow from a sister at a top-tier sorority. But her family’s nonchalance about the apocalypse unfolding onscreen hit her like lightning, unleashing a torrent of panic.

“The torches look cool? You’re talking about the boat right now? Are you freaking kidding me?” The three boys looked up from their devices, unused to seeing their mother’s rage, a thunderhead of emotion rolling across her face. “There is a Klan rally on TV! How is this happening?” Carrie let out a rumbling sob, a roar of frustration, a highly unladylike sound.

“Whoa, babe, what is going on with you?” Jim waved the boys out of the room.

“The synagogue—they had to sneak their Torahs out the back door, hide them in someone’s house,” Carrie gasped. “The men, pacing outside, guns, masks! This is why my grandfather came here - to escape stuff like this—but it’s here now, and it’s so close!”

“Carrie! What are you talking about? What does some protest in Virginia have anything to do with you?” Jim looked genuinely confused as he picked up the remote to turn off the TV. “You’re barely even Jewish. Why worry about this stuff?”

You’re barely even Jewish. Jim tilted his head, and Carrie felt his concern bouncing through the room: the bookshelf displaying a set of handsome leather-bound legal tomes, a graduation gift from the Hannafords; the posed portraits marking the family’s growth, color-coordinated outfits with neon hibiscus blossoming in the background; the dog’s embroidered foam bed resting on the marble floor. The glossy pink tiles—aurora rose, the decorator had called them—chilled Carrie’s bare feet, her sweat condensing into clamminess.

Really, she thought, what could she say? Since the death of her parents, she had drifted entirely into Jim’s world, like a strand of tangled brown seaweed bobbing along in the Hannaford current. She had never objected to Easter egg hunts, or pictures with Santa, or even access to the Hannaford’s country club, which she knew—she knew—didn’t allow Jews to even cross its threshold until the late 1990s. So what standing did she have to express apprehension, or discomfort, or downright fear when she had put on her tennis whites and played along?

**

For Marietta’s country club caste, Labor Day at Pine Manor was a can’t-miss event. The club’s towering Greek columns, fragrant azaleas, and shaded front porch stirred its members’ nostalgia for the genteel plantation lifestyle of their ancestors. Not much regard was given to what it stirred in the club’s predominantly Black service staff.

Lillian and Thomas Hannaford assumed the presence of their son, his wife, and their handsome trio of grandsons at the yearly parade of farmers’ tans and golf visors. The club would be draped in bunting. Carrie’s in-laws would exchange cheek kisses with escorts from long-ago debutante balls and marvel over their peers’ Ivy-bound grandsons and equestrian granddaughters. Carrie and Jim would defend their title in the mixed doubles tournament and sip spiked Arnold Palmers with their opponents. They’d meet up with the boys and Lillian and Thomas for the clambake, lounging in Adirondack chairs for the dazzling fireworks over the golf course.

Usually Carrie looked forward to this weekend, but this year, she couldn’t muster the motivation to fold the boys’ clothes neatly into packing cubes; she tossed the polo shirts and khakis into grooved aluminum suitcases, wrinkles be damned. Since her outburst in August, a fog had fallen over her, and she couldn’t quite find a way to disperse the clouds. At first, Jim puzzled over why their Netflix algorithm kept suggesting Holocaust documentaries, or why their Amazon cart contained a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It finally clicked on a Tuesday night, while the family watched the Braves on TV. For some reason, Carrie seemed morose as she sat scrunched on the sofa and focused on her laptop. Jim draped his arm around her and glanced at her screen just in time to see her type “Ku Klux Klan Florida” into her search box. With the subtlest of eye rolls, Jim removed his arm from her shoulder as he turned his attention back to the game, the cheering crowd not quite loud enough to obscure the continued tapping from her keyboard.

As the Labor Day trip approached, Carrie refocused her Google research from Florida to Georgia. And so it was that she happened upon the story of Leo Frank. A mob, a noose, a tree: The kind of vigilante justice typically reserved for Black men. A tree, in fact, that sat two miles due east from the Friday night conviviality of Marietta Square, where, at this particular moment, the Hannaford men in their seersucker pants licked ice cream cones as the women took just a taste.

Jim wiped a dribble of strawberry ice cream off Carrie’s chin and noted that she looked distracted. “Whatcha thinking about?”

She glanced at her children, chasing each other around the square’s cast-iron fountain—even the eldest, a teenager, happy to roughhouse with his brothers—all three of them the golden-haired products of her golden life, no churning questions of how and where and whether they belonged, all dusky sky and fireflies and strawberry ice cream.

“Nothing important,” Carrie said.

**

Saturday morning came, and the Hannaford household bustled in preparation for their day at the club, the children chattering about who would win the swim relay, Jim offering strategic guidance on which child should swim which leg, Lillian herding the group into Thomas’s Range Rover so she wouldn’t be late for her tee-time. As Carrie loaded the tennis racquets into the trunk, a thought occurred to her. She asked if she could borrow Lillian’s Mercedes for a quick errand before meeting them at Pine Manor.

Carrie hopped into the car, adjusted the mirrors, and set her GPS. For fifteen minutes she drove through the suburban stretch, past brick colonials looming over the road from within their gated subdivisions, past clapboard churches with white steeples poking up above the oaks and concrete megachurches, all glass and angles and plenty of parking.

Soon, the sprawling homes and churches, great and small, gave way to Marietta’s commercial section, where fast-food restaurants and auto body shops lined either side of the well-trafficked road. Just beyond the highway overpass, a Waffle House announced its presence with screaming yellow letters rising above the roadway, the smell of bacon grease strong enough to penetrate the sealed windows of the climate-controlled sedan.

On the other side of the street stood a taco shop: bright red picnic tables, lime green roof, a security camera dangling off a cable. Carrie parked the car, stepped onto the cracked black pavement, and walked to a narrow sidewalk connected to the lot. Carrie followed the sidewalk until she reached a pole rising out of the cement, topped by a metal plaque that marked the site where Leo Frank was lynched.

Carrie remembered her grandfather, the smell of his pipe, and the rhythm of his Yiddish-inflected English. She remembered her aunt’s seders, raucous philosophical debates extending well past midnight as she leaned into her mother’s soft shoulder and tried to follow along in a state of half-sleep. She remembered twirling the threads of her father’s tallis at Yom Kippur, when she sat close enough to feel the grumbling of his stomach as he joined the congregation in mournful song.

But her parents were gone. And her golden existence far surpassed what her grandfather could have possibly imagined for his descendants as he huddled in his cellar listening to his village crumble around him, as he suffered the nauseating turbulence of a transatlantic journey, as his fellow draftees in the U.S. Army derided him, taunting him with words he hadn’t expected to hear in America: Heeb! Yid! Kike! No, her boys wouldn’t get married under a gauzy chuppah, nor would she beam beside her future grandchildren as they read from the Torah; her sons would leave flowers at her grave, not stones, and the blooms would wither and die in the overbearing Florida heat. Instead, her sons would walk through the world with a confidence almost bordering on arrogance: their father’s firm handshake and generous smile, easy to dole out for boys blessed with the innate knowledge that outside forces would never bump them off their own golden paths. After carrying the Hannaford name for so many years, Carrie knew how that confidence felt, the comfort—the safety—her grandfather never quite attained. Who am I, she thought, to deny that to my children?

A blazing red pickup truck pulled into the restaurant’s lot, kicking a piece of gravel onto the sidewalk near where Carrie stood. She watched the small, sharp pebble bounce over to her sneakers and picked it up, pausing for only a moment before balancing it atop the plaque. She mumbled the kaddish she had memorized at Hebrew school so many years ago. Then, smoothing her tennis skirt, Carrie returned to Lillian’s Benz and programmed the navigation system for a route to Pine Manor. Her family was waiting.

Jaime Levy Pessin (she/her) is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Plentitudes, October Hill Magazine, The Jewish Fiction Journal, and kerning | a space for words. Her short story "Mikveh" received Honorable Mention in New Millennium Writings' 2024 Fiction contest. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, The Charlotte Observer, and many other publications. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories. A native of Miami, Fla., Jaime lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband, two children, and Bernedoodle.

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Cuddling up on the couch with my husband and kids to watch an old musical.

• The distinct smell of a blanketing snow, especially when someone's wood-burning fireplace tinges the air with a little bit of smoke.

• The feeling when you haven't talked to an old friend for a long time, but when you get on the phone, it's as if no time has passed at all.

• Watching my kids explore their passions. Doesn't matter if it's tennis, drums, baseball cards, or graphic novels—it's a joy to see them absorbed in the things they love.

• The flash mob of magnolias that announces springtime in Brooklyn.

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Clasping the Star of David around my neck, and then seeing my teenage son do the same.

• Singing loudly and badly along to Christmas carols—while proudly pointing out which ones were written by Jews.

• Admiring our beautifully set table in the minutes before our guests arrive for our seder.

• Realizing that a noodle kugel made entirely with lactose-free dairy products can be both digestible AND delicious.

• Taking a mini menorah with us when we travel over winter break, so no matter where we are in the world, we can light candles that sparkle in the window.