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How the wicked son became wise: a Passover parable

I’ve spent too many Passovers to count preoccupied with the two choices: the wise son or the wicked son.
[additional-authors]
April 2, 2015

I’ve spent too many Passovers to count preoccupied with the two choices: the wise son or the wicked son. Was I wise, or was I wicked — hacham or rasha? Wanting desperately to be the wise son, in my heart, in my kishkes, I always knew that I was more wicked than wise. 

After all, wise sons don’t spit on pretty ladies. 

I liked Melinda, thought she was pretty, so that’s why I treated her so poorly that one year when my older cousin, Michael, brought her to the seder at my great-aunt Magda’s house. Melinda had a great smile, an excellent pair of legs and straight, shiny, shoulder-length black hair, like the kind from a Pantene Pro-V commercial. She wore black heels and a black dress the night that I met her. 

Back then, the family always spent one night of Passover at the home of my great-aunt Magda and her husband, my great-uncle Emil, both of whom are dead now. 

Emil was Magda’s second husband — her first husband had died around the same time that Emil’s wife had, and even though Emil and Magda were first cousins, Magda relocated from the East Coast to the West Coast, where Emil was living, and in 1967 they married. It wasn’t weird back then, apparently. They both had their own sets of children, and they never had any children together. 

During seders, Magda took care of the cooking, and Emil led the service, doing a full seder, much of it in Hebrew, singing through all of the songs at the end of the haggadah. It was slow and tedious — and I just wanted to look for the afikomen, already. 

Emil was a member of Beth Jacob Congregation. Much to the delight of the family, he also became an accidental rap star. His connections to the Pico-Robertson community led to his participation in the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List.” The beginning of the film takes place in the present, featuring a man reciting a blessing. I don’t know who the actor was, but the voice belonged to Emil. And Wu Tang Clan, the rap group, sampled that “Schindler’s List” audio clip in a song about the Holocaust called “Never Again.” 

Wu Tang Clan did not pay Emil anything — Emil never even knew that his voice had been sampled until Brandon Tobman, a student at my high school who was in my sister Hara’s class, told Hara that she had to check out this song he was listening to because it was about the Holocaust. 

Hara immediately recognized Emil’s voice. 

Emil died in 2005. I was on summer break following my freshman year of college, traveling around Rome with a buddy with whom I’d just done Birthright Israel. I checked into a hostel and sat down at a computer to open my email. A message about Emil’s death was in my inbox. He was only the second husband of Magda, my grandmother’s sister, but I was close to my grandmother  — an Auschwitz survivor who lived in a small, Beverly Hills-adjacent apartment. So, from that standpoint, Emil was important to me. 

But I didn’t do anything, didn’t return home for the funeral, an Orthodox burial that took place immediately following his passing. Instead, my friend and I went to see a U2 concert at a Rome soccer stadium. 

That wasn’t nice. My favorite Passover memories took place in the home of Emil and Magda, and, after they were both gone, Passover was never the same again. There would be seders at other relatives’ homes, but none had the magic touch of theirs. It was a right place/right time kind of thing — a moment — when I was young enough to still be cute and my sister was young enough to not care so much about only her friends and the unrequited love of one of her classmates; when our cousins, who were the same age as Hara and me and lived in Las Vegas, were friends with my sister and me; when my parents were still happily married, as far as I knew; when everybody still liked each other. 

And it helped that the family — i.e., my father — respected Emil. He was a serious, successful person, worked in the bookbinding business and was actively involved in the Pico-Robertson community, while Magda, who was strong, friendly and lovely, did not speak ill of people or show any cynicism. She was different than her hermetic sister, my grandmother, who survived the Holocaust only to lose her husband in a car accident years later. After that, my grandmother seldom left home: The world had had its way with her, and she struck back at it by not participating. 

My sister and I would tag along when my father visited my grandmother. My mother seldom, if ever, came along, and Hara and I would join the two — my father and grandmother — on the sofa. We would try to have conversations with my grandmother, who spoke Hungarian and broken English, my father speaking loudly and in Hungarian to help her understand what we were saying. She loved watching CNN and had only awful words, even at the time of her death, which occurred several years ago, to say about Barack Obama. Her views affected — or infected — my father’s. In fact, everyone in my family hates Obama. My dad’s sister thinks Sheldon Adelson is a hero. I miss Emil and Magda.

That night I met Melinda, she was seated on the sofa in Magda and Emil’s apartment, a luxurious condominium on Roxbury Drive that was walking distance from the Museum of Tolerance.

I stood before Melinda, behaving like a fool, too young to understand that I was attracted to Melinda — I was 10, maybe — and rather than just keeping quiet and letting my cute looks charm her (like I said, I was very cute), I acted insane around her: dancing, pinching, jumping and yelling, a foreshadowing, I suppose, of how women would make me act for years to come. 

She was unsure how to react to the antics of this crazy boy performing for her — but she was acting like a good sport, smiling, if confused, and then I did it: I spit on her dress. 

I don’t know what compelled me to do it. To this day, my family reminds me of it, and borrowing from the famous Holocaust motto — as well as the name of that Wu Tang Clan song — all I can say is … “Never again.”

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