God bless 'em all, they held the last Passover seder ever in Pine Bluff Friday night before last, departing in haste just as our ancestors had left Egypt's fleshpots.
Over the years the site of the local seder has kept changing--from a different incarnation of Temple Anshe Emeth, which had been torn down years ago, to the First Presbyterian Church, which had opened its doors and hearts to us for years. The composition of the attendees also had kept changing--from us few remaining Jews to Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists . . . . much as mixed multitudes had accompanied us out of slavery unto freedom.
Some of us can still remember the little neo-Victorian temple in downtown Pine Bluff with all its nooks and crannies, wooden ceilings and floors, and the tucked-away rooms on the side where I taught at least a couple of generations of Sunday School students. If they're still with us, and some are, they must be patriarchs and matriarchs by now. That old temple was done in the Moorish style that Jewish communities favored at the turn of the last century, a mix of old movie palaces and imaginary Meccas. Clearly I've lived too long--or they have.
O how many places have we fled over the years and centuries, many just in time. The moral of this story: Don't dawdle. When a chance comes to leave, leave. Don't hang around for a minute too long, or Pharaoh's army will show up and drag us back into captivity. Or worse. Don't be like the German Jews and think it can't happen here till it does. We may leave with little but a day's provisions and fond memories, but leave. Now.
We're not the only ones learning that lesson. These days Cubans can feel the gates shutting on them even as they're told a new era of peace and friendship is dawning between their country and ours. But they're getting out anyway--and fast. To quote Captain Mark Gordon of this country's Coast Guard: "The perception that the time [to leave] is now. Given all that is going on, I could see how that perception would exist."
The title of a book detailing the great exodus of the Soviet Union's Jews spelled out the same lesson: When They Come for Us We'll Be Gone.
In Sholem Aleichem's stories about Tevye the Dairyman and his family, the fictional village they left in the Old Country was called Kasrilevika, while my own family's all too real shtetl in the Pale of Settlement was called Sokolov.
The Pale of Settlement, from which we derive the phrase Beyond the Pale, was the only place Jews were allowed to live in the Tsar's vast domains. His empire kept expanding to new borders, then withdrawing to the old ones, just as it still does today.
Years ago--in 1983, to be exact--I heard Jewish music floating up to my hotel room in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Soviet Socialist "Republic," and when I ventured out to investigate I met a young Jew whose remnant of childhood Yiddish bore the exact same Polish accent as my own. Both he and his wife pretended they had no English, though it turned out later that she taught it in school.
How did my kinsman wind up in this exotic corner of the great Jewish diaspora? He got here because a distant aunt had married a Communist and, when Stalin and Hitler signed their No-Aggression Pact in 1939 dividing Poland between them and setting the stage for the Second World War, she and her family had retreated to Siberia with the Red Army. Which meant hers would be the only branch of the family to survive the war. Years later, she still kept a picture of Stalin framed in their living room and wouldn't hear a word against him. He had saved them, and like the Bourbons of old, we Jews learn nothing and forget nothing.
Innocent or not, good Communists or not, this couple was arrested and hauled off to the nearest police station, where they were accused of trading in a foreign currency, to wit dollars. It seems we were exchanging family pictures, and that was sufficient grounds for their arrest. Next I saw them, they shooed me away, knowing I was nothing but trouble.
All those memories and more came rushing back to this Wandering Jew wondering at the twists and turns of Jewish history. As my mother once told me in her (and my) native Yiddish, die Yiddishe geshichte ist sehr traurig, bus ... interesant. Jewish history is very sad but ... interesting.
To Be Continued--for we are a people whose history is never finished. It can't be. Because we are blessed/cursed with eternal life. Not by our choice but His.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 05/04/2016