“When I was a boy the storyteller in our family was Uncle Lew who died a couple of years ago at 93. In a family that tended to be withdrawn, Uncle Lew was the friendliest. He had been a salesman and he liked to drive around and dropped in on people. He would ask us kids how we were doing in school and then there was point when he would launch in and start telling stories about the family, generation upon generation.  

My parents would be in the living room and we would be eating popcorn. As it got later I remember lying on the floor so my mother wouldn’t see me and send me to bed. I just wanted him to tell more and more. I wanted to know everything. What it looked like and what it smelled like, what they ate and what they wore.

As I got older I looked to those stories about family as giving us some sense of place, that is some way we were meant to be here and had a history. That we had standing.


haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning