Tag #157374 - Interview #88517 (Zuzanna Mensz )

We celebrated all the holidays, Father always made sure we did. I remember Easter [Pesach] the best, because then we’d have the seder, a festive family supper, and my sister would come from Warsaw. The house had to be cleaned, scrubbed before the Holidays, including all the drawers. I remember I once found, to my horror, a slice of dried bread in my table drawer. I didn’t tell my Father and threw it out as soon as possible. We had a separate set of dishes, used exclusively on Easter. If a particular dish wasn’t double [without a Pesach counterpart], it had to be put into boiling water. The cupboard was full of matzot, we were not allowed to eat a single slice of bread for the whole eight days, and indeed we didn’t. We only ate matzot, which Mom would use to prepare many different dishes, for example a cake from matzah flour that you bake similarly to a sponge-cake, or an omelette, the so-called matzebray. You make it like this: first you soak the matzot in water or milk, then add some eggs, two eggs for two matzot, whip the whites, add some salt to taste. You then form a sort of pancake out the mass and fry it on a pan. I still prepare it sometimes.

The seder looked like this: Father sat on a coach in the dining room, the table was pushed closer to the coach, Mom would place pillows on it, because the tradition demanded that the head of the family was comfortable. We all sat at the table, the candles were lit. Father had some matzot of special importance. There was that custom that children could steal the matzot from their father and hide them, he would look for them and if he couldn’t find them, the children could say wishes and he had to fulfill them. [Editor’s note: The most popular form of the custom was different. The last piece of matzah was hidden from the children and they were given small gifts when they found it.] Naturally, Father had never found any matzot and we could say a wish. Mom prompted us to ask for bikes, but either we had different dreams or we had mercy on him, and our wishes were much more modest… I remember asking him for a drawing pad, oh, Mom was so angry with me! Father would naturally promise to buy the things we wanted, we’d show him where the matzot were and the seder would start. There is this custom that during the seder a child asks its father four questions about the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. I was always the one to ask, although it was supposed to be the youngest child. My sister Hilka was very moody and she wouldn’t always do what she was asked to. So it was me who asked the questions in Hebrew and Father answered, reading them aloud. That [Exodus] Haggadah is very long but I think he only read excerpts of it because I don’t remember being bored at the table, just some joking, laughing, and finally a normal supper, consisting usually of dishes like broth and chicken. In the meantime Father would drink six, I think, glasses of wine. We weren’t given the wine, maybe a sip. Father would always joke a bit when drinking the wine. There was also a glass left for the prophet, but he never showed up.