"Seder in the Taiga" - a short story by Yenta Mash, translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy in 2017 in Pakn Treger

"Seder in the Taiga" - a short story by Yenta Mash, translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy in 2017 in Pakn Treger

A Seder in the Taiga” appeared originally as “A seyder in der tayge” in Mash’s collection “Mit der letster hakofe,” (The Last Time Around), Tel Aviv: H. Leivick Farlag, 2007.

A Lock Down Read

You can read today's story here 

"The Hebrew word seder means “order” and most often refers to the religious service and festive meal observed in Jewish households on Pesach. Seder derives from the same root as the Hebrew word siddur (prayer book).

Just as the siddur contains the order of prayers for daily, Shabbat, and festival services, so is the Passover seder - and, in many Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, the Rosh HaShanah seder - a prescribed order of prayers, readings, symbolic explanations, and songs related to the holiday. The Pesach seder is the only ritual meal in the Jewish calendar year for which such an order is prescribed, hence its name.

A seder can and should be interactive – encourage questioning, fun, and learning to ensure everyone from the youngest to the oldest at your table comes away with something new!" From reformJudaism.org

Yenta Mash

1922 born Zguiritse, Moldova

1977 immigrated to Israel

2013 dies Haifa, Israel

One quality I am seeking in short stories for Lock Down Reads are works that let us see how others have coped with the consequences of terrible hardships imposed on them through no fault of theirs.  Maybe from the strength show in "A Seder in  in Taiga" by a group of eastern European women of Jewish heritage exhiled to Siberia we can be drawn to reflect on how to make the best of whatever circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

Today's story is narrated by a woman in a Siberian prison camp, all the men have been sent to the mines in the Ural Mountains, for most a certain death sentence.  The only bakery in the area has just burned down, bread is a very big component of their sparse diets.  The Jewish women fear the forthcoming very important traditionally Seder dinner will be ruined by God intervened.

"As if that weren’t enough, God sent us yet another affliction—not one from the Haggadah but a Siberian one. The heavy layers of snow that had built up during the long winter caused the chimney of the bakery in Krasnoye to collapse. This, alas, was the only large-scale bakery in the area. It provided bread to villages and settlements for miles around. What were we to do? Three times a day, we gobbled down whatever meager nourishment we could put our hands on. We gathered mushrooms in the forest and ate them with the wild garlic the Siberians called kolba, and before we’d swallowed the last spoonful we were hungry again.

Two weeks passed like this, and then came word from Krasnoye, where the village council and our commandant were located, saying that if we sent them two strong young men with sleds, they would give us the sacks of flour we were owed for the two weeks. After that . . . God willing, the bakery would soon be back in operation...

In this way the Lord provided us with matzo for Passover. The non-Jews made potato dumplings they called kletski, as well as zateriukhes, which they devoured with a thin potato soup, and since it was the day before Passover, the Jewish women used our portion to bake matzo."

In the old days scholars of the Talmud, restricted to men, would speak at the dinner, now the narrator's mother speaks.  She begins to question God, what good can be behind the situation the women find themselves in just before Pass over (a Haggadah is a text giving the order of the Seder):

"All the Jewish families from our section and the one next to ours came to the seder, and there was matzo for everyone. My mother led the ceremony. Since we had no Haggadahs, she proposed that we celebrate the seder in a new way. Year after year, she said, we’d conducted the seder according to the rules laid down by the scholars of old, but this year, by necessity, we’d add our own twist. We would not ask the Four Questions, first of all because there was no one to ask them of, and second because once we began asking we wouldn’t be done till morning. Our questions weren’t actually questions anyway—they were complaints, directed at God.

For example, why on this day do we not eat leavened bread? Very simple. Because the bakery in Krasnoye isn’t operating. And maror? We have more bitter herbs  than we need; we’ve all eaten kolba till we’re green in the face. As for dipping, we’re drowning in a sea of tears, and when it comes to reclining, we’re up to our necks in the middle of nowhere.

We were slaves in Egypt, my mother said, and today we’re slaves of Stalin, exiled to hard labor in the Siberian taiga, without rights and without the slightest hope of rescue.

Why, my mother continued, should we listen to what Eliezer said thousands of years ago about the exodus from Egypt, or quote from the words of Reb Berl or Reb Shmerl, when right here at the table, Aunt Gitl and Madam Glazer, Madam Gurevitz and Sonya Shmukler, Sheyndl Gelman and Madam Schwartsman can tell us about how their homes were destroyed in the dark of night and their families torn asunder without a why or wherefore? Let each of us tell how we used to live in our little towns, upholding our Jewish traditions and our humanity, caring for the poor, distributing challah for Shabbat and matzos for Passover, providing dowries to needy brides and help to the destitute. Yet even so, the Lord sent his messenger to condemn us to wander and suffer in the Siberian taiga."

All the women in the group contribute to the conversation.  In the old days women from families of different economic and social types would have seperate Sedar dinners, now such matters are forgotten.

This is a very wise and deeply moving story.  The narrator's mother died within a year but she herself survived to almost ninety, having moved to Israel.

As a Lock Down Story, if you are comfortable, no serious food anxieties and wondering what to watch next on Netflix, then be grateful.  

We are all in this together.  We need to try to forget our divisions for a while.

Yenta Mash (1922–2013) grew up in the region once known as Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), renowned as a lively polyglot area and a flourishing center of Jewish culture. In 1941, she was exiled to the Siberian gulag by Soviet forces. She endured seven years of hard labor before leaving the prison camp and making her way to Chisinau, then the capital of the Moldavian SSR. In 1977, in her fifties, Mash immigrated to Israel and settled in Haifa, where, she began to write and to publish. Her short stories were published in Yiddish journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and her work was collected in four volumes published in Israel. She was honored with Israel’s Itsik Manger Prize in 1999 and with the Dovid Hofshteyn Prize in 2002...from Words Without Borders