Page 34 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

Blood Libel

B: Sure. Why not? But don’t think I’m going to change my story or
make some little mistake you can use against me. It’s easy to stick to
the truth once you know what it is. Still want to hear it?

S: Certainly. Please go ahead.

B: As any unaltered public archive will verify, I was born in Brooklyn
about forty years ago and attended public school there. My family
owned a small matzo bakery catering to the ultra-Orthodox Jews on
the East Coast who wouldn’t eat Manischevitz matzo despite the
kashrut assurances on the box. Wrong rabbi blessed them, I guess.
But my father—and grandfather, who started the business—made
sure the premises would pass muster. And they always had a little
schnapps in the office cabinet for the inspector. So the bakery did all
right with this limited market. After the war the U.S. finally let some
Jewish refugees from Hitler’s horrors into the country and that led to
an increase in sales once the Chasidim got organized and started
raising large families.

S: Were you involved in that business?

B: Not in any full-time capacity. I helped out after school and during
holidays and summer vacation. My older brother intended to take
over the business and that was fine with me. My interest was music
and my parents were content to send me for lessons instead of
instructing me in the finer points of baking unleavened bread. It’s
called the bread of affliction in Deuteronomy, and I saw no need to
share in the pain of producing it. I never understood that, anyway. It
seemed to me that the Israelites must have been eating leavened
bread during their enslavement, and that matzo should therefore be
called the bread of liberation. But I was never strong in biblical
studies.

S: Were you a good student otherwise?

B: About average, I’d guess. But that was in a neighborhood full of
smart Jewish kids, a lot of them children of immigrants who had
something to prove. I was third-generation, a typical teen-ager more
interested in pop culture than in getting a scholarship to MIT. And

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