Hell's Kitchen, Part Two

The apartment in which Baba and Zada reside in Hell’s Kitchen, their sanctuary from 1938 Poland alternating for Baba with Miami Beach and upstate New York according to the season, takes up an entire floor through, has both a front and back door and in addition to the aforementioned zillion little rooms contains two never-used fireplaces and two bathrooms. Outside Baba's bedroom window a pink neon sign flashes the word "wine" like mad from the liquor store below, and the bed pillows are plump and silken soft with feathers. The huge table in the front room is filled with small, etched wine glasses with gold rims that sit in tiny, matching saucers, a silver chalice, delicate china, polished candlesticks, and a dazzling, embossed white-on-white tablecloth.  There is a clump of large, aggressive-looking, shiny leaves sprouting from a gigantic rubber plant and a cluster of spiffed up children, loud, fast-talking husbands and wives, cousins and great aunts, all firing off in a couple of languages.

The room is crowded and noisy. The six brothers when bunched together are like a bouquet of unruly, assertive weeds-  they also are opinionated, stubborn, funny and charming pranksters and they all like to flirt and kibbitz. They particularly enjoy labeling themselves and each other for the amusement of the kids and others young at heart as the "rich" uncle, the "smart" uncle, the handsomest, the luckiest, the stupidest and so on.  A few of the uncles are amateur sultans with second and possibly third "wives" stashed away in hidden corners around the city and they've had lots of practice being lovable.

As the Passover story gets underway after the "brucha" or prayer, there are murmurs and surreptitious attempts at conversation and other forms of heresy at the far end of the table, mainly from the women, who are loudly shushed by Zada Jake, aka "the boss" who in turn is backed up by his toady son Sol/Shlomo/Shloimele which in turn causes the other brothers to barely stifle their snickers. The previously pristine table is slowly becoming a weird collage of crumbled matzoh, horse radish splotches and red wine stains with the errant stalk of green celery thrown across it for contrast. Later on in the course of the reading the uncles suddenly will point the children's attention to an open front door as they shake the table from underneath to simulate Elijah’s ghost, then quickly drain the prophet’s filled cup unseen in their annual and futile attempt to scare the daylights out of the more gullible of the kids. When Baba finally serves up the fish after an endless droning of every word of the Hagaddah by Zada at his customary breakneck speed, she leaves the head in tact, eye vacantly gazing back up at the Seder guests.  It is her personal revenge for having to cook for the son's wives. 

Zada keeps half a Pall Mall tucked behind his ear, has an observant, aqua stare and looks like a bald eagle quietly biding his time. Baba has darker blue eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones, leathery Florida skin from way too many unblocked winters, and a raspy voice from chronic bronchitis; she appears tortured but in actuality is kvelling - basking in unmitigated, earned glory- while regarding her sextet of glorious male progeny; she compulsively twists an already ravaged mulch of Kleenex in her hands to dab those cerulean orbs. At the end, after all the matzoh sandwiches, the soup, the matzoh snacks, the turkey, the matzoh crumbling, the compote, and the endless talk stretching into the wee hours, the uncles are drunkenly singsonging about some lost lambs.