Come in and eat!
by Jennie Rose Halperin
I hosted my first Seder thirteen years ago in Berlin at my friend’s squatted apartment, a former doctor’s office turned WG (Wohngemeinschaft, a shared apartment) in Kreuzberg. For weeks, I trawled German grocery stores looking for matzo (non kosher), which is considered a health food in Germany and packaged in tiny yellow boxes extolling its benefits for general Gemütlichkeit (health). The day before my Seder, at the Karstadt on Karl-Marx-Straße, I confronted a woman who had just put the last box on the shelf in her cart.
“Ich bin Jüdin,” I said calmly and held out my hand for it. I’ve never had anyone hand something over to me so quickly.
I had told my friend that we would be “probably ten people,” but around 6 p.m. our guests started streaming through the doors: about thirty in total. The sink was clogged all day; my friend had smuggled me a box of matzo meal from Prague, but I ruined the matzo balls because I didn’t know to refrigerate the batter before cooking (the instructions were in Czech); I had never heard half the people there speak English, which they butchered almost as badly as I butchered German; my German boyfriend and his friends showed up completely baked, two hours late, with a plate of chametz pot brownies, inappropriate in every way. (I still ate one before cleanup.) It was a delightful disaster, a wholesome and unhinged night that my friends talked about for months.
Keep us breathing fire!
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