A Potent Horseradish & Disputed Afikomen Bag
For Chana, shopping for Pesach begins with cleaning out last year’s leftovers from the fridge.
Chana Shapiro is an educator, writer, editor and illustrator whose work has appeared in journals, newspapers and magazines. She is a regular contributor to the AJT.
My Passover prep started this year with a review of the Pesach groceries I mindlessly bought on sale a few days after Pesach last year. It seemed prudent to stock up on half-price cans of macaroons, Passover muesli, and chewing gum, even though no one in our family likes any of it. Nor have we developed a yen for the discounted dried prunes and pears I grabbed in a frenzy of mindless acquisition, but just in case, I’ve got plenty. Once I assessed my stash of Passover comestibles from last year, it became clear that I had bought nothing we would voluntarily use this Passover, except a box of discounted tea bags.
Of course, the most onerous task of all is purging the refrigerator. Being devoutly anti-waste, right after Purim I began to include left-over olives (the expensive kind) and pickles (the sour kind) in every meal. I went deeper and found a jar with a few pieces of herring left over from last Shavuot hidden behind a jar of applesauce left over from Chanukah. It was tough, but I forced myself to discard those two, along with a shriveled orange that was lurking in a corner. Once the frig was empty and scrubbed, it was time to go shopping for new food that cost twice as much.
Shopping for Pesach always necessitates purchasing a large, fresh horseradish, (my most unfavorite root vegetable.) Last year, I first tried a local supermarket, but when I asked the fruit and vegetable guy where I might find a fresh horseradish, he directed me to a very big parsnip. I wonder if other Pesach shoppers believed him.
While I am perfectly content to stick with red ch’rayn that comes in a bottle, my husband, daughters, grandchildren, and two of our annual guests only want the unadulterated root. It’s about the crying.
My husband, Zvi, says that if eating the bitter herb doesn’t make his tear ducts work overtime — a visceral act referencing the bitter lives the Hebrews endured in Egypt — he simply eats more until his eyeglasses fog over. I magnanimously (heroically, I might add) peel the bitter root, but I don’t grate it. At the seder table, Zvi cuts it into slices, and his loyal followers join in a solemn chew-and-cry session. They poo-poo the ameliorating effect of the beet juice that makes my red horseradish tolerable, but I don’t care. I don’t really like to cry in public, anyway. I’ve heard that it’s easy to grow your own horseradish by planting a left-over, still-viable portion of the root, and it’s claimed to keep predators out of your garden; I’m not surprised.
But it’s not only the lachrymose session that creates memories of seders past, present, and hopefully future; our seder regulars also anticipate the yearly afikomen bag dispute.
When our daughters were in early elementary grades, one of them made a hand-decorated afikomen bag that we saved. For years, we joined out-of-town family for seders, but as our kids got older, we started to host our own, and the afikomen bag was put to use. Early in the seder, the middle matzoh of a stack of three is broken in half, and one half becomes the afikomen, which Zvi slides into the afikomen bag. Everyone eats a piece of the afikomen at the seder’s end (afikomen literally means “dessert”).
The bag’s entry into our family lore developed when each of our daughters claimed to be its creator. When the middle matzah half is put into the bag, we know that a dispute will begin. For better or worse, Zvi and I don’t remember who made the relic, so we can’t referee, and because our grandchildren and guests find the pseudo-feud amusing, it encourages the sibling theatrics. By now, the afikomen bag controversy is an anticipated part of our seders, and our daughters haven’t yet wearied of their claims.
That afikomen bag has achieved such familial significance, it was the subject of our granddaughter’s very first college essay (“Write About a Unique Family Object.”) It seems that, inadvertently, one of our daughters created a permanently stained, well-worn future heirloom.
During the festive meal, bonhomie between sisters resumes. That’s when Zvi steals away to hide the bagged afikomen. The person who finds it has tremendous bargaining power: we enjoy watching my husband deal to get it back because, even after we’ve read the entire Haggadah and have sung the songs, we can’t finish the seder properly without each eating a piece of the afikomen.
Here at Chez Shapiro, we’re ready with tissues for the horseradish cadre, and we’re wondering who will present the best afikomen bag argument. We’ll cry a little, laugh a little, and sing, “Next Year in Jerusalem.” May it be a joyful year in which we need tissue only because of eating horseradish.
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