Saturday, April 02, 2005

Guess what? I made Story of the Month on Cafe Diverso for April. That means my story will be on the home page all month. Scroll down, it's at the bottom.

It's called Why was this night different?

An excerpt:

Why was this night different?

Mum sat quietly smiling at her place by the big, festive dining table Bish and I had set out in our living room for the evening. She was so tiny, so fragile, no more than a shadow of the plump bundle of energy we had always known. She had been diagnosed just three weeks before, and even though the chemotherapy she would be starting, after the Passover holiday, gave us hope, I think we all knew deep inside that it was the last Seder Night she would be with us. Little did we know that by the end of the evening, Seder Night would have changed forever, and not only for our family.

Every year in the spring, on Seder Night, the whole extended family gathered to retell an ancient story of how our ancestors were freed from slavery in Egypt, to embark on a journey into the desert that would eventually lead them to the land of the Fathers. Religious and secular alike, on the first night of Passover, Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora took part in telling the story to the next generation. The sages of old had bequeathed a memorable way of passing it on.

You can read the rest here.