…a life
that was meant to be a long one came to its end.
—Yehuda Amichai
On a sweltering afternoon in the late summer of 5760, corresponding to the year 2000 of the Common Era, most uncharacteristically for Jews, who are a tardy people, it was standing room only at Paperman’s a full half-hour before the scheduled funeral service.
The long, stark room held four banks of pews into which six hundred people were crammed. An enormous mahogany carving in the shape of a shield dominated the chapel. It may have represented the Wailing Wall or, more prosaically, a gigantic gravestone.
No one likes doing business with Paperman’s, but it’s the only game of its kind in town. Ever since Lazar Paperman converted a volunteer burial society into a business a century ago, Paperman’s has held the monopoly on the final passage of Montreal’s Jews. Heeding the founder’s motto, his descendants continue to deliver the traditional rites gracefully, tastefully, and affordably.
In the fourth row, a couple of seats in from the aisle, Helen Stern turned her shellacked head and scoured the hall. Her eyes glowed with satisfaction.
“Isn’t this something?” she announced. “Of course, I did call everybody,” she added.
Her voice carried over the subdued murmuring in the room, and a woman with a blaze of auburn curls topped by a black lace doily gave her a withering look from the row directly in front.
Helen erased the smirk from her tawny face. “If it were up to me I’d be at the very back of the room, but Jeff—” here she indicated her husband at her side with a nod, “is a pallbearer.”
The redhead whipped her head back to face the front. She did not utter a word, but her rigid spine expressed outrage.
It’s not where you’re sitting that’s my problem, Helen. It’s that you actually think it’s because of you that we’re all here.
Like a gust of cold air, silence fell over the room. A black-suited funeral director had entered by a side door.
“Please rise.”
A collective gasp swept the hall at the sight of the gleaming oak casket rolling into the chapel. It was as if everyone had inhaled in unison and then been instantly strangled.
“You may be seated.”
Rabbi Kaufman took the podium, accompanied by a cantor.
The young cantor, a beautiful tenor, chanted the Twenty-third Psalm. Next to him at the lectern, Nate Kaufman surveyed the crowd. A lanky man with a neat chin beard, he wore a tiny crocheted black kipah. A close observer would have noted red and swollen eyes behind his owlish glasses.
The rabbi began in a barely audible voice.
My eyes flow copiously,
My heart is confounded with grief,
My whole being laid waste
Over the ruin of the daughter of my people.
His voice gathered strength: “This verse from the Book of Lamentations is an outpouring of grief bemoaning the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the sixth century BCE. Traditionally we read it on Tisha b’Av, one of the saddest days on our calendar.
“In Hebrew the Book of Lamentations is called Eikhah.
“Eikhah means how? Surpassing even the agony of loss we are experiencing, we are overwhelmed by our shock, horror, and disbelief. Eikhah—how could it be that we are here to cry out at the tragic passing of such a keenly alive, such a spirited human being? How could this have happened?”