In the spring of 1958, Sarah received an invitation to a Bat Mitzvah.
“What next!” she said, displaying the gilt-edged card at her tea party. “All of a sudden, Jewish girls are being confirmed – like the boys!” She paused only to snort. “And a whole lot at a time, no less! Paula Frankl’s grand-daughter is not even getting the service to herself.”
Nathan defended the congregation of which he was a member. “At our shul, it’s always done in groups.”
“And an Orthodox shul doesn’t do it at all,” Sarah retorted, which he knew. “There, girls don’t expect the same treatment as boys. What was good enough for their mothers is good enough for them.”
“I think it’s a lovely idea,” Leona put in. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if, sooner or later, Orthodox synagogues latch onto it–”
Sigmund put down his teacup. “That will be the day! When the orthodox start taking a leaf out of the Reform book!” he declaimed sarcastically.
“I wish they’d begun doing it at our shul when I was thirteen,” Leona responded. “Why shouldn’t girls have a ceremony to confirm them into Jewish womanhood, as our boys have, to mark their entrance to manhood? The Bat Mitzvah ceremonies I’ve attended have been beautiful occasions. The girls wore pretty white dresses and carried prayer books–”
“Like Catholic girls at their first communion!” Sigmund cut in scathingly.
The conversation had taken a turn Sarah did not like. “Christian or Jew, everyone has the same God,” she glared at Sigmund, who was inclined to forget it.
“But Christians have Jesus and Mary and the Holy Ghost, too,” little Margaret Klein said.
Sarah patted the child’s silky black hair. Like Marianne, Margaret closely resembled Sarah and there was something incongruous about hearing such a Jewish-looking child speak that way.
The other children were looking shocked.
“Jews aren’t supposed to say those names,” Margaret’s cousin Howard chided her.
Matthew sprang to his sister’s defence. “But Margaret and I aren’t Jewish.” He glanced at his mother, who was quietly sipping her tea. “We aren’t anything.”
Howard looked uncomfortable. “I keep forgetting.”
“And what you just told Margaret isn’t correct,” Hannah Moritz informed him.
Howard and his Jewish cousins looked surprised.
“Since when were you an expert on the subject?” Sigmund flashed to his daughter-in-law. Hannah’s agnosticism had always been a bone of contention between them.
“I bet if we searched the Torah from end to end, we wouldn’t find a word about it,” Hannah replied. “It’s one of those customs people assume is the Law.”
Sigmund did not deny it. “If you had your way, there wouldn’t even be any Jewish customs,” he said, venting his ruffled feelings upon Hannah. “You probably wouldn’t have had my twin grandsons Bar Mitzvah, if you’d had your way.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Hannah said coolly. “Because I happen to enjoy and approve of Jewish tradition. It’s the glue that’s held our people together.”
“That I won’t argue with,” Sigmund conceded. “But without the religion, there’d be no tradition.”
Sarah cut the debate short. “Be like me and leave well enough alone,” she advised Sigmund. “Be thankful that even the glue Hannah mentioned has held fast!” She glanced around at the several vacant chairs, her disapproval graphic in her expression.
“People do occasionally have other things to do on Saturday afternoons, Mother,” Nathan responded to her silent censure.
Bessie and Rebecca had gone to Liverpool, to wave farewell to a friend who was emigrating. Helga, whose long-standing courtship with Moishe Lipkin continued as ever, had accompanied him on a visit to his mother in the Home for the Aged. Harry’s wife, Ann, had dumped her children at Sarah’s and gone to have her hair set. And Shirley and Peter had taken theirs with them on a weekend jaunt to Paris. Esther had not yet arrived.
“Once, nobody would have dared to miss one of my tea parties,” Sarah muttered.
David, who had so far kept out of the discussion, smiled dryly, “Mother’s right.”
“When wasn’t she, so far as you’re concerned?” Nathan said testily. For him, these weekly gatherings were more of a strain than a pleasure. Yet he could not bring himself to stay away.
“What is so special about your tea parties?” Sigmund exclaimed to Sarah.
Sarah gasped. How could Sigmund ask such a question?
The moment the words left his lips, he had regretted them. But, like Sarah, he was aware that the old-established Jewish values were changing and did not take kindly to her rubbing it in. Sarah was eyeing him rebukingly. “I’m sorry,” he said grudgingly.
“You should be. Now why don’t we all have another cup of tea?”
Sarah busied herself with her teapot, but her mind was even busier. And she had still not recovered from hearing Sigmund say what he had, which was like an open invitation to the family to start going their own way. As had already begun happening in some Jewish families – those in which there was no family custom, like Sarah’s weekly gatherings, to hold them together.
“Kate and Margaret can pass around the teacups, like their Grandma Esther did on Shabbos afternoons, when she was a little girl,” she smiled. Margaret might not be Jewish, but she was part of the clan.
“And when we grow up and get married, our little girls will do it,” Kate said to Margaret.
“And I’ll drive my children to the Shabbos tea party in my Rolls Royce,” young Howard promised, to the adults’ amusement.
Sarah had made her point and would not have minded had the whole brood arrived together in a double-decker bus. That they rode on the Sabbath had ceased to upset her.
The significance of his mother’s charade with the children had not escaped David. He could read her like a book. But she had never been above connivance in a good cause.
Sarah had long since schooled herself to accept that her family did not live by the letter of the Jewish Law, that expediency had watered down their devoutness. But so long as Sarah lived, they would know where to find their own on Shabbos afternoons. Stray they might – who knew what the future may bring? she thought, glancing at the youngest generation. But nothing would have changed when they returned to the fold.