BABYLON—CIRCA 492 BC
One early, horrific event punctuates my memory of childhood. Most likely it is my earliest because it is the worst—because its horror drowned out every childish whimsy that came before it.
My family was on an extended trip to Babylon, a visit with my aunt and uncle’s family to celebrate my seventh birthday. In fact, it was the last conversation I ever had with my father and mother. It concerned my receiving the gift, a gleaming golden medallion engraved with the pattern of a six-pointed star. I remember crying out in delight and holding the luminous gift up to the light.
“Oh, Poppa, did you make this for me?” I asked.
“No, my dear. This has been precious to our family for many years. In fact, your great-grandmother brought it with her from the Promised Land.”
“You mean Israel?”
“Yes, Hadassah. That is what I mean.”
At those words, I clasped the pendant even tighter to my breast and gazed at my father in wonder. I remember that my mother laughed her warmest, kindest laugh and reached out to ruffle my hair. “It is a star, Hadassah, and we gave it to you because you are our bright star and because we want you to carry on this family legacy and all it stands for. You can put it on, dearest, but you’ll have to wait awhile before keeping it on for good. This is a woman’s neckpiece.”
“Oh, I know—but can I wear it tonight? Just for tonight?”
I remember that my parents exchanged a glance to consider my request and that in my mind’s eye I thought I spied a gleam in both their eyes, a twinkle of love for me and of affection they held for each other. My mother looked back at me and smiled again. “Yes, my dear. You may wear it tonight.”
So I slipped the medallion around my neck and immediately snuggled down to sleep on my blanket, anxious to begin my night with my newly beloved treasure, this family heritage of which I had only the barest understanding.
I was startled awake in the night to screaming and a thrashing frenzy of movement in my family’s room. And a flash of light: the glimmer of moonlight from the open door upon the curved blade of a raised scimitar.
The sword did not stay raised for long. It swept down with a swift confidence, an utter ferocity of purpose whose motion alone has haunted me for years. Thank G-d the darkness hid what came next, for now that I recall it from an adult’s perspective, the sound was fully sufficient to tell me what was taking place. A long, glistening arc of light, a whistle of sound, and the strangle of a breath escaping my mother’s lungs. The impact close by told me she had fallen hard, right next to where I lay on my pallet on the floor.
I rolled out of my blanket to her side, and I suppose the reflex saved my life, for in the dark and confusion, I blended into my mother’s silhouette. I remember feeling a jarringly opposite pair of sensations: at once the known—the usual outlines of her torso, the curve of her shoulder, the smell of her person—and secondly, the sheer lifeless weight of these once-familiar limbs. By now I was in shock and, thank G-d, completely incapable of uttering a sound. There was something else—a viscous liquid coating her clothes and mine that had not been there just seconds ago.
Knowing what I know now about children, I cannot believe I did not cry out. What seven-year-old lives through such terror and does not scream? The Lord must have stilled my tongue. Especially given what came next. In trying to make my mother speak and comfort me, I traced up her shoulder, but I could not find her face.
My exploring fingers located a warm ring of flesh and sinew.
I recoiled—not necessarily from a full mental understanding of what had happened to her, but from the sheer strangeness of it, the sudden change in a body that at that age I knew better than my own. An icy flood of combined dread and bewilderment cascaded down my senses. I knew, somehow, that something profoundly mine, the anchor of my being, was forever changed.
As I write this years later from a thorough understanding of the tragic horror of it all, I grieve once more for that long-ago lost child, almost as if she is someone other than myself. On the other hand, I also can relive the personal anguish even though my awareness at that time, thankfully, was limited.
Next to me, the shouting and slashing and falling continued. A pair of men was slaughtering my family. My nose was filled with overpowering and terrifying scents—an earthy aroma that I would later learn was blood, the sweaty odor of the attackers, even the goatish, salty smell of my own all-encompassing fear.
Over the screams of my brother and father I distinctly remember hearing the throaty male laughter of the intruders. It was low in timbre, more bass than I’d ever heard in my father’s voice, even in the morning at his gruffest. And it had a quality I had never heard before and have never heard since. All I can say is that it reminded me of animals: a combination of baying dogs and the howling of hyenas.
I must have stayed too traumatized to even draw in a breath, let alone exhale to utter a cry, because they never heard me or saw my prone form in the blood beside my mother’s body. Or perhaps they thought me dead, which, considering the state of my mind, probably was not too far from the truth.
I will say more later on about the massacre of my family and that of Mordecai, for it is certainly the dominating event of my childhood—perhaps even of my life, although clearly that is debatable considering what came next. But the reason I subjected you to this account is to show you that I of all people have cause to lament the violent taking of life.
Which is why I find such irony in subsequent events. I have discovered that the hatred at the heart of this story originated in a beheading that should have taken place almost five hundred years previous to this time. That botched execution led, through the years, to the butchery I’ve just described and, even later, to the entire story at hand. I know this sounds mysterious, so let me explain and trace for you the terrible influence of this long-ago event into the present day.