And that’s it; he feels a plummet and a deletion commensurate with the space his mother occupied in his life. Nothing will fill it. He knows this from his father’s death. He’ll go around with another amorphous blank, until he himself becomes one in the consciousnesses of his children. There are immediate tangible demands that require a clarity of mind that eludes him. Normally, he prides himself on precisely this kind of ability. His work, in real-estate law, consists almost entirely of accurately doing things in the proper sequence. But at first he can’t even make sense of what his aunt tells him. His mother has died but his aunt is not with her. His mother is on the roof of her condominium. She was playing Rummikub with other Russian Jewish women. The paramedics came. He must go to his mother’s condominium. He must call the funeral home. It is his week with his younger daughter and she is asleep. Does he wake her? Does he call his ex-wife? Does he call the woman he is dating, who is at home with her own children? Does he call his older daughter at the encampment? He decides on his older daughter, because he will need to tell her anyway, and there is something in him that wants to speak with her, to, in a selfish and perverse way, use this death to evoke a connection. He doesn’t know the etiquette of calling his daughter at the encampment. She shares her tent with her girlfriend and he imagines that a phone call from him would be perceived as unwelcome or intrusive. But his daughter answers right away, and her voice is gentle and calm, as if there were nothing at odds between them. It’s consistent with his sense of her, what he has always loved and admired, her innate inclination toward tolerance, compassion, and mercy. As if, despite her mounting disapprovals, she believes in his capacity to reform. This is her first death. An irreducible part of her life is gone. If things were not so bizarrely strained between them, would it be any easier to find the words to initiate her into it? “Mila, I need you to come home.” “Babi died.” There’s a silence. “Will you come?” “I’ll wait for you.” This is the conversation he has with his daughter, in her tent, on the grounds of her university campus, sectioned off by temporary fencing, festooned with posters and revolutionary slogans, ringed with Palestinian flags, under the skyline of an affluent North American city. He orders her an Uber and taps in instructions for the driver, a young man with a Muslim name whose sympathies he infers. Even now, with his mother dead, there is space in his head for this thought. For some thoughts, rarely the best ones, there is infinite space. He sits at his dining-room table and watches the progress of the Uber on his phone. It is like a primitive video game from his youth. The little car approaches the university gates. It turns. It comes to a stop. It spins around and proceeds toward his apartment with his daughter inside. All that passes for normal life strikes him as mockingly, even malevolently, strange. As he waits, he calls the funeral home, the same one that ushered his father and his grandparents and almost every other Soviet Jew he’s known out of this world. His father used to say leerily, “I don’t want to go to that place.” But he went. There is someone at the funeral home to answer the phone at any hour and the service is arranged for the next day. Afterward, with exceeding slowness, he walked his mother to her car. She tired easily. She expressed concern about whatever it was that was influencing Mila’s thinking. Implicit was the charge that his own laxness had enabled it. With each breath, a sound came from his mother’s chest, as if something within were imperfectly sealed. Old age, she said. This was how it was. They masked or hid from one another that which would cause distress. As a result, when the truth emerged, it was a shock. Or maybe not. Maybe everyone intimated everything. Mila arrives, and he instructs her not to reveal anything to her sister should she wake. Before he leaves, they regard each other and then embrace. He has always been affectionate with his daughters, even as they grew older and there arrived the inevitable and intruding sense of physical distinction, but, when he and Mila hug, it feels as though they must thaw a frozen layer before they can exchange any warmth. It is nearly midnight when he drives to his mother’s condominium. There’s very little traffic and he feels as if he were not so much driving as gliding through space and time. His route takes him past habitual totems of life as his parents’ son: a large Russian grocery, the apartment building they inhabited when they first arrived, a house they bought, the park where they walked—a small node of the city once infused with a particular and intimate sensibility. This is when he weeps, driving unobserved in the dark, seized by orphanhood. An ambulance is parked in the circular drive in front of his mother’s building. The light is on in the cab and he sees two paramedics inside, as if preparing to leave. There are a handful of people in front of the building, most of them elderly. The building’s residents are primarily pensioners who have downsized from their houses, mostly Jews, including Russian Jews, but also Koreans and Persians. North of the city proper, the building is at the nexus of these three communities. There is a murmuring as he approaches. One of the elderly men, whom he dimly recalls as a client of his, sombrely greets him, and, as he enters the building, he hears himself identified as “the son.” He has his own key, which he uses to enter the building. His own key and his name on the title for estate-planning reasons. There’s a security guard at a station in the lobby, with a series of screens that offer diverse views of the building—the pool, the gym, the rear entrance, the parking garage, the roof. The guard, a young South Asian woman, new to the position, pays less attention to him than the people outside had. He presses the button for the elevator and rides it in solitude, noting when he passes his mother’s floor. He proceeds to the roof, where everyone is waiting for him. To reach the roof, he pushes open a heavy iron door and then passes between a series of rectangular planters that some residents have claimed as their gardens. He knows which one is his mother’s. She grows dill, green onions, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers. He has the declarative thought, Someone will have to tend it. The area of the roof accessible to the residents is not very big—under a pergola there is a sturdy wooden table with seating for four. His aunt and uncle, three of his mother’s friends, and a dark-suited representative from the funeral home are all by the table. None of them sit. His mother’s body is on a gurney, zipped up in a black vinyl body bag. The ivory Rummikub tiles are still spread out on the table, along with the blue tile racks at each woman’s position. His mother’s place faces south, because she liked to look toward the lake and the city at sunset. When his aunt sees him, she bursts into tears. She and his mother were fraternal twins who lived their whole lives together. Until they went to university, they shared a bed in a house that lacked indoor plumbing. In old age, they talked on the phone multiple times each day and accompanied each other to doctor’s appointments and on routine errands. He’d sometimes wondered how one would cope when the other died. His mother’s friends also start to cry. Two of them he has known for decades, practically since they immigrated. The third woman, Tamara, is from the contingent of Soviet Jews who went to Israel first, before electing to migrate again. She was his mother’s closest friend in the building. When he spoke to his mother on the phone and she gave an account of her day, it often began, “I went for a stroll with Tamara.” Tamara stands before him and wrings her hands. “It happened in an instant. We were playing and then she went like this.” She clutches at her chest to mime his mother’s actions, despite the superstition against depicting another’s infirmity on your own body. How many times had his mother admonished him? “Ne pokazyvay na sebe.” Don’t show on yourself. “She could hardly speak. But she said your name. ‘Vadik.’ It was always ‘My Vadik.’ ” All of this is communicated in Russian, with the man from the funeral home looking on. They have been waiting on the roof out of deference. The man from the funeral home asks him if he would like to look at his mother before she is taken away, but he declines. When his father was dying, from a more agonizing and protracted illness, he’d resolved to be there for everything, to see everything. He’d learned that lesson and doesn’t need to learn it again. With nothing left to do, the man from the funeral home begins wheeling the gurney away, and everyone follows, as if in a procession or a trance. Then they all silently wait for the elevator. Once it arrives, there is a moment of uncertainty about who should go in with his mother’s body. He steps inside with his uncle and aunt, and his aunt insists that his mother’s friends join; there is enough room for all of them. There is something about this gaggling that feels piercingly emblematic of his life with his family, with this community, the eschewing of proprieties, the clumping together. On his mother’s floor, the doors open and he is struck by the horror of finality. He must get out of the elevator and be apart from her forever. Goodbye, Mama. He places a hand at the base of the body bag to feel some part of her for the last time. He walks along the corridor with his uncle and aunt and unlocks his mother’s apartment. Inside, it is tidy, everything in its place. Framed photos on the wall, mostly of his daughters at different ages. He goes into the kitchen and sees a Pyrex casserole dish, a cup, a plate, and a fork, washed and rinsed beside the sink; a bowl of green grapes, the globes of fruit detached from the stems the way she preferred; a free Russian-language newspaper open on the table. What else? A calendar of Jewish holidays and a tin can with a slot—a pushka, the quaint Yiddish word for it comes into his head, the charitable container, into which his mother intermittently dropped coins for the Jewish Russian Community Center. Every mundane thing is precious and searing. He loved his mother, but she loved him more. Is that just the way of things? The child grows apart, separates, contrasts. He would die for his daughters without hesitation. God forgive him, he can’t say the same thing about his mother. Maybe that is the line between childhood and adulthood, when you begin to hesitate to die for your parents. There’s nothing that needs to be done at his mother’s apartment. He comes out of the kitchen to find his aunt sitting at the dining-room table, shaking her head as if to deny something, and his uncle standing beside her, looking tired and bereft. He is a short, stocky, glowering person, trained to design truck engines, who has known his sister-in-law for more than fifty years, and must also be mourning her and feeling sympathy for his wife and for his nephew. There’s so much to weep about; it is endless. They take the elevator down together. They part and get into their cars. Before he drives, he calls some old friends who can be relied upon to tell others. He’s received the same calls from them in grim and sacred reciprocity. “Why are you up?” he asks, though it’s obvious why. “I didn’t wake her,” Mila says. He believes her. Awake or asleep, Lily knows if Mila is there. It’s like a sixth sense, reverence. “You should have woken me,” Lily says, tears burgeoning, straining surface tension, then falling. “It makes no difference. I would have told you in the morning.” “It makes a big difference.” “I didn’t tell her,” Mila says. “She started guessing and guessed.” What a stupid argument, he thinks. Like most arguments. He goes to Lily and takes her up in his arms because she is still small enough and young enough to be taken up. They sit on the couch, the three of them, Lily in his lap, Mila resting against him, all of them sobbing. He thinks, if his mother could see them, how sorry and heartbroken she would be. This was because of her and she couldn’t comfort them. None of them sleep much. Mila goes to her room. Lily climbs into his bed, as she sometimes does for a treat, but this is not that. If he sleeps, it’s so fleeting as to leave no trace. And yet come dawn he scarcely recalls what occupied his mind all night—erratic thoughts, fixations, orchestrated disputes. Also the eulogy. If he’d been scrupulous, he’d have got up and written something down. Instead, he lay beside Lily. And then it was the light of morning for the condemned and nothing would revoke time or alter the terms of the day. His task is to get up, so he gets up. It is a school day for Lily, so he calls the automated system and selects the appropriate number for “family matter” and then another for “full day” to report her absence. He brews coffee. He knocks on Mila’s door as he used to when, only a year ago, he would wake her for high school. He sits on the bed beside Lily and nudges her shoulder. She opens her eyes and he can see that there is an instant when she still inhabits the former reality before she is besieged by the current one. “Pick out your clothes,” he says. “What do I wear?” “A dress, if you like. But nothing too bright.” “O.K.,” she says and sits up. She rises, goes to her room. Telling her to pick clothes reminds him that he must do the same. He is a man, a lawyer, he has suits—even though he mostly works from home and rarely has occasion to wear them. But he must also choose a shirt, one that can be sacrificed. Should it matter which one? It’s for his mother’s funeral. Sacrifice the whole closet. But he deliberates because he knows she would consider it wasteful to ruin a good shirt. In the kitchen, he turns on the radio, as is his habit. It is the top of the hour—the international-news brief, led since October with reporting from Gaza. The reporting is unrelentingly bleak. There is little to squabble about in terms of the bleakness. But little still isn’t nothing. What is quantitatively small can be qualitatively large. In his mind he inquires of the reporter, of the national newscaster, both of whom are supported substantially by taxpayer dollars, “Why do you never mention . . . ?,” or “Why, only at the very end, do you mention . . . ?” These questions can be spoken aloud only in front of certain types of people. Broadly speaking, Jews. Also conservatives. Conservatives, because, at the moment, this position falls within the scope of their ideology. Jews, because human beings are and always will be clannish. Not all Jews, of course. As a reminder, the national news has an item about the university encampments and the petitions made to the courts in different jurisdictions to have them removed. A student activist is interviewed, a young woman with a Celtic last name, and Mila drifts to the kitchen counter to listen. The student employs the standard terms. She sounds more educated than smart. What does he expect? She is a representative. She is representing. “Do you know her?” he asks. “Yeah,” Mila says. “I know her.” The dress Lily chooses is black, long-sleeved, accented at the cuffs and the hem with black lace. “Is it O.K.?” “It’s the one I wore to your party.” He’d thrown a party for himself when he turned fifty. He was born at the end of September, 1973, a week before the start of the Yom Kippur War. For the party, he invited family and friends to a Russian restaurant not far from where his mother lived. A big spread. A dance floor. Layers of kitsch. He reasoned that in another decade he wouldn’t be able to throw such a party. His mother, his aunt, his uncle might be gone or in no condition to attend. He assumed that he and his friends would still be around, but this was not necessarily true. And his daughters would be grown. But it didn’t require a decade. It hadn’t been a year, and his mother was dead. And one week after his party homicidal maniacs had started a war that, among a great many other shocking and despicable things, had alienated his daughter from him and from her family and people. There isn’t much time before they have to go to the funeral home. He sits down in his office to compose the eulogy. What does he want to say about his mother that is not a platitude? She let him make his mistakes without letting him forget that she considered them mistakes. But when she was proved right, which was not every time, she was there to help him: “We will get through this together.” They were fundamentally different people who disagreed about many things—politics, danger, child rearing—but he prized her resolve, her levelheadedness. His entire life, mostly in secret, he’d sought her approval. He should have told her. Now he would. What was a eulogy if not a last chance to declare thoughts and feelings that have been withheld? The service is at noon. They need to arrive earlier. When they do, his aunt and uncle, a cousin, and her son are already in the chamber reserved for the family. The room is just off the main chapel. Through the door, it is possible to see the coffin on its bier, flanked on one side by the national flag, on the other by the Israeli one. For his mother, he has selected a raw-pine box, its only adornment a pine Star of David on the lid. It was the same for his father and for his grandparents. As it was written, to bury promptly with minimal interference so the body could return to where it came from. In time, attendees begin to fill the chapel. Those who are family or very close friends come into the room to offer their condolences. His ex-wife is among them. She knew his mother for two decades and was beloved until the divorce. Daniela Levin, born in Johannesburg, descendant of Lithuanian Jews. They met in law school. He was attracted by the exoticism of her accent and her sharp mind. She was a champion debater, a standout in moot court—a talent that lent itself less well to connubial life, but nevertheless. She embraces him, the girls, his aunt, his cousin. Her parents, Norman and Eleanor, are with her. “Eleanorman,” Daniela calls them. Kind people. “We can’t believe it,” they say with their lilt. As the start of the service nears, the rabbi arrives. A formidable person, he has shepherded this community of Soviet Jews since the beginning, going on fifty years. With a razor blade the rabbi makes a tear in his aunt’s blouse and in the shirt that he wears under his suit. According to tradition, there are no other direct mourners—husband, parents have all passed—but Mila asks the rabbi to cut her blouse, too. The rabbi hands her the blade. The law does not command it, but neither does it proscribe it. Mila cuts her blouse and makes a tiny nick in the lace of Lily’s dress—and with the rend grief spills out. The chapel is full. As they take their places in the front, he sees childhood friends, the woman he’s dating, his legal assistant, some of his clients, real-estate agents with whom he does business, and faces from his parents’ generation, the geriatric remnant. The rabbi intones psalms and speaks about his mother, offering recollections of her and the principal details of her life: birth in the embers of the Shoah, Yiddishkeit, Soviet existence, antisemitism, immigration, courage, struggle, family, community, legacy. His aunt, folded over herself, waves off the invitation to speak and then it is him, “the son,” and what he has prepared. He has spoken at his grandparents’ funerals, at his father’s, and now this. Each time, there are fewer people present who were part of the story. As he speaks now, he feels that there is nobody left who can chart the vital coördinates of his life. He is disappearing, becoming diffuse. When he concludes, Mila rises, Lily with her. She reads from her phone about her admiration for her Babi, a person who went through so much, who possessed clear and unwavering principles and a tremendous capacity for love. Her grandmother was her exemplar. Mila delivers her remarks without faltering, more composed than he was. After her, Lily recites all the things his mother had promised to teach her: to speak Russian, to make dumplings, to grow vegetables. Who will do it now? Nobody will do it as well as her. That is all for the ceremony. The rabbi chants the prayer for the dead; six pallbearers lift the coffin and take it out to the waiting hearse. Then it is the limousine to the cemetery—his aunt and uncle, him and the girls. A procession of cars follows. They drive north, past new housing developments, to the large Jewish cemetery where his father is buried. His parents bought a double plot, installed a double headstone; one half is still smooth and blank, awaiting inscription. He stands with an arm around each daughter while the assembled mourners bury his mother. The concussive sound of the first shovelful of dirt on the pine coffin, like the rending of the garment, shockingly tactile. The day is warm, sunny, quite beautiful. Around the edges of the cemetery are stands of mature trees—willows, maples. The gravestones have no uniform size, color, or style. There are thousands of them, names carved in English, Hebrew, Russian. Near his parents’ plot is the grave of a Holocaust survivor, the names of his murdered family etched onto the back of the stone. Once it is all done, he and his daughters pass between the ranks of those who remain, some of whom have enough Jewish education to recite the ancient benediction: “May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” He wonders what Mila makes of it, the many liturgical allusions to Israel and the Children of Israel. Does she number herself among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem? They decide on a photograph from a session from Mila’s bat mitzvah, taken five years earlier, his mother with her hair done, wearing her best jewelry, in a dress she’d bought for the occasion. It had been a proud and happy day for her, a validation of sacrifice and resolve, a datum of continuity, fulfillment of a pact with her parents and generations of cherished pleading phantom hearts. The obituary will appear in the next issue of the paper, and he imagines the phone calls it will elicit: Do you know who I saw in the Exodus? Basia Katz. He also thinks, Only two more such obituaries to go—one for his uncle and one for his aunt. By the time he and his cousin die, the Exodus itself will probably no longer exist. In the lull, he goes to his mother’s bedroom and uses her computer to log on to Facebook—object of ridicule for his daughters, preserve of the tedious old. He hardly uses it, even less since October 7th, as nearly everything he saw posted elicited despair and cast people in the worst possible light—jingoists, cynics, bigots, fools. People he hardly knew, for whom he could barely kindle a feeling, became thoroughly odious. The shrieking about Zionists, the melding of swastikas with Stars of David, Hitler with Netanyahu. The strings of partisan flags, emblems, and emojis. Injunctions and pledges. Hate and rationalization of all the provenances of brutality. He excised swaths of people from his life: from undergrad, when he’d majored in English and considered becoming a professor; a smaller number from law school; still fewer actual lawyers, brokers, and Realtors—an inverted pyramid toward a vertex of practicality. The only ones that pained him, that felt like a genuine loss, were a few members of a Facebook group with whom, since the end of the pandemic, he had played soccer twice a week on the grounds of a downtown high school. Most of the players were half his age, came from somewhere else—Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle East—and were native to the game, its flow decanted into them. He offered a passable approximation, like a clever pet. From childhood, the game had been a bond with his father, who had been a very good player, good enough to spend his year in the Red Army mostly on the soccer team. Myron Katz. Jew; athlete. Yevrei; sportsmèn. The entirety of a Soviet joke that also described the first half of his father’s life. The soccer Facebook group was ostensibly created to register who could or could not play on any given evening, but it became a place where members teased and cheered one another and posted soccer videos, quotes, and memes. It recalled the early days of the internet, fora for niche enthusiasts, now with incalculably more material—clips of Lilliputians from the early twentieth century, footage from practically every Olympics and World Cup, as well as the most parochial ephemera. He had devoted days just to the Hungarian national team of the nineteen-fifties, the Mighty Magyars, the Golden Team, his father’s heroes, led by the great and unpronounceable Ferenc Puskás and Nándor Hidegkuti. Here were more of life’s disappointments: his father had not lived to see his grandchildren, and he had never got to see his father transported back to the worshipful time of his youth by YouTube. On the soccer Facebook group’s page, he’d once surrendered to a base urge and checked the personal accounts of some of the members whose origins suggested a certain bent. He found what he’d dreaded from Padraig and Aziz—the gruesome videos of weeping fathers, covered in the dust of an air strike, cradling the broken bodies of their children. He was a father. Some of the soccer-group members were fathers, or aspired to be someday. To put himself in the place of the Gazan fathers for even a few seconds was unbearable. The sensation in his heart and his mind breached the bounds of his body and swamped the potential of life. He could almost understand how, from the outside, for another, the totality of a response would be outrage. Except that reality was riddled with almosts. Sitting at his mother’s computer, a portrait of himself as an untrammelled thirteen-year-old deity hanging above him, he types into the Facebook chat that he will miss that week’s game and, after a tug of reticence, provides the reason. Almost immediately, the little avatars pop up, followed by the reactions—the teardrop emojis and the misspelled and mispunctuated condolences. He returns to the living room to find his aunt on his mother’s cordless phone and Mila out on the balcony off the sunroom talking to someone on her cell. He hears his aunt pronounce in her heavily accented English the words she will say many times during the week of mourning, the declarations of disbelief, the sense of an eerie somnambulance, and the paltry consolation of existence. She sees him, beckons him over, and gives him the phone. On the line is Shulamit, his mother’s cousin in Ashkelon. He has met her twice in his life. Once in Israel, when he and Daniela were on their honeymoon. The other time was when he was a teen-ager, and she and her brother and her father had come to visit. At the time, his mother’s father, Zev Melman, was still living, and it was a reunion between two brothers who hadn’t seen each other since before the war, when Aron, the oldest, had left what was then independent Latvia for what was then British Mandatory Palestine. Afterward, history had interfered and the family had met its allotted fates. His grandfather had expediently sided with the Soviets and retreated with them as the Nazis advanced. His youngest brother, Mordke, had remained behind and was taken by the Nazis and their Latvian accomplices to a nearby wood, where he was shot, along with his parents and every other Jew in town. When his grandfather, a wounded and decorated Red Army veteran, returned home after the war, there was literally nobody left—not family, not friends, not rivals. What had been had ceased to be, mathematically. The lesson drawn and instilled by his family was that the Gentile zeal for Jewish death is implacable and that only Jewish strength in a Jewish land can oppose it. That only Jews themselves could provide a plausible answer to the Jewish Question. In his youth, he had tried to refute this, unconvincingly for his family and, ultimately, for himself. On the phone now, Shulamit delivers her words of condolence and then asks if she can pass the phone to her brother Mordke—named for his murdered uncle—since he is very affected by the death of his cousin and anxious to express what is on his heart. “Here, Mordke, talk to Vadik,” he hears her say. With Shulamit, he speaks in English. With her brother, he speaks in the Hebrew he acquired and mostly retained from eight years of Hebrew school, an education that he and Daniela elected not to extend to their girls. That decision now, given prevailing conditions, seems, to him, like a mistake. There is a fumbling on the line as the phone is handed over to Mordke, who, before he forms words, hums and mewls in a low tone. Now sedulously described as “neurodivergent” or “on the spectrum,” he would formerly have just been called “simple,” a term that more closely approaches the tenderness and heartache he inspires. “Vadik,” he says. “Hello, Mordke.” “Are you sad?” “Yes, I’m sad.” “Are you angry with God?” “Not about this, Mordke.” “You shouldn’t be angry with God,” Mordke says. “He is in the garden.” “Yes, He is in the garden. And your mother is in the garden.” “That’s good,” he says. “She loved gardens.” “So don’t be angry or sad.” “All right. Thank you, Mordke, I won’t be,” he says. There is a pause. Mordke emits his otherworldly sounds and doesn’t say anything more. When Shulamit returns, he asks her how she is keeping. “What can I tell you, Vadik? Bardak.” A word identical in Russian and Hebrew. A mess. A disaster. “The rockets come. The alarm sounds. We hide in the safe room. Bardak. Of course, it isn’t always so easy with Mordke, but then I think of all the old women who are hiding alone and I thank God.” He ends his call and looks out to Mila, who, noticing him, ends hers and comes inside. He wants to ask whom she was talking to. He imagines it was Farah, her girlfriend, whom he met once at the encampment. He’d been allowed through the security checkpoint to attend a session given by a professor at the university, a Tunisian dissident and political exile, a specialist in the liberation movements of the Global South. Solemnly and reverently, Farah had delivered the introduction. Throughout the talk, a fun-house-mirror version of his own understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he had felt both Mila’s and Farah’s eyes on him, but he could not make himself nod his head or moan in assent and he knew he was failing their test, doing a poor job of disguising his true feelings, exposing himself as an impostor and interloper. And now he must be doing it again, because Mila asks if something is wrong. “You have a weird look on your face.” “I would say go look in a mirror, but.” Then she asks whom he was talking to and he taps a genealogy that means almost nothing to her. He could be speaking about characters from the Bible: Aaron. Shulamit. Zebulun. Mordecai. Remote beyond conception. He’s not sure he’s ever mentioned them to her. And now it feels impossible to speak about them without it being construed as part of a polemical narrative. He cannot say, especially now, with his mother gone, and the others of her generation waning, that it pains him that the painful past of their family doesn’t pain her. That he does not believe he can evoke in her any of the sorrow he feels for the antecedent Mordke, her age when he was shot in the proverbial wood, the younger brother his grandfather mourned to the end of his days. Is it fair of him to expect it of her? He feels pain because it was transmitted to him through the immanence of his grandfather, a person he knew and loved. But what he feels doesn’t possess sufficient charge to be transmitted further. “I wanted to ask,” Mila says. “What do I tell people if they want to come?” He makes room for the full connotation of “people.” “People are welcome.” “O.K. And is there anything they should know?” “Sometimes people bring food. Round food. Bagels. Cookies. But they don’t have to. There will be plenty of food.” “Why round?” “I don’t know. The circle of life.” “Anything else?” “Give them the code to buzz up. There will be a sign downstairs with the apartment number.” “That’s it?” “I think so. Though maybe mention to the people not to wear kaffiyehs.” “Is that supposed to be funny?” “I don’t know, is it?” “Thanks very much for the information.” “You’re very welcome.” It is always busiest on the first evening. The first and the second. After that, there is a merciful reprieve. When his father died, almost twenty years before, family friends from the earliest days of the immigration came to sit with his mother. To them, even now, he remains effectively a boy. A boy with a profession. A boy who furnished the grandchildren. Correspondingly, they persist for him as they appear in his mother’s plastic photo albums, in the first blush of their capitalism, posing beside enormous American cars. Now they dodder in, az och un vey—in the badge of his mother’s Yiddish. Well, not all of them dodder. There is one who has become an avid cyclist, another who has pledged himself to pickleball. They are eager to expound on these things, which introduces some variety into the conversations. Their children are his age and are spoken of proudly. Some of those children have moved away and attained success in certain medical fields. Others have not moved away and attained success in certain medical fields. They have married well, raised children who are a credit to the nation. They sound boring and fortunate. What does he feel? Bored and envious? The envy is fleeting, futile. And, besides, there’s more to them than that. There’s more to everyone. But who has the time to delve? He wishes them well. He wishes them all well, in these precedented times. Some of his friends come. A number of them have coördinated catering for the week. Platters arrive from a Jewish deli, drawn from the bereavement menu. There is a reversion to gender norms, and the women take charge of the food in the kitchen. Daniela and Eleanor. His cousin. Mila with them, as if in the fold, which almost brings him to tears. Because it is summer, a week after the solstice, the sun doesn’t set until past nine. By eight, when the rabbi arrives to lead the prayers, the living room and kitchen are crammed with people. The food has been put out because it is past dinnertime for everyone. Stray disposable plates and cups dot the apartment. His cousin makes the rounds with a black garbage bag. A knot of the older people forms around the rabbi and they engage in a disquisition in Russian. What is it about? He knows. The subject uppermost on everyone’s mind, for which they are seeking a Hasidic imprimatur. Not his mother’s death but Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslims, the hypocritical leftists. All the proliferating enemies of Israel and the Jews. He is grateful that they are conducting this conversation in Russian, because Mila will not understand. He understands and remembers how it was when his father died, at the time of the Second Lebanon War. His uncle called him over to hear the rabbi’s prescription for the Arabs in Lebanon and wherever else they threatened Israel: “Make them disappear.” How? With what magic trick? He was disgusted then and remains disgusted, in line with his role in the family, leftist idiot and naïve fool. His family escaped a totalitarian regime that persecuted them and now complain about opportunistic and culturally incompatible immigrants who seek to transform their adoptive country into a version of their regressive, Jew-hating, theocratic homelands. In short, his family are essentially fascists, comfortable with totalitarianism if it suits them. Not just his family. He is convinced that this is true of most people. Democracy is a discipline, like diet and exercise, strenuous and irksome. Sooner take a pill or eat cake. When Farah calls up, it is still the doldrum period before prayers start. He and the girls have been in the apartment for more than seven hours. Lily sits on a chair at the edge of the room, oblivious of everyone, singing to herself. He looks around the apartment and sees Mila in the kitchen listening politely to Tamara. He gestures with the portable phone to get her attention. “Your friend is here,” he says. “Not here here. She’s coming up. You might want to meet her at the door.” “O.K.,” she says and excuses herself from Tamara. He watches Mila cross the room, open the front door, and let it close pneumatically behind her. He imagines her waiting in the hallway or by the elevator bank. He keeps his attention on the front door, anticipating. But, when it opens, it isn’t Mila or Farah who enters but Claudia, the woman he is dating. She holds the door for Mila and Farah. Claudia, born and educated in Romania, with an Eastern European’s disdain for the left, her own family’s acrid history from the war—a grandfather silent about his time in Odesa, relatives who pointed their guns in the wrong direction at Stalingrad, a great-uncle who once made a strange remark about Paul Celan—and no compunctions about who is at fault in Gaza or anywhere else. She, unlike Daniela, is consummately laconic, by circumstance or upbringing, and can devastate with a gesture, a shift, a shrug. How someone like her stayed in a bad marriage for more than a decade confounds him, but maybe that is a labyrinth for everyone. Farah comes toward him and extends a white poster-board box sealed with a gold sticker with the name of a bakery. He doesn’t recognize the name. “I hope this is O.K.,” she says. “I’m sure it is.” “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she says. “Thank you,” he says, though the tradition mitigates against mourners thanking visitors. “Here,” Claudia says and takes the pastry box from him. On her shoulder are the straps of a canvas tote filled with groceries, greens on top. He notices the room contort as if from a change in the magnetic field. His aunt looks directly at Farah, making no effort to be discreet. He’s certain Farah is aware of it. Mila is aware of it. Farah hasn’t worn a kaffiyeh, but she has two small round buttons pinned to the left side of her T-shirt. One is the Palestinian flag; the other is the rainbow. He wonders what possessed her to wear them: provocativeness, obliviousness, or the snug tenet of living her truth. It is something that she and Mila can do with little consequence in this apartment, in this city, this country, also in Israel, and nowhere else in the Middle East, including Gaza and all of the Muslim world. Putatively irrelevant. Even without the buttons, Farah would attract attention. She is an Arab in a roomful of Jews. Not just Jews but Zionists, with the claws and fangs. If there is a hostility toward her, there is also a fear. Fear of this slight, young woman who has elected to come in a show of sympathy and respect. She should be the one to feel intimidated, and probably does. How little it takes for people to feel “unsafe”—that glib euphemistic construction. The opposite of safe is not unsafe, as the opposite of love is not unlove. What capacity is there for variation or dissent? It’s just a choice. Everything is a choice while you live. The only immutable thing is death. They are now under the shadow of its wings. It will last for only a brief time. Can they make anything good of it? He has a feeling of admiration for Farah, who has evidently been brought up right. There is nothing inviting about the way his aunt looks at her, but Farah approaches, bends low, and offers her condolences. He can’t quite hear from where he’s standing, but he assumes they are the same words she spoke to him, “I am very sorry for your loss.” Uncharacteristically for the times, a sincere and simple sentence in the active voice. His aunt behaves cordially, though later she will complain to him, “Mila absolutely had to bring this friend? She looked at us like we were animals in a zoo. You know that Mila being a lesbian caused your mother a lot of pain. She hoped she would outgrow it.” When it is finally time for prayers, Mila and Farah are across the room with Lily, who has played hostess and brought Farah refreshments. The rabbi checks his smartwatch and announces that they will now begin. Men who haven’t covered their heads are given yarmulkes from the stash his mother kept at the house for holidays. Prayer books, some with English transliterations, some with Russian, are distributed to those who want them. There is only a small number of people in the room who know anything about Hebrew prayer. A few of his friends with some parochial schooling. Daniela and her parents, who, because of the peculiarities of the South African apartheid system, all received traditional Jewish educations. And Mila, who learned to sound out Hebrew words for her bat mitzvah. The others, the Soviet Jews who have lived for decades in a land of religious liberty, know to stand more or less obediently, sometimes turning a page. The rabbi faces east, toward Jerusalem, and begins. The first few words are intelligible before they dissolve into sonorous murmuring. He meets Mila’s eyes and motions her over. She comes, leaving Lily tracing with her finger a tattoo on Farah’s arm. From a distance—vines, tributaries, flowers? “You don’t have to stay for this part,” he says. “Do you want us to leave?” she asks. “That’s not what I mean.” “Where would we even go?” “You could take Lily out.” “Anywhere. Down by the fitness center and pool. Or out back by the tennis courts. Just let her run around.” “All right.” “The prayers will be done in about an hour.” They leave, the age difference between them suddenly compressed. The older girls still need to apply fashions and postures in order not to be mistaken for children. To be regarded seriously, even as they retain a footbridge to childhood. He treasures this about his daughters, how effortlessly they reinhabit the lyrics of pop songs, a nonsense dialect from the internet, synchronized clapping games: happy llama, sad llama / mentally disturbed llama / super llama, drama llama / big fat mama llama. The rabbi leads the group through the first portion of prayers. “Leads” is the right word. Maybe because he’s been thinking about children, this is what he imagines: the rabbi walks ahead; they shuffle behind. If he stops, they stand dazed, then disperse. The purpose of the prayers is for him and his aunt to recite the Kaddish, to sanctify God’s name in their time of grief. They are supposed to do this three times a day for the duration of the week, in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. Practical Talmudists parsed the law and amalgamated the afternoon and the evening. Between the afternoon and evening prayers, there is a short and symbolic break. The rabbi fills it with scriptural exegesis in a mixture of Russian, Hebrew, and English. The Creator of the Universe. The Holy One Blessed Be He. He wanders to the kitchen to get himself some water. There is a glass door that leads to another small balcony. It faces the rear of the building. Through the glass, he sees Lily running and cartwheeling on the lawn by the tennis courts. She turns back toward Mila and Farah, who walk casually behind. Claudia comes to check on him and tracks his gaze. “Are you all right?” “Yeah,” he replies, but thinks, as he increasingly does, How did this happen? How did we get from there to here? From the drowsy meagre shtetl. To the great Soviet fraud. To the gratification-industrial complex. You were supposed to build a structure—a family, a country—that could withstand destruction. How is that working out? Self-assess. He returns and the rabbi commences the evening prayers. Who is left? His cousin and her teen-age son. His uncle. His aunt. Daniela and her parents. Tamara. Claudia. Two elderly Russian Jews from the building. An elderly Jew, not Russian, who is the treasurer of the condominium board. Two of his childhood friends. And, with him, they have exactly the requisite ten Jewish men to conduct the service. As they conclude with the Kaddish, dusk cedes to night and the sky outside goes dark. It is late, nearing ten. People say their goodbyes, the men promising to return for morning prayers at seven. His aunt is exhausted, unsteady on her feet, her eyes red. His uncle offers her his arm, though he is also spent. His cousin insists on driving them home in her car. The rabbi says he will come in the morning with two grandsons to insure that they have enough people. Mila, Farah, and Lily have yet to return. Daniela is supposed to take Lily home with her so that Lily can attend school the next day, the last day before the summer break. He used to have the ability to see Mila’s location on his phone, but she disabled it not long after she started at the university. Allowing him to see her location had been a condition of his paying her cellphone bill, but even after she disabled it he kept paying. This was a distillation of his parenting. More permissive than punitive. He couldn’t be another way. When he tried, it was unconvincing. His daughters saw it as a pretense and laughed. “Call her,” Daniela says, although she has a phone. He calls and Mila picks up. He has her on speaker. “Sorry, we are literally one minute away,” she says. In the background, Lily clamors for the phone. “Did you think they kidnapped me?” she asks. “No,” he says. “They said you probably thought they kidnapped me.” “No. But it’s dark, and it’s late, and everyone is leaving.” “Sorry,” Mila says. “We’ll be right there.” They wait in a fractious mood. “What kind of joke is that?” Daniela says. Claudia announces that she will go. When she opens the door, Lily is at the threshold with an oversized cup, her lips tinted blue. “I really am sorry,” Mila says. “Lily wanted a slushy from the gas station.” “You didn’t think to call?” Daniela asks. “You were in prayers.” “Text,” Daniela says. “Leave her be, Daniela,” Eleanor says. “Fine,” Daniela says. “Lily, do you have everything?” “Yeah,” Lily says. “All right. Say goodbye to everyone. You’ll see them after school tomorrow.” “Not Mila and Farah.” “Mila, you’re not coming back tomorrow?” he asks. “I have to be at the encampment.” She says this with the tentativeness, abandon, and conviction of drawing a line that should not be crossed. He feels that if she crosses it, if he allows her to cross it, something irreparable will happen. He has always been inclined to identify as a child and not as a parent. He has borne the lessons of being his parents’ child and tried to apply them to his children. He has resisted doing the thing his mother never resisted doing—asking his child to do something for his sake, against her will. “Mila,” he says. “I don’t want you to go.” “The judge ruled that the encampment has to be taken down tomorrow,” she says. “Farah can pack up your tent.” “That’s not the point.” “Farah,” he says, “what would you do if your grandmother died and your father asked you to stay with him instead of going with people who despised everything she stood for?” “What people are you talking about?” Mila says. “I went to the encampment. I attended the lecture. I read the signs. I know what people I’m talking about.” “You were there for two hours and you talked to nobody.” “I guess it depends,” Farah says. “On if my family was supporting a genocide.” “You’re Palestinian?” “Palestinian Egyptian.” “O.K. If I were Palestinian Egyptian, maybe I would feel the same as you. Although there are exceptions who also criticize Hamas and spare a thought for the hostages. But it’s my daughter who should know better. She exists only because her great-grandfather put his family on the last train into Russia before the Germans arrived. My father, Mila’s grandfather, after whom she is named, was five years old at the time. Do you know what the survival rate was for five-year-old Jewish boys in Latvia?” “No,” Farah says. “I imagine it was low.” “It was basically zero. So here is the truth: the Jews of Europe would have traded places with the Palestinians of Gaza in a heartbeat and called it salvation.” “Wow,” Mila exclaims. “That’s fucking gross.” “Is it? What part?” “The part where you’re O.K. with the killing, you’re just upset with the terminology.” “There’s a lot of killing in the world.” “This is being done by us.” “Who is us? Are you part of us?” “If that’s how you define us, then, no, I’m not.” “Well, they’ll kill you anyway,” he says. When he is left alone, he goes around the apartment turning off the lights. Often the first light switch he tries is wrong. He’s never stayed at his mother’s apartment by himself. Sleeping in her bed is out of the question. In the guest bedroom is the single bed made of sturdy blond wood which his parents bought for him when he was a child and which his mother has kept all these years. When he started having sexual desire, he used to grind into the mattress. “What have you been watching on TV?” his mother asked when she surprised him one time. Now he is sleeping on it, a grown man, his parents gone, fearing that his daughter is lost to him for good. He regrets his outburst, not because what he said was technically wrong but because he gained so little from saying it. Did he think it would sway his daughter? There’s a reason that he has tried not to act like his parents. That approach only ever drove him away. Though he always came back. He clings to this even as the gulf between him and his daughter feels so much wider than anything between him and his parents. What does it mean to Mila? From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. There is only one solution, intifada, revolution. We don’t want two states, we want all of ’48. He thinks about Shulamit and Mordke. He thinks about the Shulamits and Mordkes of Gaza. An old woman and an old man, innocent as lambs, clambering over rubble with their piteous backpacks and bundles. What will happen to them from the river to the sea in the intifada revolution? What will happen that has not already happened? He is angry and confused. He wants his daughter back. He wants normal life back. He is a real-estate lawyer. Isn’t it a dispute over land? Send in the real-estate lawyers! Titles, liens, deeds, encroachments, easements—they can settle it! No justice, no peace? False. Peace is justice. Peace is the crown of the law. Why is the word nowhere to be found at the encampments and the rallies or in the news reports and the op-eds and the open letters? Without it, they are all doomed. He Who makes peace in His heights May He make peace Upon us and upon all Israel And now say: Amen. ♦