Around my 12th birthday, our family seders became more interesting. It wasn’t because we got more religious. It happened when I found a James Brown record.
My father’s side of the family was not particularly religious. There was probably one seder with my uncle Bernard and his family. Bernard was openly contemptuous about organized religion and it didn’t “hold” as a tradition.
We routinely celebrated the first night at my mother’s sister’s house (my Aunt Rhoda and her husband, Uncle Al) and our maternal cousins. The table would be “filled out” by Uncle Al’s sister Naomi, her husband Jerry, and their kids. Ironically, this meant that our seders were populated by two unrelated people with the same name – Jerry and Gerry (my father).
Naomi and Jerry graciously invited us to join their brood for a second-night seder. The nearly two-hour commute was abrogated when we relocated in 1978 from New Jersey to Long Island and found ourselves living three exits away.
Ask any Jewish kid age 12 or under to guesstimate the average length of a family Passover seder and the answer will be “too long.” We found ways to amuse ourselves, but any time things got too loud we drew a warning from the adults at the far end of the table.
