It has been a long time since I celebrated Purim properly – with a megilla, a costume, a drink or two.  This year, though, is probably the worst.  Not only am I almost too sick to move, but even most of my grandchildren are too sick to celebrate.  

Anyway, I only like Purim for the celebrations, and wish I could have gone to Mendy Kahan’s Purim Shpiel yesterday when he does it in Yiddish and everything turns out to be a parody – a parody of the whole idea of Purim.  That double vision of Yiddish always works for me.

But today I kept thinking of a song in Yiddish.  A song with no irony or parody.  It’s for Passover and here’s a rough English translation:

Tell me, Marrano, my brother,
Where will your seder be prepared?
In a deep cave, in a grotto,
There’s where I’ve prepared my seder.

Tell me, Marrano, where
Will you get white matzos?
In the cave, on God’s earth,
My wife kneaded the dough.

Tell me, Marrano, how will you 
Acquire a Haggadah?
In the cave, deep in the fissures,
I hid it long ago.

Tell me, how will you defend yourself
When they hear you singing?
When the enemy finds me,
I will die singing.

I kept thinking of Maranos all the time we were in Barcelona.  If so many Jews were forced to become Christians, and then were called “Marranos” or pigs in Spanish, there must be traces of Jewish DNA all over Spain.  I kept looking in their faces for signs.  

Silly of me.  It’s that hunger to connect that distorts every pleasure.