Fiction // Roots

by Joan Leegant Hirschman, unwilling to bend, was refusing to participate. A lifelong agnostic, and proud of it, he’d managed for 82 years to not observe a single of his people’s canonical festivals except in its breach, and he had no intention of starting now. It was his father’s way before him, and his father’s father’s, and now it was his. He ate bread on Passover, went to the track on Yom Kippur, and, since childhood, had miraculously avoided the trappings of this one, the relentlessly marketed Jewish Christmas when boys and girls with names like Cohen and Levy were commanded to ignore the country’s love affair with eggnog and fruitcake in favor of oily potato dishes invented by starving peasants in Galicia. Not that the so-called historic origins of the holiday were any better, Hirschman liked...

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