Exodus

by Jillian Grant Shoichet

About the Author: Jillian Grant Shoichet is an editor, writer and university lecturer from Victoria, British Columbia. She has learned through years of editing provincial legislation that it is not actually legal to kill people, so she has resorted to killing characters.

Excerpt

Edith Zuckerman was a stickler for verisimilitude, and in many ways, this Passover night was not so different from all other nights.

But on this night, unbeknownst to Edith’s guests, the blood on the Zuckerman front door jamb was not kosher, the roasted shank bone on the Seder plate was not lamb, and Herb Zuckerman was not “held up at the office.”

When they were growing up, the Zuckermans were the only kids at Toronto’s Forest Hill Collegiate whose mother lit real oil lamps at Hannukah. She lined the glass bulbs along the front window behind the sofa. She used only kosher cold-pressed virgin olive oil from Israel. On the eighth day of the Festival of Lights, by which time both the bulbs and the windowpanes were an opaque, smoky grey, Edith Zuckerman would tell Maria to clean the glass and phone Sears to book the Zuckermans’ annual upholstery and carpet steaming appointment.

During the harvest holiday of Sukkot, Maria was instructed to serve all three meals of each festival day in the backyard sukkah, the temporary pergola’s ceiling of greenery festooned exuberantly with gourd and squash. Even when the temperature dipped below freezing. Even when it snowed.

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