“Everyone’s making bread,” I say, trying to sound casual and not like I’m terrified, because talking about bread is easier than talking about what’s going on. My phone balances on my belly as I lie in bed. “It’s like the pandemic hit, and everyone’s collective delusion went ‘I’ll bake bread, that’ll solve it.’ I just don’t get it.”
“There’s magic in bread,” says my bubbe. Her voice is tired, like it had to walk the whole distance from Israel to the US in order to reach my ears. “A good challah is worth more than its weight in flour, oil, and eggs.”
“Okay, but why baking, of all things? If people want to help they should stay home. Maybe volunteer to deliver food to neighbors if they’re healthy enough to do it.” If I keep my voice light enough she won’t know the fear makes my chest feel like an iron band is shrinking around it.
“There’s something to be said for doing something in a crisis. Baking is a reasonable something.” She sighs, and I can hear the weight of every one of her 102 years, studded with countless pogroms and wars. “Maybe it’s different in America. You people have never known real hardship. If you’ve always had it easy, you’ll need to learn to adjust.”
And there’s nothing to say, because how do you argue with that? If only I were as strong as she was, and able to handle horrors better.
• • • •
Ruth kept half an eye on the window, watching for a horse and cart as she kneaded the dough in a hurry, flour flying from one hand as the other pulled and rolled the sticky blob. For tonight’s order, five loaves of dark bread, five of rye, three bialys, ten knishes, and two intricate braided challahs. The young man from the Resistance with the nice green eyes, Chaim, was coming to pick them up, and they couldn’t be late.
Chaim always said there was magic in her bread, though Ruth thought it was nonsense. She certainly didn’t see any magic in her father’s bakery—just flour and eggs and salt and the ceramic bowls of yeasty starter she kept in the corner under cloth napkins. Though the yeasty goo was sort of magic, turning simple flour into sour bubbles that made the dough rise. If the loaves were just right, and the dark pumpernickel had a hollow sound when you rapped its bottom with a fist, and the challah shined with its egg wash, and the rye’s crust made a raspy sound when you went over it with your hand . . . that’s when the magic worked.
Or so Chaim claimed. Ruth was certain it was just Chaim flirting with her, getting her to drop the price by a zlota or two.
She shook her head, her hands not missing a beat. Times were hard enough in the little ghetto, and the Svatislavian Polizia were now coming every week for bribes, not twice a year like before. No more discounts for Chaim. Even if he had those nice green eyes. Even if he was part of the Resistance, which she both admired and feared. No use saving money for the Resistance, if she was taken out and shot by a nice goy polizia just doing his job, when she didn’t have the coin to keep him away. Her father, sick in his bed, wouldn’t be able to help. And then who would make bread for the Resistance?
• • • •
Jews show emotion with food. If you come visit we shower you with carbs of love: challah and pita and babka and cakes, so many cakes. Not like there’s any visitors now.
On week four of lockdown I start to get twitchy. My baseline fear gives way to jumpy anxiety. I click from tab to tab on my laptop, bouncing between dire predictions on the news and politicians blatantly ignoring the warnings on Twitter. I can’t concentrate on my work, which is already less efficient when everyone’s remote, and my boss can tell. She’s testy, and I can’t tell how much of it is my fault and how much is the pandemic.
I try to check in on people. Every day it’s a different video call, with the soft-voiced, “Hey. How you holdin’ up” that’s less of a question than a statement of collective grief.
I Amazon some chocolates to a friend who’s a doctor, who’s getting overwhelmed with the COVID patient load and is barely holding themselves together. The chocolates never arrive.
As I sit at home, too high-risk to go anywhere or do much of anything, I fret. I stew. I feel helpless and exhausted and terrified and coiled tight as a wire with borrowed anxious energy that I have no way to release.
And I remember my bubbe’s words, and try to make bread.
The plan is challah. Start traditional, why not? I put a few rolls of toilet paper in a plastic baggie and stuff it into my mailbox, then wait for a friend to show up and swap them for a small packet of yeast. This is what we’re reduced to, a barter economy with ten seconds of seeing a friendly face at a distance. He waves and then dashes off, back home to his family. Lucky bastard.
Better to do something than nothing, my bubbe said, so here goes. I film my steps as I go, to share with her later, focusing my phone camera on the little tan grains of yeast swirling in a bowl of water. I add some salt and wait for the bubbles to come, showing the yeast is alive.
The bubbles never come. Was the yeast dead all along? Or is it sugar you’re supposed to feed the yeast instead? Damn. I think it’s supposed to be sugar. I don’t have any more yeast, so I can’t try again.
I upload the video to YouTube, title it “How not to make a challah,” and send my bubbe the link so she can give advice on where I went wrong.
I feel helpless, like there’s nothing I can do. I can’t make bread and I can’t improve the situation. I can’t get my friend chocolate, and I sure can’t get enough PPE to keep them safe. I can’t get my government to take this seriously, especially while some people are now protesting local mask mandates with machine guns and a spray of germy spittle as they shriek. It feels like everyone in power has decided that my friends in the medical field, and front-line workers, and high-risk people like me are all acceptable losses.
It feels like there’s a bowling ball nestled at the bottom of my stomach at all times, heavy and twitching and juuuuuust on the precipice of an inky-black abyss where it could drop even farther. I want to scream and cry and curl up in a ball in the corner, and I know none of these will make me feel better but I imagine them wistfully anyway.
• • • •
Chaim was late. Chaim was never late. Never past sundown on a Friday late.
When the knock came on the wooden door it was a sharp ra-ta-tat, irritated and impatient. Not Chaim’s easy tapTAP tapTAP, the same rhythm as shaBAT shaLOM.
“Open up! Polizia!”
Ruth straightened her spine, grabbed a few overboiled pretzel rolls that she kept for such occasions, and fished in the little brown ceramic sugar bowl for a few zlota. “Coming!” She stuffed the coins and rolls into pockets of her floury apron.
There were two of them. One polizia had blond hair combed back under his sharp-tipped cap and a neat blond mustache, and the other had straight brown hair and held the door open with a boot to make sure that the first wintry snowflakes could make their way into the warmish shop front. Both had noses straight as the pole on their eagle-and-bear insignia, straight as the barrels of their rifles.
“We’re looking for Haym Berger,” said the blond. It took Ruth a minute to realize he meant Chaim. The chet sound was hard for the goyim. “Got a warrant for his arrest.”
“Haym?” She kept the mispronunciation. “I don’t know if I know a Haym . . . I have many customers, but can’t remember everyone’s name. What does he look like?” She tried to keep her shoulders not-quite-squared, not-quite-slumped, and to keep her voice from quavering. Show she was cooperating, not a threat, but not to be rolled over for fun. Even shivering from the cold would be a show of weakness.
As long as her dad stayed quiet in bed, she’d work this out. One way or another.
“What d’ya mean what’s he look like? He looks like you.” Brown-hair turned his head back and spat on the dirt, a few blades of withered winter grass away from his shiny black boot.
“I’ll keep an eye out for a Haym, and will let you know. Meanwhile, it’s so cold out! Would you like a pretzel roll? They’re fresh from the oven this morning.” She fished out two from her apron pocket. The bottoms were just a tiny bit soggy, but the tops looked firm and dark and inviting, the sprinkling of rough salt on top matching the sprinkling of snowflakes gathering on the polizia’s furred collars. They shouldn’t notice if they grabbed them with their fine leather gloves still on.
The blond polizia grabbed one and gnawed about half of it off.
The brunet’s eyes narrowed at the offering. “Don’t like pretzel rolls. I’ll take something else though.” He pushed his way in, rifle knocking against the edge of the wooden door.
The inside of the shop was cleaned for Shabbat already, unsold loaves and rolls and knishes and bialys sitting neatly on rolling racks. The countertop had nothing but her locked cash register and the thin green-paper boxes with Chaim’s order, tied with white string.
“What’s those?” he asked, worrying at the knot on top, his gloved hands too clumsy to get anywhere.
“Just an order for tomorrow night. I can’t bake it tomorrow beca—I just like to get an early jump on things. How about a nice bialy?” She led him to the racks and made a show of picking one out for him from the middle . . . as though she was finding him the best one. She picked one that hadn’t quite gotten the perfect shade of brown on its bottom.
He growled but accepted the onion-filled roll, taking a bite and scattering crumbs on his chest and her floor.
The two polizia shared a look which could only mean, “We came all this way and only got bread? Must be something else worth having.” The blond finished his pretzel roll and brushed the crumbs from his gloves onto her lintel.
“And your tax? Your contribution to the great Svatislavian Polizia, keeping you safe from criminals like Haym?”
“Of course.” There was no tax, not really. But it would keep her safe, even if it was from the men themselves. It would be useless to tell them she could not conduct cash transactions on Shabbat, but Judaism was firm with the caveat that allowed actions as long as it was to save a life at risk. Ruth was certainly a life at risk. She fished out the three zlota she’d put in her other apron pocket and offered them.
The brunet snatched them up. “This isn’t enough. Open the register.” He tapped his rifle as though idly, but making his point.
Ruth reached into her shirt and brought out the key, which hung there on a thin leather thong. She wished she’d kept it elsewhere, since now both polizia were staring at her chest. She stepped behind the counter, making sure her body blocked the brown ceramic sugar bowl where she kept more money. The key unlocked the cash register to show . . . nothing. The opened drawer was bare but for a paper clip and a few dulled half-grozta in a corner. “I’m sorry sirs, this is what I have. Business has been slow today, and I just paid the miller.”
Another low growl as the brunet grabbed the meager coins from the register, a glare from both, and the two polizia stalked off without saying another word.
Her father, mercifully, had stayed upstairs in their apartment during the whole exchange.
• • • •
My job gets downsized.
My landlord posts cheery signs around the building that rent is now due, or else. After two straight weeks of being stuck on hold, every day from nine to five while the office is open, I manage to apply for unemployment. Their online system is down, unable to handle the load, and the people answering the phone sound frazzled and worn thin. With the current wait times, I’ll find out if I’m approved for unemployment in two months, they tell me.
I mope at home, nothing to do. Nobody’s hiring. And meanwhile my concentration span has gotten even shorter. A two-minute clip of a WHO doctor giving an update now takes me ten minutes to get through, as I keep pausing it and bouncing elsewhere. I doomscroll Twitter through the wee hours of the night.
I’m too anxious to sleep, and too tired to focus.
A few months later, yeast is available again, and I order some online and prop up my phone to film. My dough stays runny like cake batter, and as it bakes and rises it overflows its pan. Charred globs seal themselves onto the lowest wire rack and onto the bottom of the oven.
After walking her through it over the phone, my bubbe’s able to play “How not to make a challah 2” on Youtube.
“Next time you’ll do better,” she says. “Do you feel better, though?”
“Not really,” I say as I roll onto a pile of folded laundry that I haven’t managed to drag the three feet from the bed to the dresser.
“Try again,” she says. “Just do something. Even if it doesn’t help, it’ll help.”
• • • •
Ruth’s father was never meant to be a baker. His father, Ruth’s Zayde Avigdor, was a rabbi, and it was custom that a rabbi’s first son follow suit. But young Yosef didn’t have a head for letters, much less a head for the math required in numerology. Better at working with his hands, Yosef started a bakery.
It was okay, Zayde Avigdor had told Ruth when she was young. The Torah is everything you need to know, but bread? Bread is life.
But what about at Passover? Ruth had asked. We don’t have bread then.
Zayde Avigdor had laughed his booming laugh, for it was good for Jews to argue and question. “Ravaleh,” he’d called her, his little rabbi. Not that women could be rabbis, but she’d loved the appreciative gleam in his eyes. “Ravaleh, unleavened bread is still bread. And Hashem gave our people the commandments right before He rained down bread from Heaven. Both important. If you can’t study the Torah, bread is the next best thing.”
Even though it’d been years since he’d passed, Ruth missed him every day.
Meanwhile, Yosef’s head wandered more and more, and soon he’d started forgetting things. He’d started by forgetting the Jewish curfew, and then he forgot how to make challah. Challah! Of all things! Eventually Ruth could count on one hand the number of days when he didn’t forget he had a daughter. Most days he called her Bluma, thinking she was his wife.
So Ruth tried to keep him away from the polizia as much as possible. In bed as much as possible. She soothed him and brought him books and bread and newspapers until the newspapers were too much. And then it became easiest to just say it was Shabbat, every day. They had just come back from shul, at all times. Prayer and reflection in his bedroom, at all times.
Until the day she couldn’t.
The bakery’s biggest oven was outside in the little lot behind the building, where it could vent its heat safely. Ruth stood in the oven’s circle of dead wet grass, tan against the snow that accumulated all around it, and pulled out a rack of loaves. The oven stayed on throughout the week, even through Shabbat, fuel roaring in its belly. She couldn’t hear the polizia knock on the door as she tossed the new-baked loaves into a large basket on the ground. She couldn’t hear her father thump down the stairs and let in the polizia as she took the waiting bialys-to-be and shoved them deep into the oven shelf with a floured paddle. She couldn’t hear the yelling as the men were enraged that a filthy Jew dared speak to them this way, didn’t give them the respect they felt entitled to.
She did, however, hear the gunshot. And then the second gunshot, and the third.
And without being fully conscious of what was happening, or what she was doing, she grabbed the basket of loaves and sprinted into the alley that connected the back lot and the street behind it, putting as much distance between her and the polizia as she could without caring which direction she was going.
• • • •
My first unemployment check comes in, which is a relief until I see the amount. It’s far too small to live off of, but at least it’ll slightly slow the bleeding from my bank account.
There are no jobs. Businesses are closing left and right. From the few places I hear back, I get interviews, and then get ghosted after.
My yeast-delivering friend’s whole family is sick. He tells me how all-consuming the illness is, how they’re all still exhausted for weeks after. My doctor friend has permanent bags under their eyes.
My third attempt at challah looks amazing from the outside: the plaits are an inviting dark brown on the top of their bumps, rolling into pale yellow creases where they touch each other. The inside is dense and horrible, like an undercooked, unsweetened cake. Baking it further would just burn the top.
I upload “How not to make a challah 3” and notice that the viewcounts of my previous two videos are at around 50 apiece. Who on earth wants to watch me curse at dough, I don’t know.
“I’m giving up on bread,” I tell my bubbe on the phone after she manages to watch the video. “This is a waste of time and money and materials.”
“There’s magic in bread,” she says, “but the magic is more in the doing. If you can’t do this, do something else. Doing something is always going to help, even if it doesn’t help.”
It makes no sense. But she has been slipping into bits of senility lately, so I shake off her words and forget them shortly after, diving into yet another wave of what-ifs. What if she’s senile enough to wander out without a mask and catch Covid and die? What if she gets Long Covid and doesn’t die, but is bed-bound and stuck in misery for the rest of her life? What if all my what-ifs fling me into another panic attack? The pandemic anxiety threatens to swallow me whole.
• • • •
Ruth ran until she could run no more. She stopped, realizing she was outside in the snow without a coat or a plan, and was far from the ghetto where she was supposed to stay. She looked Jewish, itself already half a crime. Dark curly hair, thick black eyebrows, and more nose than was safe in this town.
Chaim. Chaim would know what to do. He’d given her so many invitations, and she’d never taken him up on any of it. Not that he would be home, with polizia crawling everywhere looking for him. But he’d once mentioned going to a meeting in the old abandoned monastery—once a place for goyim, now giving Jews refuge.
She shivered and pulled her sweater tighter around her torso, which was already bonier than it had been a few months ago. No buffer against the cold. But she shifted the basket of loaves on her hip and trudged onwards, making sure to zigzag between streets and to mix up her snowy footprints with others’.
The monastery had been abandoned for decades. It sat on a hill near the woods, close to the Lavoska River where boats would once come and pick up the ale the monks brewed to distribute around the country. Ruth had been walking for over an hour by the time she staggered up to its worn wooden door. She could barely feel her fingers as she knocked.
With no answer, she pushed on its painted handle and was surprised it gave way, flecks of rust-red coming off on her hand. Inside was cold, but her cheeks tingled with the warmth that was the absence of icy wind. She found her way into the part of the building that had been a church. Stone floors, wooden pews, and a thick layer of dust. But way off to the side, where the church opened into the rest of the monastery, she could see footprints.
She followed them until she reached the monastery’s kitchens, where she suddenly felt a cold metal line against her throat.
“Who are you,” hissed the person holding the knife, their breath hot on her nape, “and what do you want? You have two seconds before I start cutting.”
Ruth dropped the basket in fear. “Ch-Ch-Chaim!” she stuttered, “I’m looking for Chaim! He’s a friend!”
The knife dropped and Ruth turned around. It was a girl, no older than twelve, for all that she was already tall as Ruth. She wore what looked to be an entire wardrobe at once: five drab sweaters layered on each other bulked her out, and at least three skirts. She wore her hair in a dark braid like Ruth’s.
“Chaim’s gone,” said the girl. “The polizia got him two days ago. They put him on a train to the work camps.” Her hand darted out, quick as an adder, and grabbed a loaf from the basket before Ruth could say anything. The girl wolfed it down, barely breathing between bites.
“I . . . I don’t know what to do,” said Ruth. Her voice broke and she started to shiver. Part from the cold, part from grief, part from the exhaustion of it all. Her father was dead. It was . . . too big an idea to wrap her head around. Chaim was probably dead too, or would be soon—nobody ever came back from the work camps. And she had nowhere else to go.
“Can the Resistance help me? I can bake, if they have flour and ovens. Or I can clean or . . . or do anything that’s needed. I can be useful. I have nowhere to go.” Tears finally reached her eyes as she tentatively poked at the giant wall of grief looming inside her. She shook her head, trying to clear it. There was no time for that now.
“There’ll be a boat,” said the girl, grabbing a second loaf and taking a bite. Ruth noticed her cheekbones poking out of her face, how gaunt she was, and wordlessly offered a third. “In eight days, on the river. It’s taking people across the border. Things are better for Jews in Lavroskia. You could take Chaim’s place, if you have your papers and something for bribes.” Her chewing slowed to a more normal pace as her belly filled. “You can’t stay here, though. We can’t feed you for a week. And you’ll freeze in that,” she indicated Ruth’s sweater. “Come back in eight days.”
The fishing city of Lavroskia was named for the river, or the other way around. Any city needed bakers, and the boat was the only thread for her to grasp. Going home for the interim was dangerous—she would be under heightened watch. The polizia would come again and again, for more money or worse. But there was no better option.
• • • •
My yeast-delivering friend is in the hospital with Covid complications. He was feeling better, but now has an embolism and goodness knows what else. I toss $50 that I can’t afford into his GoFundMe and quit my Netflix account to make up a bit of the difference.
My doctor friend calls and tells me they’ve lost a colleague, and I don’t know what to say to offer any comfort.
Outside, people are protesting for racial justice, chanting at the top of their lungs. Counter-protesters yell back, spittle freely flying from their unmasked faces. I feel embarrassed, staying inside. I’m too high-risk for a protest to make sense. And yet again I feel helpless and ineffectual. Doing something is all well and good, if there’s actually something you can do.
I try to bake some challah and film it again. The loaf comes out of the oven flat and dense. This is probably how you make hardtack, not bread.
The first “How not to make a challah” video has five thousand views and people are arguing King Arthur flour vs Gold Medal in the comments. Now “How not to make a challah 4” joins it on my channel.
I don’t feel like I can complain to my bubbe about it. What can I say to a woman who lived through pogroms and the Holocaust? That I’m scared and alone during a much more peaceful time? All I need to do is stay inside and wait this thing out, as long as my savings don’t give out first. (Which honestly, they might.) But nobody is actively trying to kill me. It’s not nearly as bad as she had it. So why do I feel so scared and useless?
• • • •
Back at the bakery, Ruth swept the shards of glass from the front room, cleaned up the crumbs from the stomped and stolen loaves, set the overturned racks that had once held bialys and knishes and challah back upright, and put the emptied cash register back in its place. Her father’s blood had soaked into the wooden floorboards and no amount of scrubbing would ever get them clean.
She didn’t board up the windows—with what planks of wood? And what good would it do? Better to show that this bakery had been abandoned, had no more to give. Like her.
Ruth washed her father’s body and wrapped it in a white bedsheet—the closest she could get to a tachrichim, the traditional linen shrouding garments. She took his tallit, his prayer shawl, snipped off one of the tzitzit fringes, and wrapped it around him too.
It took hours to dig a grave next to the big oven in the back, for all that the oven’s residual heat had kept the ground from fully icing through. She recited the blessings as best she could, trying not to think of how wrong this was, so wrong. It shouldn’t be her doing this by herself, but a rabbi with a minyan. It shouldn’t be her father in the ground, he who had done nothing wrong, but the polizia. It shouldn’t be her left all alone, too frightened to fight back against the injustices and instead crouching near-silent on the freshly turned earth like a shivering mouse. Where was the Resistance? For all the good they’d done, it sounded like they were mostly gone too. Out-manned, out-gunned.
“Baruch atah Adonai, Dayan Ha-Emet” she whispered, bless the Lord, the judge of truth, as she locked the door to the front of the bakery behind her, then went up the stairs to the little apartment on the second floor where she had lived in all her life. She threw a pillowcase over the mirror, tore a hole in her clothing, and prepared to sit shiva.
It was strange to sit shiva all alone. When they’d sat shiva for her mother, and again later for Zayde Avigdor, it felt like she was living with the whole town in one tiny apartment. People bustled in and out, brought food, patted her cheeks and offered handkerchiefs for her streaming nose. Her father had been there to comfort her too.
And now their home was silent. Worse than when she and her father had rattled around like two zlotas in a big empty jug. The only sound was the wind whipping through the dead tree branches outside and the windows creaking with the effort to keep it out.
The town itself wasn’t deserted, but Jews were no longer allowed to congregate. Not in shul, not in each other’s homes. Certainly not at the Jewish cemetery. Going out and asking the neighbors that were still left to come sit shiva for Yosef, or even telling them he had passed . . . well, it was lucky enough Ruth managed to get back to the bakery unseen. Going out again before she had to make the dash for the boat was just asking for trouble she couldn’t afford.
Inside she sat. She tried reading their well-thumbed copy of the Torah, but her eyes couldn’t focus. She felt too empty for grief. Too numb. Like the sadness inside her was so large that, if she were to poke it, the frail dam holding it back would burst and she would be so overwhelmed that she would die of despair. And she couldn’t afford to do that.
While it wasn’t forbidden to cook during shiva, tradition meant mourners didn’t have to, with visitors bringing food. But Ruth couldn’t starve. As she went through the motions of the most basic of mourning cooking—hard-boiled eggs, the simplest of loaves, frying the last of the stringy meat from the icebox—her shoulders relaxed with the familiar motions. She remembered Zayde Avigdor’s words during her mother’s shiva. “When all is lost, do something anyway. Even if it doesn’t help, it’ll help.”
She hadn’t understood the words then. But now they clicked into place, and she started to bake. Baking wouldn’t bring back her father or Chaim. Baking wouldn’t keep the polizia away, or keep her neighbors safe, or help her get to the boat in time. But the dry powderiness of the flour, the soft stickiness of just-risen dough . . . they felt nourishing to her fingers.
So she baked. She had plenty of flour, and food was as good for bribes as anything. Challah bread and rye loaves and pretzel rolls and bialys and knishes and poppy seed rolls and hamantaschen and proziaki and sesame bagels and rugelach and babka. Anything she could think of and had the ingredients for came marching like Resistance soldiers out of the big oven in the back.
But when she used the last tablespoon of poppy seeds to fill a hamantaschen, something inside her broke. It didn’t matter how much she baked. She couldn’t carry all of this with her. She couldn’t hide with a sack of bread larger than she was. What would she do, steal a wheelbarrow and rumble it through the cobbled streets? And baking could fill her home with bread, but it didn’t fill the hole in her heart.
Ruth collapsed to the ground, spilling both poppy seeds and the tears that had been held back for days. She was alone. Her father, gone. Chaim, gone. Zayde Avigdor and her mother, gone. Half of the Jews in the ghetto were gone, whether into the ground or to work camps she didn’t know. And her heart hurt with the loss as the grief dam burst and the sadness washed over her in wave after wave after wave and she felt she would drown.
Hours later—it must have been hours, because the candle on the bakery table had long flickered out—Ruth had cried herself out. The numbness returned, both to her heart and to her legs, which had fallen asleep. She shook them out and looked at the table filled with the triangular poppyseed cookies eaten at Purim, their dough still pale and unkissed by heat.
What was the point? To do something anyway, even if it doesn’t help?
Who was even going to eat these hamentaschen, the polizia when they next came to raid the bakery? To hell with them. Ruth resisted the urge to scream—better to not call attention to her presence—so instead she mashed up all the hamentaschen and kneaded them into a poppyseed-dotted ball. And punched it once for good measure.
Ruth stared at the wooden table, drained yet again. She unfocused her eyes and the twin poppyseed dough images crossed and moved against each other. Zayde Avigdor’s face floated into her mind. And before she knew what she was doing, she began to sculpt.
The poppyseed dough became Zayde Avigdor’s big bushy eyebrows and kippah. White proofed dough transformed into her father’s kind eyes and smile, her mother’s nose. Pumpernickel dough, dark with burned sugar, became Chaim’s hair; rye dough his abdomen. Braided challah arms and legs buckled with musculature, khachapuri palms and feet bristled with rugelach fingers and toes. Raisins for dark irises were the final touch.
The sculpting was rough—she was no artist, and dough was not the best medium for detail—but the important bits came out clearly. Her father’s eyes twinkled back at her, sharp as they’d been only a few years ago.
“Baruch atah Adonai, Dayan Ha-Emet” she murmured. Zayde Avigdor had told her of the great Rabbi ben Bezalel, who’d made a golem to protect the city of Prague. A homunculus made of earth and clay, brought to life with one of Hashem’s names—Emet. Truth.
This creation was her truth, bread and family. She sliced in אמת (emet) on the figure’s forehead—pumpernickel needed slashes before baking so it could rise and expand properly, might as well have them be meaningful. Not that it would be a golem. Golems were made of sturdy clay, not soft dough. Golems were made by rabbis, not women. And anyway, golems were a folktale, nothing more.
Then, with great difficulty (because even with the figure sliced in two along the waistline, these were the two largest loaves she’d ever made) she eased both halves into the oven out back to bake.
It was silly, in retrospect. Rugelach needed a different temperature and bake time than khachapuris, which were different than rye loaves, which were different than challah. Either some of the figure would burn or some would be underbaked, or both, even with the oven on its lowest heat.
“See that, Zayde Avigdor?” she said aloud into the cold air, unchanged by the weak warmth of the oven. “I did a thing. I did many things, and it didn’t help. Nothing is better. NOTHING!” And as the yell left her lips she knew deep in her bones that this was a mistake she could not undo. The sound reverberated into the night, touching the dusting of snowflakes still falling around her, hitting the street lamps and the rooftops and far beyond.
She headed back into the building, and as if on cue, came a rapping noise on the bakery’s front door. “Open up! Polizia!”
• • • •
My friend dies. I can’t go to the funeral because it’s close family only. I try to join in on Zoom, but it feels meaningless, like an empty gesture that helps nobody. My friend least of all.
It’s been six months of pandemic and I haven’t been able to do anything of use. My fear and helplessness have been overshadowed by a feeling of empty numbness, like that’s my body’s last possible defense mechanism.
I clean out a thick layer of fire extinguisher residue from the inside of the oven and toss a charred black loaf in the compost, then upload “How not to make challah 5.” The comments have grown, and people are in a rollicking debate over whether I’m a true disaster in the kitchen or am just a comedian making it up.
“Are you feeling any better?” asks my bubbe on the phone.
“I mean no, not really. I don’t think the baking’s helping.”
“Everything helps. Even if it doesn’t look like it’s helping. As long as you’re doing something and not just sitting on your tuchus. If all your options are terrible, at least doing something opens up new options.”
After I pay rent this next month, I’ll have $44 left to my name.
• • • •
“Come out! We won’t be so nice if we have to ask another time!”
What could the polizia possibly want? Were they back to get more baked goods to smash up or steal? To rape and kill her? Was it safer to answer the door or stay hidden? Do something, said Zayde Avigdor’s voice in her head. Ruth made her way through the bakery kitchen and into the public-facing bakery space.
The space looked abandoned, between the empty shelves and mostly-missing windows. The two police officers who’d been there before stood in the doorway, the half-smashed wooden door swinging open in front of them. The icy wind whistled into the bakery.
“How can I help you?” She struggled to keep the panic out of her voice as she reflexively smoothed out her apron. No zlotas in the pockets to give out, no rolls without going back into the kitchen to get some . . . and somehow she knew that letting the men further in was a very, very bad idea.
The blond polizia barked, “We know you have him!” He swooped forward and grabbed Ruth by the shoulders. “Where’s Haym?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” she squeaked. “I was told he’d been arrested last week!”
His fingers dug into her arms where surely there would be bruises the next day. “And then you filthy people helped him escape!” He gave her a rough shake, then spat on her cheek.
The dark-haired officer strode up to them and shoved something hard and cold and round under Ruth’s ribs—the right size to be a pistol. “You have three seconds to start talking, or we do with you what we did to your disgusting father.”
Ruth stiffened as she heard the pistol click.
“One . . . ”
“I don’t know anything! I swear! I haven’t seen Haym or Chaim or anyone in weeks! I’ve been alone in the bakery!”
“Two . . . ”
“Oh just get on with it,” said the blond polizia, and then several things happened at once.
The other polizia said “Three.” And the door between the kitchen and the bakery front burst open. And a huge figure made of rye and challah and rugelach, easily eight feet tall, shot itself into the fray and flung the dark-haired officer toward the wall. The man slammed into an empty metal rack and hit his head on a shelf, then collapsed on the floor.
“What the hell!” The other officer let go of Ruth and took out his own pistol, firing twice at the bread man.
The bullets passed right through its chest in a spray of crumbs. The figure looked down at itself, appeared unmoved by the experience, and grabbed the remaining officer by the front of his uniform. It lifted him clean up off the ground, then flung him into the opposite wall.
The pale polizia shook his head and fired from his position on the ground. This time the figure’s legs bent into a crouch while the torso stayed in place, letting the bullet whiz unobstructed through the empty space suddenly between the two. The figure—a golem, Ruth realized, the information slowly trickling into her consciousness like honey through cheesecloth—re-aligned its hips and torso and went back into one piece.
The look of horror on the polizia’s face turned to terror when the golem bent down and scooped him up, carrying the man over its shoulder like a firefighter, and deliberately stomped its way back through the door to the kitchen. Ruth stood rooted to the spot in fear and astonishment. Between the polizia’s frantic screams she heard the familiar creak of the ice box opening—then the screams quieted to a muffled squeak a moment later when the lid creaked shut.
The dark-haired man remained crumpled and unconscious, a wound on the back of his head sluggishly bleeding into the wooden floorboards. His blood was far from the stain from her father’s blood, and for some reason that felt important.
Ruth tried to snap herself back into action. Do something. Do anything! You can’t just stand here!
Shaking, she went back to see what had happened. The outside oven door was open, fire roaring merrily inside. Floury footprints and handprints originated from the oven door, then went everywhere.
The polizia-containing icebox sat door-side-down on the large wooden table. The blonde man whimpered from within as the golem stacked chairs and benches on top to weigh it down further.
She had to go. Run, right now. There’s no telling when the other polizia would wake up, sound an alarm. Or how long the golem would hold.
A golem. She’d made a golem. No time to even think about those implications. Thinking could happen later. Now was the time to act.
She ran upstairs and grabbed her papers and packed. Shoved on her thickest boots, hoisted her bag over her shoulder and went back downstairs.
The golem was standing in the kitchen. It had bound the other, unconscious polizia to two table legs with strips of canvas torn from empty bags of flour. It stood there placidly, hands behind its back as though waiting for orders. It looked at her through her father’s kind eyes and Zayde Avigdor’s laughing eyebrows.
“Um,” she said, swallowing against the dryness of her throat. “Thank you?”
The golem gave a half-bow and smiled.
“Here,” she said, and handed it some of Zayde Avigdor’s old clothes. “We’ll need to hide you.”
As she watched the golem transform into the silhouette of her zayde, Ruth felt a little bit lighter. Things were still terrible, it was true, but the old words still held. “Even if it doesn’t help, it helps,” she whispered to herself. “A new option opens up.”
Together, they made their way to the river, leaving the ghetto in Svatislavia behind forever.
• • • •
Just as I finish applying for yet another credit card, I get an email informing me that my YouTube account funds are ready, and to please link a bank account so they can be deposited. I look, and my failed challah videos have earned a million views and five hundred dollars. I hadn’t even realized I’d set the videos to advertise. It’s not enough for rent yet, but looking at the stats shows that the income and the rate at which it was coming in is increasing daily.
“See?” says my bubbe when we next talk on the phone. “I told you, bread is magic.”
“I don’t think I’ve actually managed to make bread yet. None of those outcomes looked like bread.”
“Doesn’t matter. Even if it doesn’t help, it helps. Even if it’s not bread, it’s bread. Still nourishing in a different way.” I can hear the smile in her voice, and I’m amazed at how she’s stayed so strong throughout this whole time.
I scroll through the comments again and realize . . . people are entertained. They’re seeking refuge from the chaos that is this year, and my baking mishaps are filling a need. My bread is nourishing.
I’m never going to cure this pandemic, or fix my country’s response to it. Hell, I’m never going to be a good baker. But a comedy YouTube channel? Silly as it is, it makes me feel like I’m not useless.
The next day I gather up the ingredients, and the strength from my bubbe, and start to film “How not to bake a pumpernickel 1.”
Because even if it doesn’t help, it helps.