Everything changes… except my Haggadah

In over 50 years of changes in my life — many of them dramatic — the one utter constant has been the Levy family Seder. Maybe it’s occasionally been at the Coopers, but the dramatis personae have largely been the same: the wise son, the wicked son, the dull son (always my sister-law Sarah, the joke never gets old), the son who is too young to ask, and Elijah, who has never yet said “thanks” for all those free cups of Palwin No 5. Maybe he’s trying to tell us something.

Yes, there was a short feminist patch egged on by my older cousin where I refused to pour the water to wash my father’s hands. The manishtana has changed hands a few times with the arrival of sons and nephews, and dayenu went through several years of endless, annoying choruses — but Pesach is pretty much always the same chez nous: a breakneck dash though the Haggadah before the eating of matzah and maror together, and the joyous declaration that “the meal is now served”, on page 26.

At least, it’s on page 26 of The Children’s Haggadah, an announcement preceded by a sepia-toned picture of a family round a table where the mother wears a red dress and it’s ten past ten on the clock (they are clearly more thorough with their process than my family). There is meant to be a “pull-across” paper tab where the son disappears under the table to find the afikoman, but on my haggadah — given to me in 1976, when I was eight — the tabs were ripped off, long ago, and you have to lower the sliding pieces of paper manually.

Do you have The Children’s Haggadah in your family? Woe betide if you do not, because if you came to our house on Pesach, you’d never keep up and would always be on a different page. The cover of this particular tome is blue and shiny with an illustration that looks like a question mark. The words “Pesach” and “maror” are picked out in red Hebrew letters, and there are pictures of flowers, that look oddly Japanese, now you come to think of it. Inside, the type is big, and bold, important words picked out in red and blue, with cute little stick drawings.