Psycho Bubbel

Between the first and second Seder, it was said that one law must be broken so the others would hold. That year, Rebbetzin Gula vanished after the fourth cup and woke behind the Afn-kneitsh, the great matzah oven of their time. Since then, as was the case for Uug, she has not seen the moon—not once.

On the Seder of 5631, the Bubbel of Zitmah did not open the door for Elijah. “If he needs a door, he is not yet free,” he said. The kehilah wailed that the law had been cracked like a bone. Elijah appeared—visible, scowling—and sat. He did not eat. He stayed until dawn.

One year, Reb Yossele was caught hiding chametz in his ex-wife’s attic “to test her piety.” She found it, of course, and baked it into a kugel she served at his second wedding. The guests wept. The marriage lasted eight days, as foretold.

“This is how it always goes,” said Reb Nosnik, now blind and sweet-smelling. “No egg. Only hunger shaped like memory.” And the people nodded, for once, together.

“You do not know how to eat.” When the day broke, no one spoke of eggs. In fact, eggs were not eaten in Zitmah for seven years, until the child who had cried during the sermon returned from the hills, now grown, carrying a basket of pebbles and asking for salt.

Witnesses claimed the egg did indeed sob, though others said the sound came from the plumbing. A fast was declared, and then immediately broken with pickled fish.

III.
That night, the elders dreamt of enormous yolks circling the moon, and in each dream, a different cousin whispered,

was it not written in the Almelekh Codex? And why, too, did my grandmother die choking on an egg that she claimed was perfect?” To this Reb Ziblun replied, not with words, but by laying a boiled egg upon the bima and staring at it until it wept.

but by pressing it into the memory of the womb.” There was silence, save for one infant who cried from the gut.

II.
A dispute arose, as is foretold in the Soot-Songs of Tante Devela. Reb Nosnik, whose beard was long but uneven, stood and declared: “If this is the True Method, then why

The congregation, though weary of such declarations (there had been thirteen in the last calendar fog), nonetheless stood upright in reverence, as was the custom. “Each egg,” said Reb Ziblun, “must be cracked open with the left hand, shelled with the right foot, and consumed not with the mouth,

The Bubbel of Zitmah: On the Eating of Eggs

I.
It came to pass in the long wake of the Ninth Forgetting that Reb Ziblun of Veyl-Muchnik declared, before a congregation of doubtful grocers and trembling notaries, that he had discovered the True and Final Method for the eating of eggs. (continued...)