Passover in New Orleans

There's a knot that you feel in your stomach when you're about to do something dangerous—when you become a bit anxious, say, about the fact that you're about to cross enemy lines and enter a place where you will enjoy an excellent chance of being not only caught, but also hanged—and then there's a different knot that you feel in your stomach when you're about to do something wrong. When you are seventeen years old, you are accustomed to believing that you simply don't know things, that there is an entire world of considerations and complications that you aren't obliged to concern yourself with, and so you tell yourself that one knot is the other knot, and that you are just terrified of being hanged. But you know the difference.

Let me tell you something about what it's like to be folded into a barrel in the back of a smuggler's boat with nothing but a small canteen of water, an even smaller tin of gruel, a chisel and a packet of poison. For the first six hours, your muscles paralyse you. For the second six hours, your thoughts paralyse you. But for the third six hours and beyond, your spirit is set free into the wide-open spaces of memory and imagination, and you start to see visions. By the evening of the second day, you have become a prophet, and by the evening of the third day, you rise from that coffin-barrel as the Messiah. I was prepared to resurrect myself and redeem the world, but unfortunately the journey from Ship's Island in Mississippi to New Orleans was only two days long.

Those first six hours inside the darkness of that barrel, into which I was folded like a message in a bottle, were agony. But it was a physical agony, which was at least a relief from the knot in my stomach, whose real origin I knew better than I could admit. After the first six hours passed, with their tortures of neck and knees and the insistent smell from the rags that I had stuffed into my uniform's crotch, my mind freed itself. I began to understand why my teachers had always insisted on rote memorization of poems and speeches and the like, and I wished I had paid more attention to my Hebrew tutors, or even to my English ones, because the ability to entertain oneself with memorized passages from the Bible (or from the Farmer's Almanac, for that matter) is indispensable to anyone stuck in a barrel in the bottom of a boat. I tried to recite the passage from the Torah that I had chanted at my bar mitzvah, the Song at the Sea from Exodus, and imagined myself as a new Moses, sent downriver in a basket into the heart of Pharaoh's dominion. I would enter Pharaoh's territory, I imagined, kill an Egyptian taskmaster (a slave owner, I told myself again and again, who was planning to kill Lincoln! How could I possibly be more just, more right?) and then flee back north so that God could reveal himself to me in the burning bush of Union pride. This was just the journey in the basket, the trip down the Nile. But these were false thoughts, and I knew it. Instead, as the second six hours gave way to the third, I tried to remember everything I could about my mission, except, of course, for Henry Hyams himself. And I found myself thinking back to how it had begun.

The previous autumn, we had observed the Day of Atonement in the camp. I know it sounds improbable, a Yom Kippur service in the Union Army, but it happened. It was Abraham Mendoza's idea. Sergeant Mendoza was twenty-two years old, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, also from New York City, and, as he was thrilled to tell anyone who asked (and even those who didn't), his forebears had come to the North American colonies in 1699, after being banished from Spain in 1492 and spending the intervening centuries in some godforsaken place in Brazil—all of which made Mendoza himself a sixth-generation American, and embarrassingly proud of it. Unlike most Jews of his background, nearly all of whom had disappeared like a lost tribe into the wilderness of American Christianity, Mendoza was a bookish, traditional sort who had committed most of the Pentateuch and half the Psalms to memory in Hebrew, English and even in the Spanish-Jewish jargon, and he would quote chapter and verse about proclaiming liberty throughout the land and walking through the valley of the shadow of death any time he was giving any kind of order, oblivious enough not to notice that everyone was snickering at him behind his back. I found him insufferable and I assumed the feeling was mutual.

But one evening in the camp, I noticed him waiting behind me for the latrine. Because I was trying to ignore him, I was of course attuned to his every move. And so I heard him quite clearly when he mumbled in my direction, under his breath, 'Amcha?'

It's a Hebrew word, amcha. Technically it means 'your people'. But for Hebrews, it is a code—a simple word whispered in a stranger's ear to see if he recognizes it, at which point the question is already answered. It's a perfect code, because if the person asked fails to respond, it might just as easily be disguised as a cough. And what makes it even more perfect is that only a Hebrew can use it, because no one else, except perhaps some Germans, can pronounce the guttural 'ch'. Mendoza's name and complexion gave him away immediately, of course, but I myself am quite fair, and rather tall too, not to mention that I prefer not to divulge my ancestry to everyone I meet. So he asked.

'What an eloquent sneeze,' I thought of exclaiming. Instead, I thought of my parents and lowered my own voice. 'Amcha,' I replied.

'Wait for me on the left side of the barracks tomorrow, at eighteen hundred hours,' he said.

Before I could ask why, the line behind me had forced me to enter the latrine; by the time I was finished, Mendoza was gone.

I went to wait for him the following evening, more out of curiosity than anything else. When I arrived at the spot, I was surprised to see two other soldiers already there—Isaac Calderon and Benjamin Gratz, two sixteen-year-old enlisted men. Before I could even speak to them, Mendoza had arrived. 'We've been excused this evening,' Mendoza informed me, 'for the eve of Yom Kippur.'

Yom Kippur! I had completely forgotten about it. But Mendoza hadn't. I saw now that he had a small prayer book in his hand as he led us outside the borders of the camp and began the service in an open field. There were nineteen of us, it turned out, including some men I had never met and a few faces that surprised me. Mendoza planted his torch in the ground and lit it, and turned to the company. He announced that the service would need to be abridged. We nodded our assent, and he opened his prayer book to begin.

After the prayer was finished, we all breathed in that fall air, now dark with the first starlight, with relief and renewal. The year was fresh, unstained and beautiful as the rattle of the crickets in that open field on that cool clear night. As we returned to the camp, Mendoza began talking with me, and, unblemished by my prior loathing, I answered him. We talked about our families, our relatives near and far—holiday postcards received from distant cousins, pranks played by our fathers, foods cooked by our mothers, and all the other small details of home that lonely soldiers remember. The service that night, strange though it was, was a piece of home, and now, as we casually spoke of our mothers and cousins, Mendoza was family.