“At the age of thirteen – my birthday was coming up – I was to undergo the ceremony of the bar mitzvah.
Impossible, said my mother when my father brought up the subject. It’s not impossible at all, said my father. Didn’t I find a way to have him circumcised? So now we will have the bar mitzvah. But – said my mother, who was having difficulty breathing and beginning to feel an attack of nerves coming on – how can you take Guedali to a synagogue? Who said it has to be in a synagogue? asked my father. We’ll hold the ceremony right here at home. Just for the family. This sounded more reasonable, and my mother agreed. Deborah and Mina were excited about the idea. Bernardo didn’t say anything.
For weeks I studied with my father the passage from the Bible that I was to recite in Hebrew. Two days before the party, my mother, Deborah, and Mina began to prepare the typical sweets. Father ordered a new suit made, and the girls were running to the seamstress’s house every other minute.
The night before the party I couldn’t sleep, I was so excited. Early the next morning Deborah and Mina danced joyfully in. They blindfolded me: it has to be a surprise, they said. For over an hour I waited, hearing their whispering and the clinking of glass and silver. Finally they took off the blindfold.
Oh, it was a beautiful sight. The table was covered with a white cloth; there were bottles of wine, crystal goblets, and steaming platters of food – the traditional Jewish dishes. On my bed were presents: books, a record player and records (Cavalleria Rusticana wasn’t among them), reproductions of famous paintings, a typewriter. And a violin almost exactly like the one I had thrown in the river.
I embraced my family, crying, and they wept too, but they tried to contain their emotion: come on Guedali, we want to start the party. Father came in, bringing the clothes he had bought me for the occasion, a dark suit coat, white shirt, tie, a skullcap. I dressed and placed the ritual shawl the mohel had given me over my shoulders. Mama came in, wearing a party dress and a new hairdo. She hugged me hard, sobbing, and didn’t want to let go of me. You’ll wrinkle his new coat, said Papa. Bernard came in and greeted me sourly.
I read the passage from the Bible without a mistake, my voice firm, the fringe of the talit falling over my haunches and hindquarters, one front hoof pawing the ground – as it always did when I was nervous.
‘Now,’ said my father when I had finished, ‘You are truly a Jew.’” (pages 46-47)
