Anyway, we went off, masked and carrying a large bottle of alcohol, to the lawyer's house, which serendipitously is in our neighbourhood. We sat in his garden, keeping the correct distance and using new pens from the box, and spent half an hour signing the contract. In about 3 years, we will have a lovely new home - no matter what happens to the housing market due to Corona. It's only taken about 8 years of ups and downs and changes of lawyers and contractors to get to this point ...
Wednesday night was the Seder, marking the start of Passover. Even stricter curfews than usual were in place, to make sure that people did not travel to spend the evening with the extended family as they normally would. My father reported a police checkpoint at the bottom of their road, which is just on the edge of Kfar Saba towards Hod Hasharon. This was the first Seder without my mother-in-law M, who died very suddenly in December. His side of the family got together on Zoom, using ADC's university account so as not to be cut off, and we had a really lovely Seder. The pre-meal part was just over an hour, and Y's children R and Z read very nicely (G, his youngest, will be four next month and is the only very small child there). We stayed connected during the meal and compared food - and Seder plates. We put an orange instead of the zro'a (we didn't have anything else, since the meat course was beef), and used celery and rocket from the balcony pot plants for the kappas and major, as we didn't have horseradish. The rocket was actually very peppery and played the part of the bitter herbs very well. ADC made excellent charoset, that I'm still eating on matza for breakfast - compared to tasting a bit ceremonially at the Seder and no more. We even managed to continue with the post-Seder songs (both the traditional Jewish ones and Negro spirituals, many of which refer to the Exodus of course), despite the lag on Zoom. The fact that all of us had drunk (at least) four glasses of wine by that time certainly helped...
Earlier on, my family had also had a mass Zoom meeting, not just the Israeli branch but the Cape Town and Berlin ones - unbelievable to think that we were all together in Budapest for the Seder a year ago, while M was studying at Central European University. So much has changed since then - not least that we had planned to visit K in Berlin a month ago. MR played Ma Nishtana and Simḥa Raba on the oboe, which was lovely (especially once everyone else muted themselves, so that there was no echo). It was really good to talk to everyone, and amazing to see how similar A and K (first cousins once removed) look with their hair pulled back; although that might be a matter of camera angle, too.
Because of the holiday, we've been working a bit less (although I continue to be swamped, with people sending articles and book chapters almost daily). ADC and I have binge-watched "Unorthodox" on Netflix, and enjoyed it very much. The Satmar hassidim really do live in a different reality. I found some of the characters over-stereotypical (like the Israeli violinist in
Berlin), but overall, it was excellently done. We've also watched The Third Man, Dr No. and There Will Be Blood. With all that TV/film watching, I finished a black and white striped scarf for Z (a Juventus fan) well in time for his birthday tomorrow, 110 cm knitted in less than a week. I made it using yarn that I inherited from my MIL, so Z will feel that he has a present both from us and from Savta Yum.
Tomorrow, I will get up early and go shopping. ADC couldn't find eggs or matza when he went to the grocery store during his lunch break today, so I'll see if going first thing (i.e., before ten) makes a difference.
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