by Bruce Eric Kaplan

Passover makes me think of going to my Grandma Rose’s. “Come on,” my mother would scream from the back hall, standing by the open door, waiting for us to come to the car. “We have to go to Grandma Rose’s.” I guess we were always late or just going to the bathroom at the last possible moment. When I was very little, in the early nineteen-seventies, my parents, my two older brothers and I went to the Seder on the first night of Passover at her two-bedroom apartment in Queens. Her neighborhood was Forest Hills where seemingly everyone was Jewish.

The Seder at Grandma Rose’s wasn’t a fun night. First, there was the drive from Maplewood, New Jersey which more often than not involved traffic. “It’s the tunnel,” someone would always say because I guess it was. Then we would finally get to her building and have to look for parking. “There’s no spots,” my father would say because there never were. The Seder itself was so boring. You read from the Haggadah for an hour, doing the little rituals like dipping your pinky in wine to symbolize blood, then you had a bad meal. My grandmother was a terrible cook and we brought the desserts. Nothing is worse than a Passover dessert, because of the lack of yeast. We made flat, chalky brownies every year using mix that came in a red box you bought at the supermarket, and you made it in about five seconds by adding water to some dust and then baking. After dessert, you sang a couple of songs, then gave up and went home.

The Seder was something you needed to get through. Just needing to get through things was big in my family. “Well, we got through it,” my father would say after some night out somewhere. It seemed like life might just be one long series of things you needed to get through. Grandma Rose was a big believer in getting through things. She was a big believer in general. She seemed to think about God and being Jewish all day long. “God wouldn’t like that,” she once said to me about something I can’t recall. She seemed very intimate with what God liked and didn’t like.

My family belonged to Temple Oheb Shalom in South Orange, New Jersey. Every September, we went there for the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah, and then, Yom Kippur. “The holidays are late this year,” my mother would say. Or in other years, “The holidays are early this year.” I am not sure that the holidays were ever on time. We didn’t get off from school for the Jewish holidays. Not being in school that day was a real statement. It said you were Jewish.

We lived one town over and drove a few miles to get to temple, usually about an hour or so after services started. I believe it was timed so that we skipped the early part. It seemed the main thing was to be there for Rabbi Shapiro’s sermon, which always started out having something to do with the bible and quickly turned into a statement about Israel. “I thought he made some valid points,” my father would say afterwards.

Because of our arrival time, we never parked in the temple parking lot, which filled up quickly. Instead, we found parking in the surrounding streets filled with beautiful old houses, much nicer than ours. We always knew how late we were by how far away we had to park. On the walk to temple, my brothers and I would pick up chestnuts from the ground and throw them into the air, or perhaps occasionally, at each other. The chestnuts were beautiful and brown, smooth in a way that other things weren’t. I never saw chestnuts anywhere else in New Jersey, other than the street we parked on at the High Holy Days. Summer was the most fun time of year, obviously, and when you walked down the street with the chestnuts on a cool September day, in a suit and tie, on the way to atone for all your sins, you knew the fun was over. It was now Fall for sure.

Even though there were tons of Jews in Maplewood and South Orange, being Jewish very much meant you were other, in a way that it doesn’t seem so now. My kids have two Jewish parents, but don’t seem to feel other in any way at all.

“Do you know you’re Jewish?” I asked them not that long ago.

“Yes,” my daughter said. But not very convincingly.

And I understand. They celebrate Hanukkah, but they don’t celebrate any other Jewish holidays. Plus, they celebrate Christmas each year at their aunt’s, and often Easter at their grandmother’s. So basically, my kids are just confused.

When I first started elementary school, there was a lot of talk about Christmas, and no talk about Hanukkah. Then there started to be a little cursory talk about dreidels. Christmas was a real holiday and Hanukkah was the Jewish version of it, except not. I went to my friend Jeffrey Van Kirk’s house on Christmas mornings, had some Christmas cookies, watched Jeffrey open all his gifts, and got a little gift from his mother. In that way, I had a tiny taste of what Christmas was.

But in another way, I did Christmas whole hog: I lapped up every Christmas episode of every TV show. And I watched every Christmas special and every single Christmas movie that was on at that time. The specials were fun but the movies were profound. When I was really young, they would show “The House without a Christmas Tree.” In that one, Jason Robards was a sad widower who lived with his mother, played by Eileen Heckart, and his daughter Addie, played by some child actress. He refused to celebrate Christmas — he associated the holiday with his wife and it was just too painful for him, but then Addie won some sort of raffle for a Christmas Tree at school. She got to keep the tree and celebrate Christmas, and Jason Robards got to move forward in his healing.

I loved and still love “Miracle on 34th Street.” Natalie Wood was an extremely compelling actress and no one ever talks about it. In 1985, Ted Turner created a colorized version of “Miracle on 34th Street” and it was bizarre. Everyone was just pink or yellow or blue; no one was really a real color. “It’s a Wonderful Life” showed up one year and never stopped showing. Now, as a husband and father, I often feel like James Stewart on that bridge, at the end of my rope. Marlo Thomas starred in “It Happened One Christmas,” a TV remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Truthfully, I wish there were more remakes of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It should be like “Pride and Prejudice” where every ten minutes you get another version.

But my favorite Christmas movie of all was called “June Bride.” It starred Bette Davis as a tough career woman, a magazine editor who descends upon a small town in December to do a wedding story for the June issue (there was a long lead time in those days). She’s very cynical and hard-bitten, but because of the magic of Christmas she falls in love with Robert Young, the photographer for the assignment. Like Jason Robards, Bette Davis was transformed into a new, more kind and loving person because of Christmas. I wonder if I loved the Christmas movies because someone always changed. No one I knew in real life ever changed. Everyone was always exactly the same. My father, who loved all old movies, could never really get behind Christmas ones. He had a hard time appreciating anything about Christmas. It would have seemed a betrayal to his people, or more specifically to Grandma Rose.

My father was a dutiful son. Every night, he called his mother, after dinner and before the nightly news. My father never missed the nightly news. Neither did Grandma Rose. They watched Chet Huntley on NBC. If you were a grown-up you had to watch the nightly news or you might not know what happened that day and that would be terrible. Grandma Rose seemed very old, which she was. Maybe she seemed very old for her age her whole life until she was in her nineties, when she seemed just right. She had glasses with thick, coke-bottle lenses, through which her eyes looked crazy big. She only had wisps of white hair that barely covered her scalp. She had no eyebrows. And she wore fairytale red lipstick at all times. I never saw her without lipstick. Her apartment was full of big, dark wooden furniture. Except for the television cart, which was made of wire and very rickety. It was as if a television didn’t deserve to be on a serious dark piece of wooden furniture. It just wouldn’t be right.

She worried about everything. Plane travel was a big one, perhaps the biggest one. If someone took an airplane, Grandma Rose needed to know what time it was taking off, what time it was landing, and what airline. Just in case. But really any kind of travel was worrisome. My father always called her the moment he got home from visiting her. If he didn’t call immediately, the phone would soon ring and everyone would know who it was.

“Hello,” my father would answer.

“You didn’t call,” she would say.

Grandma Rose was almost blind and got blinder and blinder. When we went to visit her, she served us raw carrots, which she peeled. But they were never fully peeled. They were just sort of peeled, since she missed most of the carrot. There was a lot of dirt on those carrots. You just ignored it despite the odd feeling that you were eating something very unclean and could die from it.

On our Sunday visits, we would have lunch. When I was very young, she would boil chicken and we would have that and the partially peeled carrots. And a few pieces of rye bread served on a plate. After that became too much for her, we would take her to one of the diners she loved. Every day during the week, she would take a walk down the boulevard and have coffee and a little lunch at a diner.

“With some decaf,” she would always order.

The walk to and from the diner was like her job. As far as I know that was the only thing she did each day. Oh, also she had a “story” she watched in the afternoons. I think it was “As the World Turns.” I only ever heard her call it her story, never a soap opera. She didn’t really discuss it with us, other than to mysteriously say “they do terrible things” on it.

My parents always talked with Grandma Rose about what books she had been reading. Any book she read was either about Judaism or being Jewish in some way. Or it was by a Jewish author. Ideally, it was both. Evergreen, by Belva Plain, was a big book for her — the saga of a Jewish family, spanning many generations. She was obsessed with William Safire. But there was a year or two there where every adult in the world seemed to be obsessed with William Safire. She loved Sam Levinson, who seemed to have endless books about his very Jewish childhood where they didn’t have much, but were happy. Not having much but being happy seemed the ideal goal in her mind. Having too much was disgusting in some way.

Occasionally, Grandma Rose visited us in New Jersey for some particularly good reason, like a Bar Mitzvah. But it was strange when Grandma Rose was in New Jersey. She seemed like an alien if she was anywhere other than Forest Hills. Grandma Rose didn’t show much emotion. My father once told me that he was happy one day as a child, when all of a sudden for no reason, his mother reached out and pinched him.

“Ow,” he said and maybe even cried a little. “That hurt. Why did you do that?”

“I just want you to know that sometimes life is unfair,” she said.

When I was around ten, my aunt Leah was killed in a car accident. She was Grandma Rose’s only daughter. The shiva was held at our house. We had to get a special cardboard box for Grandma Rose to sit on. There is some rule in Judaism about not being comfortable for a certain amount of time after a loved one dies. It’s hard for me to imagine you need the box to be uncomfortable but whatever. I wish I could remember where we went to buy the cardboard box. I remember it was made expressly for the purpose it was used for. It sat in our basement for months after shiva was over until me or my brothers played with it and ruined it.

As Grandma Rose got older, she repeated herself. She told one story over and over again to me. She was visiting our house one afternoon when my father yelled at my brother Andrew for doing something. Maybe he told him to go to his room. As my brother stormed up the stairway (the third step up rattled because it wasn’t put on right), he loudly muttered under his breath, “I hate you” so my father could hear it. Grandma Rose was scandalized by this. But worse, she was horrified that my father didn’t say anything.

“And then your father didn’t say anything,” she would always recite to me. “I asked him why. He said he wanted Andrew to be able to hate him.” She would then look at me with her big glassed eyes. Can you imagine that?” As if it would be fine for a son to hate his father?” She was confused and upset by it anew each time.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was 21 and Grandma Rose was mystified by the whole thing. Moving on the whole was very mystifying to her. I believe in her mind, she thought, why would a person move?

“What do you like about it out there?” she once asked when I was home visiting.

“I don’t know. I like the whole culture,” I said.

“What culture?” she said drily, but it wasn’t really a question.

Towards the end, Grandma Rose started falling a lot. I was visiting my parents one time when Grandma Rose was staying with them because she had fallen and hurt herself. She was in a hospital bed in their den on the first floor of the house. It was a small room and the hospital bed was crammed between the comfortable chairs and the television set. We watched “Some Like it Hot” over her. Once she started falling, Grandma Rose talked a lot about wanting her life to be over. Not that she would have ended it. I believe in her mind, God would have been angered by the very idea of that.

I am trying to remember her not worried, and it is difficult. One time comes to mind. For some reason she was telling me about being a child and how when it was winter, she was allowed to buy warm chestnuts from a man on the street.

“They were so delicious,” she said. “Delicious like nothing else in this world.”

As she recalled the memory of eating the warm chestnuts in winter, she was transformed. She was a totally different person. But only for that moment.

“Her friends call her Annie.” — People who pretend to know more about Anne Hathaway than you.

Every time I read an article about Ken Lerer saying something about how much money BuzzFeed has or doesn’t have, a little ghost whispers in my ear, “Kenny! People who’ve worked with him call him Kenny!” And then I hate myself faster than you can hate me. And then I am impressed by how many people I know who’ve worked for the Huffington Post at one point or another. First of all, “Ken” is already a nickname for “Kenneth,” so “Kenny” is just kind of overboard — it connotes some inner circle of people who know something about him that most people don’t know, except you don’t even have to know him to know that. And poof! The inner circle is broken. Shibboleth nicknames are just constructs, and all they signify is that someone is Important Enough For You Not To Know Them Personally. And guess what: we already know that!

For seven years, I worked at a place full of shibboleth nicknames: Hendrik “Rick” Hertzberg, Calvin “Tad” Tomkins, Calvin “Bud” Trillin, Elizabeth “Betsy” Kolbert, Kelefa “K” Sanneh, Seymour “Sy” Hersh, Jeffrey “Toobz” Toobin, David “D-Money” Remnick. I could go on, but I signed some N.D.A.s. Okay, okay, I hear you — you’re going to say this is a writerly byline thing. It sounds more professional to be Elizabeth instead of Lizzie (no it doesn’t! Lizzie Widdicombe has a WAY better rhythm!), or Nicholas instead of Nick. Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton, so why can’t William Finnegan be Bill Finnegan?

Don’t get me started on initialisms as bylines. What is this, the New York Times and are you one of its publishers? A.O. Scott is kind of cool because we uninitiated can call him “Ayoooo!” in our heads, but to those who know him, he is Tony. Booo-rinngggg. I’m going to call him Anthony just to be different from those of you who insist on being different. I see you, Daniel T. Max. I am particularly against initial bylines for women, because give me one good reason that isn’t just plain-and-simple gender erasure.

If you have a name that you go by in life, that should be your name. Good ol’ Tad Friend is actually Theodore Porter Friend (NOT Theodore Wood Friend IV) — aren’t you grateful not to have to contend with that? Amanda Urban, a grown-ass woman and one of the biggest literary agents in New York openly goes by a nickname that is more commonly encountered as a name for a baby’s pacifier. She is married to Ken Auletta, not Kenneth Auletta.

I’m not against nicknames, per se! But having a secret nickname just for people who “know” you totally defeats its purpose. Ed Koch was Ed Koch for everyone, and I still trip up every time I read an announcement about Mike “Michael R.” Bloomberg. So who is your nickname really for? Do you actually discern the closeness of your social ties by how someone refers to you? Or is this all just a performance, making you feel known by your special and important friends? Are you embarrassed, Margaret? Do you feel inadequate, Robert? Is this the screed of a woman with an un-nicknamable name? Yes.

Photo: Flickr

Advertising agencies, who are hugely responsible for the focus on millennials that has helped make everything so stupid over the last few years, are having a hard time getting those millennials to work for them, because when you’ve been bombarded with the message that you’re so special, why would you want to spoil your specialness doing something as gross as advertising?

Happy Primary Day, New Yorkers! I just want to alert you to a little-known state law that makes it legal to vote for the candidate of your choice without having to turn it into a huge thing on social media. A more recent statute also removes the requirement to get into pointless, embarrassing Twitter fights with supporters of rival candidates. I’m not generally supportive of our legislature and the work they do, but the fact that we live in a state where there is no obligation to reveal just how sad and empty your own life is by engaging in crude, shameful arguments with people you’ve never met is something we should celebrate, and the best way to celebrate is by exercising those rights. Here’s hoping your lines aren’t too long. Just in case, here’s 8 minutes of music to make the time go by. Enjoy!

One woman’s entire life has been leading up to this moment — today is her day. Here’s a voter’s guide, you dummies.

★★★★★ A woman in suede boots trooped up the avenue past the urgent care center, at an hour either late or early for her pink wispy dress. It was certainly too early for the pharmacy in the 24-hour drugstore to be open. A man holding a low lawn chair, accompanying a boy in baseball pants and a jacket, hailed a cab. Indoors, lines of light moved slowly over the ceiling through the blinds. Birds were definitely singing. People wore thin cardigans out on the roof deck across the way. The hours went by slowly and there was still light. There was still light enough to go out in, when going out felt possible. Couples were hand in hand or moving with arms draped over one another. A young couple kissed on the corner of Broadway, then kissed again. The warm weather had come up so suddenly, no one seemed to have sorted out the right configurations of long things and short, layers and bareness. A little boy drew his bow and rubber-cup-tipped arrow on the Lincoln Center plaza, and the man walking ahead of him looked back and shook his head. White daffodils were backlit with sun bouncing off glass to the east; a rainbow glanced off someone’s upper chest.

Sophie Gee ends her review of Mothering Sunday, the new book by Graham Swift, with the assessment that “I wasn’t sure why it was a novella, since Swift’s style and themes are so weighty, but the lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.” This is the perfect example of one of the greatest problems of our literary age: the conflation of length with depth.

I have not read Mothering Sunday, and have no intention of doing so — I decided at the beginning of the year that from now on I would only read fiction by women (I am grandfathering in Julian Barnes, because if you think I’m going to miss the new Shostakovich novel you’re out of your mind) on the reasoning that if I’m going to give up my time to a bunch of things that never happened, that time might as well go to the gender that is considerably underrepresented in the daily attending I do to stories someone made up — but I paid attention to the reviews when it came out in Britain and they seemed generally positive; Gee is certainly welcome to dislike the book for being “inconclusive and vague,” but to suggest that another couple hundred pages would make it more fulfilling is to fall victim to the terrible bias against concision that overvalues the mammoth tree cemeteries we are supposed to revere for their word tonnage. It’s the same bias that suggests a 700-page epic is somehow better than a 200-page romp, or that someone who is good at writing short stories can only really be taken seriously if she writes a novel. It’s a dangerous, damaging idea that diminishes those who don’t waste space. A good writer can say something true in ten words, even fewer if they actually focus on what they want to express. That skill should be rewarded, not degraded.

Length is poison. Length does disservice. Length gives more room for the writer to indulge in his worst (i.e. most “writerly”) habits, incites skimming and inattentiveness on the part of the reader and generally destroys any possibility of ambiguity, which is the best kind of biguity. Why do we think something larger is more meaningful? There are any number of reasons going back hundreds of years but my own personal theory is we don’t want to acknowledge how terrible yet coherent our existence is. It’s basic. Life is hard. Childhood ends. Men are bad. Women suffer. Our struggles lack meaning. We repeat our mistakes. We die. These are things we all know whether or not we want to admit them, but it sugars the pill immensely if these very rudimentary, very obvious sentiments are hidden under 600 pages of extraneous dialogue and descriptions of what’s happening in the middle distance.

Could we please all agree to stop mistaking length for depth? If we were willing to acknowledge the virtue of brevity over the insincerity of volume, we might live in a world where we were all able to be a bit more honest about how things really work. We wouldn’t need to try to hide what we really want to say. It won’t be simple, I understand that: Too many people have too much invested, financially and positionally, in prizing the authority of bulk. They won’t be beaten easily. But couldn’t we at least try? Let’s all try. At minimum, we would be going a good way toward the goal of getting everyone to shut the fuck up a little more.

Okay, that was my argument. But how would you feel if it were this?

Sophie Gee ends her review of Mothering Sunday, the new book by Graham Swift, with the assessment that “I wasn’t sure why it was a novella, since Swift’s style and themes are so weighty, but the lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.” Could we please all agree to stop mistaking length for depth? A writer can say something true in ten words. Let’s all try to shut the fuck up a little more.

It’s MUCH BETTER, right? Thank you.

“Is it fair for Shakespeare to overshadow Cervantes?”

From a distance, it looks less like a haven of free-spiritedness than a catwalk of people who have decided that free-spiritedness looks good on them

You couldn’t pay me to go to most music festivals, not even to cover them with a gimlet eye for a word rate. (That said, if the Lilith Fair ever did reappear, I wouldn’t not go.) They are disgusting and muddy and full of unwashed humans on drugs with not enough porta potties (Ed note: what is our house style on this?) to prevent them from peeing all over the “fairgrounds” or whatever. The one and only time I went to The Governors Ball, everyone around me got way too stoned before an Animal Collective set and it was very hot and people started fainting and CONVULSING all around me; it was utterly terrifying.

Coachella is the Seinfeld of music festivals — it’s hard to say what it’s about, exactly. But Carrie Battan took a good run at it, highlighting in particular the womenswear aesthetic (jorts, flower crowns, fringe), which may be the strongest part of Coachella’s “brand,” if it can be said to have one. I’ll just watch you guys have fun from my side of the Instagram app.

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama goes to… @Lin_Manuel #Pulitzer100 pic.twitter.com/78ORIi2aOa

— The Pulitzer Prizes (@PulitzerPrize) April 18, 2016

In addition, the previous 84 awards have been rescinded and bestowed on Hamilton retroactively. In recognition of this moment, the accolade will henceforth be known as the Hamilton Prize for Hamilton. Hamilton.