After a long minute, Mommy had sighed and smiled and said, “Your father means well, Yechezkel, and he loves his family”
There had been a group of Kach’niks at Chezi’s bar mitzvah, clustered at a round table in the corner of the Banyad Hall basement in Spring Valley, with their large white knitted yarmulkes and military bearing, two of them in actual military garb.
They ate the same knishes in mushroom sauce as everyone else and drank Be’er Mayim soda, because the hall didn’t allow non-heimish brands and whatever askan had helped Chezi’s mother figure out the event hadn’t been very picky with halls.
At the end, it had been a cute distraction. Chezi’s classmates who knew nothing about Meir Kahane and Kach were awed by the presence of adults who owned guns and were happy to tell the wide-eyed boys about the responsibility of a Jew. At some point, the menahel came to say mazel tov and he had broken up the little conversation, leading the boys in dancing, but for the rest of junior high, the boys talked about those men.
Chezi knew a bit more than they did, because Abba would go to every Kach meeting and come back enthused, talking to no one and everyone about “building a future” and “making what’s our own, our own.”
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