Cast Your Bread

What’s a little kid to do when his stomach is growling all day, when he knows he’ll be going to bed hungry until that one chocolate spread sandwich the next day? That little kid was me — until Hashem sent my salvation through an astute custodian with a huge heart.

Night was always the hardest part.

You’ve heard the expression “Going to bed hungry”? I doubt you really know what it means. And even if you do, probably not like this. My small stomach growled constantly. Hunger made me dizzy. Lying on the old bed, I thought about one thing only: food. I’d flip through those little Machanayim booklets, stare at the drawings of Hechtkopf, the illustrator whose characters all us kids knew, and fix my eyes on the steaming dishes in the pictures of the kretchmes of Eastern Europe.

The whole day had passed with almost nothing to eat, but there was no one to complain to — everyone at home was in the same boat. Poverty was our reality, our decree of fate, and in our house, there were no exceptions.

The house itself showed it. Paint peeled from the walls, the ceiling beams poking through the crumbling plaster. After hunger, the cold hit hardest. Jerusalem’s biting frost. We had no heating, as there was no money for gas. At any moment the electric company could cut us off, and the phone line had already been disconnected for half a year, but what mattered most to me wasn’t gas, electricity, or phones. It was the empty refrigerator. Because that was about survival.