Bugger Off!
A Classic Passover Tale
The Passover holiday marks a long tradition of telling. At the Seder—an eighteen-hour dinner that kicks off eight days of matzah-induced chronic constipation, we Jews read from a book called the Haggadah, (literally translated as telling), and we tell our children the Exodus story. For the unfamiliar, it’s a classic Bugger Off! tale that goes something like this:
The Israelites were slaves in Egypt.
God helped them bugger off.
And they lived happily ever after…
…until the next time they were told to bugger off.
As a young child, I loved everything about the story—Moses and the burning bush, Pharaoh’s hardened heart, the ten plagues, and for a change, victory for the Israelites. But after the millionth telling of Exodus, I was ready for the sequel.
Half my family was Egyptian, including my mother, and I wondered about her own exodus. Unfortunately, Mum wasn’t much of a Teller.
Back then, almost everything I knew about my mother, had been told to me by others, including her being Egyptian—a fact I learned from a cousin when I was ten years old.
For today’s Egyptian Jews, Exodus stories seem to fit into two categories: We Had To Bugger Off, andWe Really Had To Bugger Off.
It wasn’t until my last trip to Israel a month ago, that there was more Telling than I’d ever heard before.
My mother told me her family’s We Had To Bugger Off story, in which her brothers left Egypt shortly after Israel’s independence. She told of her parents who couldn’t stop them from heading to the Promised Land, so they packed up the whole family including eight of their nine children. She told of living in a tent for a year, where, as an unsupervised toddler, she’d wander away and get lost for hours at a time.
Since she was very young, my mother’s telling was much less detailed than my cousin Rosette’s, who remained in Egypt until 1963. Barely a teenager at the time, Rosette recounted her We Really Had To Bugger Off story.
My cousin told of a deposed king, of a revolution that turned out badly for Jews, and of a government who began to harass her father. She told of frozen bank accounts, of demands for new ‘taxes’, of the red government seal that suddenly marked her home as property of the state. She told of random arrests of Jewish men and teenage boys, including that of a family friend—the straw that broke the camel’s back. She told of secretly leaving her home and friends without saying goodbye, of the fear of being caught as she and her brother boarded the boat, and of the relief upon reaching her new home in France.
These shocking, not shocking Tellings, compelled me to capture them the old-fashioned way—on Egyptian papyrus. Below are process shots of the visual telling.
Working title: Bugger Off!
We’ll see where it goes, and I’ll update this once it’s complete—hopefully well before the matzah-induced constipation has subsided.
If you missed last week’s post about the historical victory for Arizona’s Wire Hanger Manufacturers, click the link (in bold type) to read it.
I have been known to eat matzah in solidarity with my husband. It's not bad with some good hummus or other such dip.
Loved the story.
Bugger Off! was part of our history also
Can totally Relate