Sabbath candles

In the Jewish households of the Pale of Settlement, the lighting of the Sabbath candles was the defining act of female religious observance, the one ritual that belonged to the women of the house. In the Antin home in Polotzk, this ceremony unfolded every Friday evening with a fixed and reverent choreography. While the father and brother went to the synagogue, the women and girls assembled in the living room for the candle prayer. The table gleamed with spotless linen and china; at the father's place lay the Sabbath loaf covered with a crocheted doily, beside it the wine flask and the kiddush cup of gold or silver. At the opposite end of the table stood a long row of brass candlesticks polished to perfection, with the heavier silver candlesticks in a shorter row in front, for the mother and grandmother were very pious and each used a number of candles, while the children and the maids had one apiece. The arrangement of the candlesticks—brass in a long row, silver in a shorter row before them—was itself a visible hierarchy of piety within the household, with the matriarchs burning the most lights and the youngest and the servants burning the fewest.

The Women's Sabbath and the Gendered Order of Piety

The candle prayer was the one religious office that belonged exclusively to the women, and its performance marked the precise division of spiritual labor in the orthodox Jewish home. The men went to the synagogue to pray; the women stayed home and lit the candles. This division was not incidental but structural, rooted in the deeper conviction that a girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen, where she learned to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider, and where her mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife. A girl was born for no other purpose than wifehood, and the candle-lighting was the weekly enactment of that destiny. Marriage itself was a sacrament among the Jews of the Pale; to rear a family of children was to serve God, and every Jewish man and woman had a part in the fulfilment of the ancient promise given to Jacob that his seed should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood was the great career, but while men might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood—and the Sabbath candles were the emblem of that work, the flame she kindled week after week in the service of God and family. The ceremony was thus not merely a domestic chore but a sacred office, the woman's share in the covenant.

The Sabbath Meal and the Sacred Time of Rest

The candle-lighting opened a period of enjoined rest that the children eagerly anticipated. On Friday afternoons the parents came home early to wash and dress and remove from their persons every sign of labor; the great keys of the store were put away out of sight, the money bag hidden in the featherbeds. The father put on his best coat and silk skull-cap; the mother replaced the cotton kerchief with the well-brushed wig. The children bustled around their parents asking favors in the name of the Sabbath—to wear new shoes in honor of the day, to be taken across the bridge on the morrow. After the candle prayer the women generally read in some book of devotion while the children amused themselves quietly until the men returned from synagogue, when the father's call of "Good Sabbath!" was answered in kind, and any poor man without a home who had been brought from the synagogue as a Sabbath guest was welcomed and placed in the seat of honor next to the father. The family stood around the table while the kiddush, the blessing over the wine, was said; if a child whispered or nudged another, the father reproved him with a stern look and began again from the beginning. Only after he had cut the consecrated loaf and distributed the slices were the children at liberty to talk and ask questions. The candles burned over this meal, consecrating the table and the food upon it, and the memory of those Sabbath suppers eaten at the end of long walks remained among the liveliest of the narrator's recollections—the thick cheese cakes of Saturday night, eaten as a ravenous child in memorable twilights before the lighting of the week-day lamp, cakes whose flavor could never be reproduced in America because, as the narrator insists, it takes history to make such a cake.

The Candles in America: The Erosion of Observance

The fate of the Sabbath candles in America became the measure of the family's transformation. The father, who had always been a nonconformist in his heart, a habitual sceptic for whom individual freedom was the only tolerable condition of life, did not attempt to touch the fundamentals of the mother's faith, but he would have no bar to the children's social intercourse with the world around them. On the holy days he bought the mother a ticket for the synagogue, but the children he sent to school. On Sabbath eve the mother might light the consecrated candles, but he kept the store open until Sunday morning. The mother might believe and worship as she pleased, up to the point where her orthodoxy began to interfere with the American progress of the family. Thus the candles were permitted to burn, but their light no longer marked a true cessation of labor; the store stayed open, the money kept moving, and the sacred time the candles were meant to inaugurate was hollowed out. The mother, who bore lovingly the yoke of prescribed conduct and for whom individual freedom was confusion, gradually divested herself at the father's bidding of the mantle of orthodox observance, a process that cost her many a pang because the fabric of that venerable garment was interwoven with the fabric of her soul. The candles she was still allowed to light became a remnant of a world that was dissolving around her, a ritual whose meaning the family's new life was steadily eroding.

The Test of the Forbidden Food and the Price of Freedom

The narrator's own relation to the dietary laws that the Sabbath candles symbolized was tested in a scene of acute personal crisis. Invited to tea by Miss Dillingham, the woman who helped her in so many ways, she made her first entrance into a genuine American household, her first meal at a Christian board. All went well until a platter was passed with a kind of meat strange to her; some mischievous instinct told her it was ham—forbidden food—and she, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it. She had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, and self-contempt, but she helped herself to a slice of ham nevertheless and hung her head over her plate to hide her confusion, furious with herself for her weakness. She who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought was afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh; she began to reduce the ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table. But she learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk; she ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of herself. The scene is the direct counterpart of the Sabbath candle-lighting: the same body that had once stood in the consecrated circle of women's lights now forced itself to consume the forbidden flesh, and the narrator reflects that so ridiculous a thing as a scrap of meat should be the symbol and test of things so august, that in the mental life of a half-grown child should be reflected the struggles and triumphs of ages.

The Persistence of the Sacred in Memory

Yet the candles were not simply extinguished by Americanization; they were transformed into memory, and memory became a kind of consecration in its own right. The narrator's most intense experiences of the old life came not through deliberate recollection but through sudden, involuntary gustatory shocks—eating ripe American strawberries and suddenly experiencing the very flavor and aroma of strawberries eaten perhaps twenty years ago, becoming a child again, positively aching with the pain of being so suddenly compressed to that small being, wandering about Polotzk once more with large questioning eyes, riding the Atlantic in an emigrant ship, taking possession of the New World. The Sabbath cheese cakes, the cherries eaten with the stones in a contest with a cousin's boy, the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the Vall, the sweetness of Dvina water, the richness of newly turned earth moulded with bare feet and hands—these were the sacramental elements of a lost world, and the narrator was glad that her mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, had forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery, for the omission made the narrator the richer in memories. The Sabbath candles, in this light, were the first and most potent of these sacramental objects: the flame that had once marked the boundary of sacred time became, in the New World, the image of a holiness that could no longer be practiced but only remembered, and the memory itself took on the quality of a consecration. The narrator's life in America—from the first meal of canned food and bananas in the flat on Union Place, through the years of poverty on Wheeler Street and Dover Street, to the drawing-rooms of the Back Bay where she drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were as delicate as their porcelain cups—was a long passage from the world the candles illuminated to a world where their light was only a memory, and the shock of the contrast between the cushioned refinement of Beacon Street and the reeking slums she had left behind was like a searchlight turned suddenly on her life. The Sabbath candles burned at the beginning of that passage, and their light never entirely went out.