Suffering and deprivation as spiritual purification

Suffering and deprivation as spiritual purification is a religious framework through which Zeidy interprets hardship, loss, and self-denial. It gives his survival and his family’s history a sacred purpose: pain can cleanse the soul, while faith can preserve inner serenity even under persecution. The narrator sees the comfort this framework offers him, but does not share it; deprivation feels oppressive rather than purifying. The concept therefore holds both a source of endurance and a point of generational strain.

Inherited Loss and Self-Denial

Zeidy’s understanding of suffering is rooted in a family history of oppression. His ancestors lived for generations in Eastern Europe and endured pogroms, persecution that the narrator compares with the violence of Hitler’s reign. Against that history, the narrator struggles to understand why Zeidy and Bubby continue to impose hardship on themselves instead of accepting relief. Their self-denial is not presented as an accidental remnant of deprivation: it appears to carry meaning, even fulfillment, for them.

The narrator interprets that meaning as a belief that pain can make a person clean. Zeidy’s trials are not merely burdens to be escaped; he sees earthly suffering as preparation and cleansing for the world to come. This belief changes the significance of deprivation. What the narrator experiences as needless hardship, Zeidy can experience as spiritually purposeful endurance, a way to live with abundance without becoming reconciled to it as something owed or secure.

Prayer and the Practice of Serenity

The belief takes concrete form on Friday nights. Zeidy places his palms against the east wall of the dining room and prays privately. Tears accompany the ritual, but the narrator understands the prayer as helping him feel better and live with the abundance around him. The scene joins physical gesture, repeated time, and religious orientation: the ordinary family dining room becomes the setting for an intimate act through which Zeidy gives suffering a place within faith.

His ideal is menuchas hanefesh, an inner peace that cannot be overturned by circumstance. Zeidy teaches that possessions are vulnerable to loss: a parent, sibling, home, or dress may be taken, and none can guarantee lasting security. He draws authority from knowing what it is to lose everything. In his account, the family’s ancestors maintained calm through persecution, bodily torture, and anguish because faith allowed them to see beyond immediate suffering. From the perspective of heaven, he believes, human pain is small; a soul weighed down by what lies directly before it cannot reach happiness.

Survival as Responsibility

For Zeidy, survival also creates an obligation to those who came after. Bubby reminds the narrator that she survived so the narrator could be born, and Zeidy likewise reflects on having wondered why he was allowed to live. With time, he came to understand the births of his children and grandchildren as a reason for his survival and a responsibility: he must help them grow into good Jews. Their lives give meaning to what might otherwise remain an unanswered escape from loss, and he regards wasting that survival as unthinkable when so many people were denied the same possibility.

That sense of responsibility extends into everyday choices. Zeidy takes leftovers from the refrigerator, combines them in one pot for dinner, and refuses to let Bubby throw food away. Bubby, too, cuts mold from vegetables and saves them, while cakes and pies are frozen and even crumbs are wrapped and kept after special occasions. These practices make scarcity and preservation visible within domestic life. They reflect the elders’ refusal to treat food as disposable, while also making the narrator’s experience of restraint concrete rather than abstract.

The Narrator’s Divergent Experience

The narrator does not find spiritual cleanliness in deprivation. Where Zeidy’s faith makes hardship meaningful, self-denial leaves the narrator irritable and distressed. Even crying feels difficult rather than relieving. The narrator recognizes carrying the family’s legacy of loss, but inheritance does not guarantee agreement: the same history can be held as a source of religious purpose by one generation and as an unresolved burden by another.

That difference surfaces at the Shabbos table, where the narrator begins sobbing while Zeidy sings. He gently advises the narrator to pray for menuchas hanefesh and asks what there could be to cry about. The narrator cannot explain the distress without feeling ungrateful beside his history of loss. The moment exposes the limits of Zeidy’s consoling framework: his counsel offers a language for endurance, but cannot make the narrator’s pain legible to him or turn it into the same kind of faith.

Meaning and Tension

The concept is not a simple celebration of hardship. Zeidy’s faith gives suffering shape, converts survival into duty, and provides a discipline for living with the possibility of loss. Yet the narrator’s response shows that the framework does not dissolve pain for everyone who inherits it. Deprivation can signify purification to Zeidy and deprivation itself to the narrator. Their difference leaves the belief suspended between solace and constraint: a way of making historical suffering meaningful that can sustain one person while deepening another’s sense of being unable to speak.