We were at a big Rosh Hashanah dinner in Los Angeles last night. It was exactly like James Joyce, the dead, except with Challah bread.
We gathered for Rosh Hashanah in Los Angeles, and it felt like stepping into James Joyce’s The Dead—though here the horse-drawn carriages had become Teslas idling at the valet, headlights sweeping across Wilshire like guilty consciences. Inside, the desert air clung heavy as brisket gravy, and every chair was taken by a Goldstein or a Bernstein, all talking at once, as if Babel itself had RSVP’d.
And yet when the clamor receded, the hush came in—just as Joyce promised. I thought of Gabriel staring at snow over Dublin, and here imagined instead the faint ash of distant hills drifting down on Los Angeles: on the Teslas in the driveway, on the empty kugel dish, on the Goldsteins and Bernsteins, and on us all.
