Madeleine cookies don't do much for me, but one bite of matza evokes memories of every seder I've ever attended since I was able to talk.

I remember the pink dress with the belt and big buttons I wore to the seder when I was eight;  I remember the year I prepared the bowls of salt water and ended up basically saturating the H20 with NaCl and nearly burning everyone's tongue off.

I remember my late grandmother, who couldn't cook to save her life ('though her mother and daughter were in a class of their own) but definitely knew how to set a beautiful table. She ironed the heavy white tablecloth, put me to work polishing the silver candlesticks, unpacked the gold-rimmed plates and heavy silverware from their padded and velvet-lined cases and carefully decorated each small plate of homemade gefilte fish with precisely one piece of green lettuce, one slice of orange carrot and one large dab of red, beet-sweetened horseradish.

I remember opening up the haggadot to prepare for each seder (a job I took very seriously) when I was a kid, shaking the matza crumbs from the previous year out of the binding and seeing the pages with the ten plagues dotted with spilt wine drops and written up with notes from previous years' preparations ("Adina sings here"; "Jackie reads this").

I remember belting out all the songs with my sisters, and giggling when my older cousins jokingly pronounced Had Gadya as Chad (like the country in Africa) Gad Yeah.

I remember the sense of slightly desolate regret I felt the one year I did not attend a seder - when I was in a village in a remote area of Himachal Pradesh and couldn't face the 16-hour bus ride down to New Delhi and the Chabad House there.

I remember my mother's famous sponge cake with fresh strawberries, and each year I shake my head in wonder when I remember her ability to cook gourmet seder meals for 20 relatives on two consecutive nights - and everything from scratch!

I also, for some bizarre reason, tend to think about the seder scenes in two movies that I love: Crimes and Misdemeanors and The Garden of the Finzi Continis. 

In Woody Allen's Crimes the seder takes place in the late 1940s, in Queens, New York. The family is arguing over whether or not there is a God and if there is a God, whether he punishes evildoers. The father is a rabbi, and he insists that not only is there most definitely a God, but his eyes see all. The father's sister, an atheist and a socialist, asks how he can believe in an all-seeing God after the Holocaust.

In Vittorio de Sica's interpretation of Giorgio Bassani's unforgettable memoir, the elegantly attired family (dinner jackets for the men, evening dresses for the women) are sitting around their gorgeously appointed table in early 1940s Ferrara, trying to pretend they don't feel the restrictions that Mussolini's fascist government has placed upon the Jews. They're singing Who Knows One and laughing as they point their index fingers in the air to indicate the chorus and first verse of the 13-verse song ("Who knows one? I know one! One is God, who is in the heavens and on the earth"). The phone rings, and one of the characters goes to answer. But there's no one on the line. He returns to the table and explains to his father that it was a wrong number. But then the phone rings again and again, and each time the scenario repeats itself. Slowly, with each answered ring met by silence on the other end of the line, the singing trails off and the family becomes apprehensive. They sit in tense silence as the phone rings yet again. But this time the person on the other end speaks; he is a family friend and yes he was the one who called before. Aaaaah, everyone sighs in relief, and they resume singing with almost giddy joy.

It's a small, small bloggers' world

This year my sister invited two friends to my mother's house for the seder - Wendy and Joey, who met because of the blogging connection and ended up being married by another blogger, who's married to this blogger, who is one of the co-founders of Global Voices Online, to which I contribute the roundups of the Israeli blogosphere.*

And this year I was privileged to be invited, together with another blogger (and friend) to the family seder of a wonderful friend whose generosity never ceases to touch and humble me.

But I forgot to bring the box of pralines I bought as a gift at Max Brenner.

*A post-modern twist on Had Gadya - a kind of joke for "members of the tribe."