Kiddush Cup

EXCERPT:

I am a convert to Judaism- 3 in Jewish years. But … I have Jewish blood coursing through my veins. My great-grandfather came to America at the turn of the 20^th century to escape the tsarist pogroms of Russia… He hid his Jewishness from the family he married into and never chose to speak about it…two years ago, I drank from my great-grandfathers Kiddush cup, one of the few items he chose to take with him in hopes of a better life. The Kiddush cup sat in a dusty Brooklyn basement for 93 years until it ended up in the hands of his great-grandson. Me, his Jewish great-grandson… If my Japanese father, who was a small boy in Hirohito’s Japan during World War 2 can sit next to (my wife’s) zaydie, a Holocaust escapee from Hungary at our wedding 60 years after the Holocaust, then anything is possible.