The Story of a Sufganiyah

It’s been thirty days and we still haven’t let it go. Carefully placed on a small dish on our living room table is the sufganiyah that was gifted to me and my daughter when we entered the Bondi Beach Hanukkah party that ended in tragedy. We were given two, one for my little daughter and one for her big brother, who had stayed home and had asked her to get one for him. She was very proud of herself, because being five meant she could run this important errand for him. She skipped all the way to the petting zoo. Our hands were full.

Then we ran. Then we threw our bodies down. Then we hid. And hidden even deeper under my body, pressed up against the concrete, my daughter held onto this one sufganiyah. The other one was lost among the pile of bodies. But this one she gripped with an iron fist, and with it she held on to everything sweet, everything that meant we would get out of there, that we would get home and give this to her brother, that life as she knew it would continue. She dug her fingers in with all her might and did not let go.

Many people never made it back home. Somehow, we did. And later, after the immediate horror, when we were finally in our living room, she gave the sufganiyah to her brother. I did not have the heart to tell her it was inedible, that she had been holding onto something now covered in unspeakable things. Instead, I promised her we would get fresh ones. And the next morning, a whole box of them arrived. Angels brought them, angels in the form of her schoolteachers.

When we finally cut into the fresh sufganiyot, the jam oozing out, my son said, “Oh no, it’s the blood of the dead.” All of us froze. We all thought it. Because we had just seen it. How I ached. How I wished it was all a terrible dream.

And so here it is, our surviving sufganiyah. It’s shrivelling, withering, dying slowly. Its time is coming, but now I am the one holding on. Its roundness speaks to me about wholeness, of continuity. It reminds me of children. Of babies. Of chubby cheeks. And inside, hidden deep within, is that jam, the jam for a sweet life.