My grandfather had no interest in the Jewish calendar or Uncle Ray’s explanation thereof, and as for Purim itself, he could take it or leave it. Unlike the other Jewish holidays, it had been fun when he was a kid, and he still gave it credit for that. But somewhere between the Ardennes and the Harz mountains, my grandfather had lost the taste or the capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat, and it struck him as cheap and painfully mistaken to draw all the neat parallels that Ray planned to draw in his sermon between the would-be exterminator Haman and the bona-fide exterminator Hitler.
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