Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

This is a story of mothers and daughters, of secrets radiating across generations, of betrayals and abandonments and of forgiveness and transcendence.

Barbara Pupnik Blumfield is living a satisfying life far from her ultra-Orthodox Jewish roots. She’s a nursery school teacher at a Reform synagogue. She has a wonderful, loving, upbeat husband who is a financial planner. She has a teenage daughter, Lili, who has discovered long-distance running as a way of coping with her attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

That world starts crumbling when first her daughter injures her ankle during a track meet, then she learns the woman who was her second mother, Mrs. Kessler, has died, and finally that her mother’s forgetfulness may be a symptom of Alzheimer’s.

The wife of her childhood rabbi, Rebetzin Rivka Schine, invites her to participate in the tahara, the ritual washing of the dead before burial, for Mrs. Kessler. It is considered one of the greatest acts of kindness that one person can do for another because the dead person can never repay it. It was a ritual Barbara had never participated in because she had left the community when she was 19.

The invitation stirs memories of how much Mrs. Kessler had meant to her, how often her own mother had failed her and how much she missed the warmth and security of her former synagogue. It also stirs up memories of the affair her mother had with Andy Noffsinger, the synagogue’s “shabbos goy,” the non-Jew hired to do tasks Jews can’t do on Shabbat and some holidays.

When Rivka Schine asks her to watch over her mother, Barbara has no intention of doing so. But her mother’s condition forces her into contact  -- and into a confrontation with her own past. Her mother’s memory lapses provide clues to an uncle she never knew and the nature of the relationship her mother had with Noffsinger amid the tragedies and abandonments of her own past.

The story jumps back and forth in time between different points in Barbara’s life and her present. This book is part mystery as Barbara tries to lift the veil hiding her mother’s secrets, and part a psychological story of how Barbara comes to terms with her own faults and sins. In the end, the reader is looking through a richly layered story.

Barbara’s participation in the tahara for her own mother, fuses the layers into an integrated whole, leaving her in full possession of her history, her present and her future.

The Author: Michelle Brafman

Washing the Dead is Michelle Brafman's first novel. She has written numerous short stories, essays and other works.  She received a Special Mention in the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.  Her fiction has appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, the minnesota review, Blackbird, Lilith Magazine and other journals.  Her essays have been published in Slate, Tablet and the Washington Post, among others.

She teaches fiction writing at The Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program. Her second novel is Bertrand Court, a mix of stories about the residents of a cul-de-sac in the Washington, DC, area.