How my potty Passover family holiday became a joyful Jew-bubble

I am feeling disorientated, dragged down and, in fact, struggling to really walk at all. My legs feel unbelievably heavy and the challenge to move each one is like hauling a sizeable tree trunk. But I need to move, to get away… for all around me there is wailing and bedlam. Small demons and some adult-height ones are calling out: “Mom! Mum!” “Mamma!” “Mummy!” “Mommy!” “Ima! Immmma!” “Eeeeeemmmmaaa!”

I jump at each shout, whipping my head round guiltily like the neglectful mother I secretly know I am. Hello? Is it me you’re looking for? What do you want? What did I do? What have I done? What haven’t I done? Are you hungry?

But I am also pushing a great weight, a beast, and it is getting heavier and heavier by the second. What’s more, beast I’ve been burdened with pushing is complaining. I ignore all the voices calling out to their mothers (even though some of those voices are very probably the calls of some of my own children) and see what it is that my own mother wants.

I jump at each shout, whipping my head round guiltily like the neglectful mother I secretly know I am. Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?

Ah, so her foot has somehow become entangled with her wheelchair’s footrest. This explains why the wheelchair has been so hard to push. And why my mother-beast has been caterwauling. Usually it’s the chair’s safety strap that is stuck in the wheel and I just push on anyway but now it’s my mother’s foot so, dutiful daughter that I am, I stop to unjam her now-mangled foot. I bask briefly in the approving looks of the other hotel guests and push on to the hotel’s open coffee bar, which is where salvation currently lies.

Although this is my third all-inclusive, all-Jew, all-kosher-for-Passover trip, this time in Split, Croatia’s second-largest city, I am still not accustomed to being so thoroughly immersed in such a Yiddish-y, heimish-y, mishpocheh-y or, as all the American Jews here say it, “mishpoychah”  meshugge-ness.

Misha's mother, Judith, with her granddaughters and (far right) Misha's niece Etta[Missing Credit]

The horrors of so many demands and stresses from children and my parents – on top of everything else, my 91-year-old dad regularly disappears, like an ageing, bekippah’d Harry Potter with an invisibility spell, and can’t be found for hours, but will then suddenly reappear and stubbornly claim he was with us all the time – are, just about, outweighed by the pleasures of being so “en-Jewelled”.

Once I surrender to the meshuggeness of it all, I feel a palpable sense of release and relief.

All the hotel guests at this hotel are Jewish. This time the majority seem to be from New York and New Jersey, the rest mostly English, Israeli, French and Belgian. My Jewish guard gradually comes down. Magen Davids and yellow ribbons are visibly on display. People are speaking freely in Hebrew and Yiddish. My mother doesn’t have to remind my father to hide his kippah as she often feels he must when they are out and about in London. We are in a crazy but cosy bubble. A big kosher-bubble.

Misha (second left) with daughters Ruby-Rose, Delilah and Leora[Missing Credit]

The atmosphere is convivial and it’s both heartening and heartbreaking to listen to and share people’s experiences of antisemitism since October 7.

One of the saddest stories I hear from is the American mom who’s recently emigrated to Israel and been “cancelled” by her 25-year-old daughter for it, a daughter who gets all her news from TikTok. She now refuses to let her mother enter the apartment she and her pro-Palestinian activist flatmates share in New York.

Misha's father, Menachem[Missing Credit]

I commiserate heartily and feel immense gratitude for my Zionist children. I count my brachot.

Let my kids demand my attention as much as they want. I announce to them that when I eventually become a grandmother, I would like to be known as bubbaleh.

This Jew-bubble really is lovely. The mix of Chabad, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jew works well.

There is clearly a pretty wide difference in guests’ religiosity, but there is also acceptance and a sense of togetherness.

On venturing into the local town for a walk with my children this bubble bursts.

After a few minutes, we see a swastika graffiti. We decide to laugh at it and pose for photos.

Back at the Seder table in the hotel, we revel at being together. But then my dad whizzes inaudibly through the Haggadah, claiming he’s read it all – in half an hour, noch – and promptly disappears.

He says it’s to go and get more matzah or wine but we know the drill: we won’t now see him for hours.

Of course, we offered, as we always do, to go and get him things, to save him the efforts, but, of course, he shouted back: “I am not a cripple!”

At least, I think to myself, that we lose my mostly chairbound mother less frequently. Here, in the Jew-bubble, even the bad things have their silver lining.