It is during Seder, the traditional Passover meal, that the story of the Exodus is retold. (Not the movie starring Paul Newman - the original one featuring Moses and a cast of thousands.) Before the actual stuffing of the faces could begin, there were certain ritual foods that had to be consumed with the readings of passages from the story, but eventually we were all able to settle in and begin eating.

For most of the family this meant a lot of talking and very little eating. The seating was worked out so that the older the generation the closer to the head of the table you sat, and us young folk were usually seated at card tables that were attached like an extended kite tail to the main dinner table.

There is one year in particular that stands out for me, because of word-confusion and its nature. That year it seemed we younger folk were even further away from the head of the table; in fact we had to watch people in the middle of the table to know what to do because we couldn't hear anything the reader was saying that year. It wasn't until we all began the regular eating of the meal that we found out the reason for our being even further away from the centre of things.

The first words that trickled down the table to us exiles were that there were some very special guests in town. They were first cousins of our mom's cousin's wife. Of course she wasn't really part of our family, so these first cousins weren't related to us except by marriage and if was rumoured they might actually be Litvaks.

"Mary's family," the voice drifted down into our outer provinces, "God Bless them, are sweet people..." No words: I don't know, maybe it's because Hebrew has no vowels that Jews are so good at saying so much without using words. An eyebrow, a tilt of the head or a lifting of one hand says plenty for those who can read.

Even I, who was almost illiterate in that strange language of gestures and silences, could read something about cousin Mary's family that wasn't what it should be. I craned my neck to try and see these cousins who weren't cousins - who might not be all they should be.

They were sitting near the very top of the table, almost in the place of honour where my grandfather was ensconced. If not for two chairs that contained his eldest niece and her husband, they would have been seated beside him. From where I sat they didn't look much different than those folk across from them except they weren't nearly so fleshy. Aside from my grandmother who had something wrong with her thyroid, they were the only two who didn't have the sleek look of the well fed.