It is only when the family travels with Shmuel to his wedding in a nearby village that Hannah realizes what is happening to her. As Hannah tries to understand what is happening to herself, she begins to live the role of Chaya, orphaned and living with her Aunt Gitl and Uncle Shmuel in a rural stetl. Looking back, Hannah finds herself in a house with strangers who call her Chaya and talk about her parents who have just died of cholera in Lublin, Poland. Opening the door, Hannah sees before her, not the drab hallway of the building, but a twilight country scene, with a man carrying a hoe over his shoulder and singing as he walks toward her. At thirteen Hannah would rather be hanging out with her friend Rosemary, but when her grandpa chooses her to open the apartment door for the prophet Elijah, she reluctantly complies. She's tired of Grandpa Will's tirades about the Nazis and tired of the endless ritual of the Seder. Hannah is tired of hearing the old stories, stories of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, lost to the concentration camps of central Europe in a long-ago war.
Her stomach felt heavy, as if the argument lay there like unleavened bread. Hannah rolled her eyes up and slipped farther down in the sea. "I remember, I remember." Hannah whispered. "You know it's Passover," her mother said, sighing in a voice deliberately low. "I'm tired of remembering," Hannah said to her mother as she climbed into the car.
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