My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

Lionel Blue uses affectionate, comic exaggeration to sketch a family portrait of Jewish life lived more as culture than strict observance. The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) is the most solemn fast in the Jewish calendar, associated with repentance and restraint; the image of his mother “shoot[ing]…like a rocket” to dance the Charleston the moment it ends highlights the tension between inherited ritual and modern, secular pleasures. The line also captures immigrant/second‑generation assimilation: synagogue attendance remains a marker of identity, but the emotional center of life may lie elsewhere. Blue’s tone suggests neither condemnation nor piety, but a wry recognition of how devotion, habit, and modernity coexist in real families.