How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (11 page)

PETER ORNER

Oak Street, 1981

M
Y FATHER WAS SO ATTACHED TO THE HOUSE THAT MY MOTHER BASICALLY SAID, “
T
AKE IT, SO LONG AS
I
CAN GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE.”
A
ND BY THE WAY,
I
'LL TAKE THE KIDS AND THE CAT.

And so we moved across town.

I was in the seventh grade, awkward, afraid, and manically sex-hungry in a way I've never been since. Puberty struck me with peculiar force. It was a strange time and there we were in a new, unfurnished house in the same town. We didn't escape very far. I went to the same school. I had the same lack of friends. But somehow a mere change of angle made everything very different. My loneliness was somehow more profound. I felt, oddly, newly made. Not better—I just wasn't exactly the me I was when we all lived in my father's house. The move—and my newly found vocation (even now when I think of the house on Oak Street I see myself in the closet, soccer cleats on, masturbating to Christie Brinkley)—made this the beginning of something.

This was December 1981. The new house smelled of plastic. It was quiet, mercifully quiet. My father's rages were across town, and we only heard an echo. To make our not-yet-furnished house homier, my mother, bless her, put up a Christmas tree. We were Christmas-tree Jews. Let me be clear: we had no relationship to Christ beyond loving the mall like everyone else in America. And let's be honest: presents are better when they come all at once in a blitzkrieg of wonderful commercialism. Still, my mother never left out Chanukah. In fact, for her this was the holiday, and in her way she kept it purer by giving us trinkets—bottle openers, whistles, finger puppets—rather than bicycles those eight days. I remember the three of us, my brother, mother, and I, sitting on the floor in the dark beside the unlit Christmas tree. We weren't poor, but the illusion that we might become so was thrilling. My mother put the menorah on a folding chair and lit the candles and sang the prayer. I think this is the point I want to make. My mother sang. She so rarely ever sang. Her prayer was low like a hum, and very beautiful, and my brother and I listened and watched her face in the candlelight. I realize now that she was so young then. That so much was ahead of her. But she was my mother. How was I to know?

If there is symbolism in our celebrating in an empty house after escaping from my father—let it be. Farewell, Antiochus, it's been good to know you. It was our time of happy exile. We'd moved down in the world. Bless downward mobility as you bless everything else. But think mostly of my mother's voice. The menorah on the chair. A house that smells of plastic. Her voice like a hum, rising, rising.

JOANNA SMITH RAKOFF

Dolls of the World

T
HE MOVE WAS SCHEDULED FOR LATE
J
UNE, BUT THE CALLS STARTED COMING IN
A
PRIL.
M
Y PARENTS HAD RETIRED.
T
HEIR NEW HOME—THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY; A CONDO IN A
S
AN
J
OSE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY—WAS A FRACTION OF THE SIZE OF THE HOUSE IN WHICH
I
'D MOSTLY GROWN UP.
T
HERE WOULD NOT BE ROOM FOR, SAY, A COLLECTION OF EVENING GOWNS SPANNING THE FOUR DECADES OF
my
parents
'
marriage—from a New Look–style red satin to a sleek, dolman-sleeved shift, loaded with linebacker-sized shoulder pads—or an elaborate set of Waterford goblets, five-piece service for twelve, which would not have looked out of place on Edith Wharton's most formal table. In California, life would be casual. My mother would buy new clothes, new dishes, new furniture, all trimmed and modern. But before she did so, she needed to get rid of the old stuff, a lifetime's worth of anniversary presents and birthday presents and Mother's Day presents, of Nambe vases and silver-handled fruit knives and needlepoint renderings of “Oriental”-style flowers, of fondue pots, iced-tea spoons, and toothpick holders, of Braun electric hand mixers, banquet-sized coffee percolators, and automatic foot massagers.

All of these things—and, of course, many more—had for years been neatly stowed in kitchen cabinets, in the rows and rows of built-in closets my mother installed in our massive basement, in the squat Ethan Allen buffet in our dining room. After Passover, my mother began removing them. And the phone calls began: Did I want the Balinese bark prints we'd picked up at Cost Plus when I was four? What about Grandma Pearl's love seat? The gallon-sized turquoise thermos we occasionally took to the lake? Those fondue pots? Twenty-four miniature cocktail forks carved out of ivory? The etched-glass martini glasses my mother had registered for in 1951 but had never liked and had rarely used? The sheets I'd slept on as a young child, imprinted with a repeating image of Raggedy Ann and Andy at play? Or those I'd switched to at eight or nine, a Laura Ashley print of pink, nearly abstract rosebuds? The lamp in the family room with the pear-shaped glass base?

“Sure,” I said, nervously, wondering where I would put all this stuff, wondering if I really wanted it. I was twenty-five and made $265 per week as an assistant at a literary agency. Most of my belongings came from the enormous Salvation Army in Astoria. It would be foolish to refuse anything, and yet, as my mother named thing after thing, I felt increasingly inclined to say no. I could not, somehow, imagine a future in which I gave dinner parties elaborate and large enough to necessitate several identical sets of crystal-and-silver salt and pepper shakers, after which my guests would lounge on my mother's cream-colored sofa, delicately sipping aperitifs from the smaller siblings of those maligned martini glasses. My mother sold the crystal, a souvenir from a trip to Ireland, for $15,000. I suggested that my sister might like the living room sofa.

The calls kept coming. At work, I swiveled on my chair and glanced at manuscripts as she listed the things she'd unearthed in the cedar closet. “Years ago, when B. Altman's went out of business, I bought two glass plates—one for Amy and one for you—and I
completely
forgot about them. Oh, Joanna, they're
gorgeous
. Yours has a print of irises.”

“I've packed up your room,” she told me in May.

“I was planning on coming home and doing that,” I told her, in carefully measured tones.

“Well, I couldn't wait,” she said. “Anyway. And I've packed up some other silver odds and ends for you. The little candy dish. The fish trivet. But what about the menorah?” I struggled to picture my parents' menorah. Was it brass? It hadn't figured prominently in my childhood mythology. Before I could answer, she said, “You have Grandma's, right?”

I had recently moved into my grandmother's apartment on the Lower East Side, which came equipped with a small, mildly confounding array of Judaica, including, actually, three different menorahs.

“I do,” I told her.

“Okay, then I'm going to give ours to Amy. I think she lost hers in the move.” This was a polite reference to both my sister's difficulty with maintaining ownership and upkeep of physical objects (including, but not limited to, her house, which had recently been covered in a volcanic spray of sewage, the result of neglecting their rural septic system for as many years as they'd lived in the place) and the fact that she'd recently left her husband and their three children—temporarily, we were told—and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Poughkeepsie, somehow misplacing various family objects on the five-mile journey.

“Sure, that sounds good,” I told her. “All I really want are the books. Whatever Amy wants is fine with me.”

What Amy wanted, in the end, was most everything—or, at least, all the big stuff—and this was, indeed, fine with me. Her house, as it happened, was not actually hers. My parents, I'd just discovered, owned it. And they'd decided to sell it, to cut my sister—eighteen years my elder—and her husband off.

“We're going to be on a fixed income,” my father explained. “We can't keep up that house anymore. We can't support them. They can save up and buy their own place.”

An entire house's worth of furniture wouldn't fit in my sister's little apartment, so my mother arranged for it to be transported to a storage facility nearby. And I, on a chilly night in early June, drove a dilapidated van out of the barbed-wire-rimmed U-Haul lot on the Bowery, picked up the man who would, a few months later, become my husband, and drove upstate. The next day, I began slicing open box after box—my second bedroom was a sea of brown cardboard—and unfolding protective sheets of bubble wrap and newspaper and tissue. A white Wedgwood vase. Two copies of
The Joys of Yiddish
. A pewter pitcher with a pattern of vines snaking up and down its face. One grandmother's flatware, then another's. (My sister, I was told, had received yet another set.) The steel canister set—stamped
SUGAR, FLOUR, TEA, COFFEE
in the sans serif font popular in midcentury—that had sat on our kitchen counter, supplying the ingredients for hundreds of cookies and cakes and brownies. Worn wooden spoons. The painted glass lamp that had sat by my bedside through childhood. The green enamel pots my mother had bought when she moved into our old house, twenty miles south, in Nyack, a town I much preferred to our own. Four yellow pillowcases, never used, in a Marimekko-ish butterfly print. (Where were the matching sheets? I wondered.) A sari-fabric dancing dress with a handkerchief hem. My beloved ice skates—Riedell silver stars—and my skis and ski poles and ski boots, the latter still in the original box, with its stark black-and-white design. Linen tablecloths and damask tablecloths and cotton tablecloths embroidered with flowers. The heavy glass candy dish that had sat on the coffee table in our living room, the sole spot of color in my mother's palette. My parents' vast and wildly colored collection of liquor, which dated back to the earlier years of their marriage, when they entertained avidly: Chartreuse and Cherry Heering and Sabra and blue curaçao and Harveys Bristol Cream and Vandermint and amaretto.

By the time I came along, these bottles had been banished to a dark recess of the stereo cabinet, which ran along one side of our living room. Come Thanksgiving—when the extended network of Rakoffs and Avruts and Merlises and Senators tended to gather at our house—my father might pry the door open and, under the wary eye of my mother, gather the ingredients to make martinis for the various cousins who liked to hit the sauce. But at Chanukah, the cabinet remained firmly shut. Barring the occasional invitation to eat latkes at, say, the Siegels', we spent the holiday alone, with minimal to no merrymaking. Blue-and silver-wrapped presents were piled under and on top of the grand piano just north of the stereo cabinet; a blocky electric menorah was placed in the large front window. It was my job to twist the blue, ovoid bulbs into their sockets each night, as dark fell. Our real menorah—which was, yes, I was remembering, definitely brass—stayed in the kitchen, candles having been deemed too messy for the living room. Each night, before dinner and after lighting both menorahs, I sat in the dim, chilly room and quietly opened one gift, slitting the tape along the seams, just as my mother did.

Nearly twenty years later my habits hadn't much changed. As the day grew dark—and I grew sweatier, dustier, my hands darkened with newsprint—I found myself surrounded by a swarm of neatly opened boxes, their flaps yawning. There were things that were missing: the tall, delicate pot that completed my Aunt Fritzi's chocolate set (not that I had any use for a chocolate set; not that I was even sure what a chocolate set
was
); a Mexican blouse, embroidered all over with flowers; set of pastel portraits that had hung in our family room, that had probably—and deservedly—gone to my sister; and, most heartbreakingly, my dolls, which had sat, glassy-eyed and squat-legged, on the top tier of my white bookshelf for as long as I could remember. I'd expected to find them tucked into the corners of boxes, swaddled in stray pillowcases: the Russian peasant doll with real human hair; the china lady-doll with crumbling hoop skirt and parasol; the Japanese fabric doll, in elaborate kimono and obi; and, my favorite, the set of peachy-skinned, shiny-haired, plastic-bodied creatures known as “Dolls of the World,” which had played key roles in my multipart Barbie dramas. But there were no dolls to be found, save a battered rubber Kewpie in a faded orange dress.

When I creakily rose from the floor—ready to shower;
not
ready to find a place for the thousand objects I'd just unpacked—I saw I'd left one box unopened, a box labeled
LARGE SILVER
. Once again, I pulled out the Swiss Army knife—itself a relic, survivor of umpteen summers at Camp Tel Yehudah, rescued from my dresser by my father—sliced open the packing tape, and began unwrapping soft, brown swathes of Pacific cloth. Serving pieces piled up around me, clattering on the worn parquet. There was the little candy dish—as a child, I'd filled it with halvah and jelly rings before company came—and the trivet shaped like a fish. The covered serving dishes, with their ornate curlicued handles, that had held boiled vegetables as recently as this past Passover. A set of small, tailored candlesticks. And then I found one last cloth bag, which contained something solid and heavy and large enough to fill the bottom of the box. “The menorah,” I thought for some reason, before remembering that no, that had gone to my sister. With weary hands, I pried the thing out and unzipped the bag. Inside was a round platter, with a solid center and a thick filigreed edge, at the center of which was a lengthy inscription. It had, it seemed, been given to my mother by the Sisterhood of a synagogue called Sons of Israel to commemorate her five years of service as the president of said organization.

“Sons of Israel?” I thought. There were exactly three synagogues in the vicinity of the town in which I'd spent most of my childhood—the town we'd moved to when I was three; the town my parents would soon be leaving—and none of them were called Sons of Israel. “
President
of the
Sisterhood
?” The mother I knew had no interest in religion—less than no interest. Her most potent memory from early childhood had to do with the tyranny of Orthodoxy: one of her aunts accidentally mixed up the milk silver and the meat silver; their father, her Grandfather Abraham, became so enraged that he threw both sets through the kitchen window. (“
Through
the window,” she liked to say. “Not
out
the window.”) When my father fondly recalled his own father's small shul on Norfolk Street, my mother said, “Oh, come on.
Your father
took you out for shrimp chow mein on Saturdays.” She was not, as far as I knew, a believer.

O
UR TOWN WAS
the sort of Jewish enclave that springs up, mysteriously, outside of New York—and, I suppose, D.C., Boston, and Chicago—but my friends were not Rachel Weissman and Jillian Altchek. They were Sudha David, Zinnia Yoon, and Susan Conachey. At their houses I ate samosas and kimchi and, most remarkably, that cliché of clichés: anemic sandwiches consisting of one slice of bologna, another of American cheese, and two of white bread. None of this struck me as odd—or struck me at all, actually—until my eighth year, when the majority of my classmates began attending Hebrew school. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, as the rest of Mrs. Cohen's third-grade class piled into cars, en route to Pomona Jewish Center (Conservative) or Temple Beth El (Reform) or Monsey Jewish Center (“Conservadox”), I boarded a near-empty bus back to Tamarack Lane, where I sat at the kitchen table and ate Danish butter cookies with my mother. That I preferred this activity to any other—certainly to any involving the other attendees of Lime Kiln Elementary School—made me vaguely uncomfortable, but I squelched such concerns with military-style force and retired to the family room, where, beneath those aforementioned portraits of beautiful, big-eyed children—the sort popular in the 1970s—that sat atop the Danish modern bookshelf, my vast collection of Barbie dolls served as actors in an elaborate saga involving a costume ball, a grandmother trapped in an attic, and a private production of
As You Like It
(a play within a play!), the précis of which I'd recently read in Charles and Mary Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare
.

But come December, it became clear that something was very wrong. My Jewish classmates were, this year, talking about Chanukah in a new, enticing way. They were going to parties at which doughnuts were served and dreidels were spun and songs were sung and gifts were picked blind out of big bins. And they were also—how had I never noticed this?—recounting their families' celebrations, which involved grandmothers and aunts and uncles coming in from out of town and making big batches of latkes, and which reminded me of passages from one of my favorite series of books, Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family, a chronicle of a big Jewish family on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century. The sisters—Ella and Henny and Sarah and Charlotte and Gertie—bought pickles and penny candy and ate them on their stoop, when they weren't curling their hair with hot tongs or making costumes for Purim or helping their mother prepare for Shabbos dinner. Even while dusting, these girls had fun—true, boisterous
fun
of a sort I'd never quite experienced, living, essentially, like an only child in our pale, quiet house—and it occurred to me that they, like my classmates, went to Hebrew school.