How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (12 page)

Cautiously, I broached the subject with my mother. She explained that to attend Hebrew school one had to belong to a synagogue, and we did not belong to a synagogue because my parents—my mother—didn't like any of the options. Pomona Jewish Center, she felt, was “materialistic”: their dues were un­believably high, their members the sort of women who would soon come to be known as Jewish American Princesses (their children were my most popular, and poisonous, classmates). Services at Temple Beth El were, she said, akin to “going to church.” Monsey Jewish Center was located dangerously close to the Hasidic neighborhood of New Square. Of this, my mother could only shake her head in horror.

The real problem, of course, lay not in the synagogues, with their various flaws, but in my parents' faith, or lack thereof.

“We're not sure we believe in God,” my mother finally explained.

“Things have happened,” my father chimed in, turning his face toward his shoes, as he did whenever difficult subjects (like my sister) arose, “that made us think there might not be a God.”

They were, I assumed, talking about the Holocaust. This made sense to me. I had read Anne Frank's
Diary of a Young Girl
—and was working my way through every other Holocaust- or World War II–themed novel I could find at the library—and while I didn't begrudge Anne's right to “believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” it seemed to me, with my knowledge of her fate, that a God might have allowed some wandering in the desert, some enslavement, some slaying of sons, but He or She would not, could not have stood for the attempted extermination of his allegedly chosen people. “Oh,” I told my father. “Okay.”

All of this went a ways toward explaining my family's interpretation of Chanukah, which struck me, by comparison, as rather like those bologna sandwiches Susan Conachey's mother served: thin, anemic. Not just because my parents didn't even feign an interest in Judah Maccabaeus, not just because no blessings were mumbled as we lit the candles, but because—and you have already guessed this, no doubt—they lacked the gaiety that I seemed, recently, to be hearing much about. Occasionally, latkes made an appearance on the holiday table, but only occasionally; my mother didn't love to cook, in general, and, in particular, disliked anything that “made a big mess.” Standing over a frying pan for the better part of an evening, getting splattered with an ever-graying batch of batter and hot spurts of corn oil, was definitely not on her list of favored tasks. But what baffled me was that while our family was large and mostly clustered in and around New York and Palo Alto, we never gathered at Chanukah, the way, it seemed, other families did. Even my sister was generally off doing, as my mother said, “who knows what.”

That year—my eighth year, the third grade—as the holiday was nearly upon us, my mother noticed that something was bothering me. I was quiet, reserved. She attributed this to feelings of alienation (though she didn't use that word) from the dominant culture of our nation. One night as I lay on my bed reading, she knocked on my door and came and sat down beside me. “It's hard to be Jewish at Christmas,” she said, in the low pitch she used for serious talks. “Everyone is having fun. It's
seductive
—” This word embarrassed me, with its sexual connotations (I had read Beverly Cleary's
Fifteen
and the entire Judy Blume oeuvre). “It's
really
seductive. I know, trust me. The trees, the lights, the carols. It's beautiful. You want to be a part of it.” I nodded and stuck my finger in my book. She must, I supposed, have been thinking of the tall fir in Susan Conachey's living room, or the Bing Crosby on the radio, which my father liked to sing along to, or the elaborate, buttery pastries we'd eaten a few nights back at the rustic home of some German immigrants, friends of friends.

But I, of course, didn't care about any of that. Christmas as practiced in contemporary America—the overly shiny ornaments, the illuminated Santas perched on rooftops, the synthetic red stockings with names inscribed in glitter—had little interest for me. The news reports of parents standing on line all night outside of Toys “R” Us to secure Atari consoles and Rubik's Cubes made me flush with shame. Worse still was the idea of compiling lists—of
asking
for what you wanted. But Christmas as it was lived in the books I read obsessively, over and over, filled me with a sick longing, rooted less in the specifics of religion, and more in the general ethos of the holiday, as embodied by various nineteenth-century novels, first and foremost Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
.

What I wanted was a Chanukah as redolent of—as informed by—ingrained, unself-conscious tradition as the March girls' Christmas. I could imagine nothing better than to be a March girl—preferably my namesake, Jo (and in an alternate universe, in which she, not Amy, marries Laurie)—eating roasted chestnuts and donating my dinner to the poor family down the road and trading scrappy, heartfelt gifts, each chosen
specifically
for the intended recipient, with careful thought given to what she wanted, what she loved, what she might, in her heart of hearts, truly
need
.

But what
was
an authentic Chanukah for an American family? The truth is, there was no such thing. We grown-ups are now all too coolly aware of Chanukah's minimal religious significance, that it was a minor holiday, artificially boosted to Christmas-level status in the 1920s by a double-team effort on the part of Jewish leaders—who had watched the latest wave of Jewish immigrants rushing to partake of Christmas (“The purchase of Christmas gifts is one of the first things that proves one is no longer a greenhorn,” a reporter asserted in the
Forward
in 1904)—and canny marketers, who began advertising their wares as ideal Chanukah gifts (and, in the case of Aunt Jemima flour, ingredients) in the then-booming Jewish press. Tellingly, the All-of-a-Kind Family books are filled with vivid descriptions of Purim and Passover and Sukkot but scarcely touch on Chanukah. My parents, born in the 1920s, had barely celebrated the holiday. My classmates, well, their parents were closer in age to my sister—they were baby boomers—and they were, in a way, the first generation to take for granted the import of the holiday as a consumer occasion and, to be fair, one for gathering family, Noel style, or, in my dream life, March-family style.

But I was not Jo March and, perhaps more important, my sister was no Meg March (though it occurs to me now that she bore certain similarities to
her
March namesake, the artistic, bratty Amy). For starters, she barely knew me. She'd left for art school soon after my birth but had quickly dropped out to marry, then divorce, a blond, mustached man with the improbable name of John Johnson and a charming tax-free business involving the sale of mood-altering chemicals. At my parents' behest—and with their financial backing, of course—she went to nursing school somewhere in the vicinity of our house, but she was rarely around. Throughout my childhood she would occasionally appear on our doorstep, her hair a different length or color—now choppy and short, one strand dyed blue; now tawny and long and permed—jumping furiously into my parents' arms, pouring herself one of my dad's Cokes, hunching tensely in an armchair while my father sat at the secretary in the living room and scrawled out a check for her, then racing off again in whatever little car she was driving at the time. I was always relieved to see her go, and ashamed of my relief.

Occasionally, her visits coincided with major holidays—and one year, my birthday—and this year, this eighth year, she would, it seemed, be around for Chanukah, or one night of it. In the spring, she would be getting married again (though we all pretended that her first marriage had never happened), this time to someone deemed acceptable by my parents: an X-ray technician and would-be doctor, Jewish, from Bricktown, New Jersey. His name was David and he liked to cook. This year, there would be latkes.

As Chanukah came closer, the gifts began to appear under the piano. Eight boxes of identical shape and size, with my name on each of them. This was unprecedented, and I was curious. On the first night, we lit the candles—my mother allowing me to hold the
shamash
by myself, for the first time—and the electric menorah; then my mother said, “Are you ready to open a present?”

Strangely, I felt nervous. What could be inside those identical boxes? “Um, okay,” I said.

She looked them over carefully, squinting at some incomprehensible marking in the corners, then handed me one. “I think this one should be first.”

Carefully, I peeled off the wrapping paper and found a thin cardboard box with a clear plastic window at the front.
DOLLS OF THE WORLD
it said, in black letters, above the window.
POLAND
it said below. Behind the window stood a small doll with honey-colored braids, a dirndl skirt, and a funny peaked cloth hat.

“Wow,” I said. “Cool.”

My mother beamed. “I saw them and I just couldn't resist,” she said. “I would have loved these when I was your age. Amy had something like them, but they've disappeared, I think.” Removed from the box, the Polish-costumed doll blinked at me. “I thought you should open Poland first,” my mother explained, “because—well, you know—your Grandma Pearl's family was from Warsaw.” I nodded but felt deeply confused. My grandmother and her sisters all had deep-black eyes and blue-black hair.

One by one, the dolls emerged: Spain, dark-haired, in a red-and-white polka-dot flamenco dress. Greece, with a black velvet vest and a wildly striped skirt. Italy, in a thin red, white, and green ensemble that seemed more a nod to the country's flag than its indigenous costumes. Being the diligent, dorky child I was, I brought each new doll into the family room and compared her dress to the portraits of native peoples in my
Encyclopaedia Britannica
set. To my surprise, they appeared to be fairly accurate.

On the eighth night, my sister and David arrived, full of chatter about the wedding and my sister's new job, in a psych unit at Cornell Medical Center. I showed her my dolls, the last of which I'd just opened: Sweden. I was still dismayed by their physical characteristics: Why was it that the Spanish doll was the one that most resembled me, when our family had come from Russia and Poland?

“Well, Polish people—actual Polish people—are generally fair,” my mother said. “And Jews can be from Poland, but they're still Jews. They don't look like Poles, usually. So maybe if there were an Israeli doll it would look like you. Or an American doll.”

I nodded. “Or a Jewish doll,” I said confidently and was surprised when my mother laughed. “I don't think they would make a
Jewish
doll,” she said. “It would be an Israeli doll.”

My sister folded the dolls' legs and sat them in a row on the floor of the family room, as if they were watching television.

“I can't remember if I still played with dolls when I was your age,” she said. “I was never that into them. I always wanted to play outside.” I nodded solemnly. My mother had said the same thing. Amy had scars all over her legs from falling off roofs and out of trees, while I had to literally be pushed out my front door when the warm weather hit. “But dolls are cool,” she said. “I love these dresses. They're really pretty.”

I thought about asking her why there couldn't be a Jewish doll but instead found myself pointing to the pastel portraits on top of the bookcase.

“Who are they?” I asked. It had not occurred to me, until the words left my mouth, that they
were
anyone—anyone other than anonymous, beautiful faces, like the faces of princes and princesses in fairy tales. And as soon as I finished the sentence, I saw that this was the wrong question to ask—and also the right one. My sister's face had gone blank and slack.

“You know who they are,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

“You do,” she insisted. I shook my head. Sighing, she pointed to the girl on the right, with dark hair and green eyes under thick brows. “That's me,” she said.

“You!” I almost shouted.

“Yes,” she said, and drew her lips in a thin line. “And that's Anita”—she pointed to the blond girl, my favorite of the three, with her shy, wide smile and kind eyes—“and that's Mark. My brother and—
our
brother and sister.”

I wasn't sure what to say, what else to ask. Suddenly, many things made sense. The questioning of God. The sudden sadness that came over my parents, like a summer storm. “There was an accident,” she said. “I was there, too—” And then she turned away. “Mom and Dad can tell you,” she said. “They'll tell you when you're old enough.” I nodded. “I'm going to find David,” she said. “Okay?” Okay, I said. Okay.

But it was never okay. They never told me. There was an accident, I knew, and my brother and sister had died. My sister, a cousin eventually revealed, had been in a coma for weeks or months—the cousin couldn't remember; “It was a horrible time,” he said—and awoke changed. “She had brain damage?” I asked. “No,” my cousin said. “She couldn't live with the guilt. She was the one driving the car.”

I
N
C
ALIFORNIA, MY
parents thrived. Our rapidly multiplying Palo Alto relatives—the cousins with whom my mother had been raised, like siblings, and their children and grandchildren—gathered weekly for potluck dinners and held big, unruly Seders. “You would love it here,” they told me. “So would Evan.” At our wedding, in October, they gave us a large, shiny brass menorah in a traditional style of interlocking arches. It was a grand-looking thing, and Evan—who preferred silver to brass, matte to shiny, modern to traditional—looked at it doubtfully, then tucked it in the linen closet, behind the million sheets and tablecloths I'd unpacked three months prior, and next to the monstrous silver platter, the origins of which I'd still not figured out. But in December, I pulled the menorah out and placed it on top of our piano, a mahogany baby grand with a cracked soundboard, inherited, along with the apartment, from my grandmother. Each night we lit the candles—I had learned the blessing as a teenager, at camp—and the glow, brighter each night, reflected back the warm sheen of the Wurlitzer, casting long shadows on our pristine walls. By the last night, Evan was won over. The menorah stayed on the piano through the new year, then moved to the old yellow bookcase in the foyer, the first thing visitors see when they enter our apartment—the first thing we see when we come home.