How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (13 page)

Exactly a year after their move, my parents returned to New York for a visit. For a few days they stayed with Evan and me on the Lower East Side—the vases and fruit knives and fondue pots they'd bequeathed us now neatly stashed in our crumbling kitchen—before heading upstate to visit with my sister, who had returned to her family. My sister and her husband had not, of course, been able to buy a new house—or even an apartment—and after a brief, disastrous stay in a friend's cottage (they'd flooded the place; the friend was suing), they'd moved into a residence motel, of sorts, with a two-story medieval knight in its parking lot. My parents were not pleased. “Amy's a blonde,” my mother sighed, wearily, into the phone at the Poughkeepsie Holiday Inn (they'd dismissed the knight-guarded motel as “sleazy”; a fair assessment, I would soon discover). “Not just a blonde, a
platinum
blonde.”

That weekend, my husband and I drove up the Taconic and checked into the Holiday Inn. Moments later, my mother burst into our room, suggested that Evan play a round of golf with my father, and hustled me off on some invented errand. As soon as we hit Route 9, she said, “It's all gone. Everything is gone.”

I didn't understand. “What's gone?”

“Everything,” she said. “Everything. She didn't make the payments on the storage facility. Not even one. They sent her three warnings, then they auctioned everything off.”

“You're kidding,” I said, for this seemed a real possibility to me, more possible, somehow, than my sister's losing everything, the material sum of my parents' life together. (Later, when I told a close friend what had happened, she was shockingly nonplussed. “Amy fucked up again,” she said. “Big surprise.”)

“I should have given you Grandma Pearl's love seat,” my mother said.

“And the menorah,” I said. She gave me a funny look.

“What menorah?”

“
Our
menorah,” I said, with a hint of impatience.

“I didn't give Amy our menorah,” she said. “What would Daddy and I use?
We
still need to light the candles, don't we?” I assented that they did. “I love that menorah,” she said, with a smile. “We've used it for years. And you know what's funny? I can't even remember where it came from.” This was indeed funny, coming from a woman who could recall the provenance of every dress she'd ever placed on her back. “Why would we give Amy our menorah?” she asked again.

“You said—” I began, then stopped. What was the point? Then, suddenly, I remembered the portraits—the pastel portraits of Amy, Anita, and Mark. Had she given them to Amy? I felt slightly panicky at the thought of this. “Hey,” I said. “What's Sons of Israel?” I asked instead, surprising myself.

“Sons of
Israel
?” she said, all trace of laughter gone. “It's the synagogue in Nyack. Why?”

“Nyack, our Nyack? Where we lived when I was a baby?” She nodded. “There's a platter. It was in one of the boxes you gave me. From the sisterhood—” Suddenly, I felt uncomfortable. This was not, I was sure, something she would want to talk about. Not now, certainly, but maybe not ever. And I had known this; this was why I'd waited so long to ask.

She nodded again and swallowed. “We were founding members,” she said. “Back before you were born. Way back. Mark had his bar mitzvah there. Before the accident—” I nodded quickly to cut her off. If you had asked me, at the time, I would have said I wanted to spare her the pain of talking about my brother and sister. But now I suppose it was a selfish move: I was terrified of what she might say. She went on anyway. “Afterward, we just couldn't go back. With everyone feeling sorry for us. We were always reminded of them. Everywhere we looked. We had to move away.”

For a moment, we sat, and then she unbuckled her seat belt and, with a grin, pointed to the T. J. Maxx. “Should we go shopping? It seems like we deserve some new stuff.”

“Sure,” I said.

As we walked across the cracked pavement, along the rows and rows of nearly identical cars, she put her arm around me and I remembered:

“My dolls,” I said. “Amy had my dolls.”

“No, she didn't,” my mother said quietly.

“She
did,
” I said, hating the slight whine that crept into my voice. I was supposed to be the strong child, the mature child, the wise child. I was the child of their old age, the child who would take care of everything, who would right all my sister's wrongs and replicate every joy of those I was conceived to replace. I was the child who never asked for anything. But I wanted my dolls. “You accidentally gave them to her. Just like the butterfly sheets.”

“No, I
didn't,
” she insisted, her voice rising, and I knew, for sure, that she was going to cry. We were approaching the sidewalk, the threshold of the store, where rack after rack of clothing awaited her gimlet eye, her expert knowledge of cut and drape and fabric and make. “I would
never
give Amy your dolls. How could you say that? You loved those dolls. They were your
friends
.”

“But I didn't find—”

“I packed them away in a box, a ski box, a square box with a handle—”

“A
ski
box?” I asked.

“A ski
boot
box,” she said. “A Salomon box. Wasn't there a Salomon box?”

There was, I told her, and guided her inside.

That night, we made an attempt to eat dinner together as a family at a steak house favored by my youngest nephew, then six. But my mother was furious and couldn't even look in the direction of my sister, who was indeed as blond as Madonna, with bangs like Sandra Dee's. After the waitress took our order, Amy began sobbing. My teenaged niece looked like she wanted to hide under the table. My brother-in-law pretended everything was fine. Eventually, Amy left the table and never came back. We spent the rest of the night searching for her. The next day, Evan and I drove home in silence, through a hot, heavy rain. In the front closet, on the highest shelf, next to my ice skates and Evan's basketball, I found the black-and-white box—I'd saved it, as a teen, because I'd liked the design—brought it into our bedroom, and opened it up. The dolls were packed in layers, like candy. I pulled out the Japanese lady, the china lady with her parasol, a black-haired flapper doll, the Russian doll, her wiry hair disintegrating. And there, below them, were the Dolls of the World, their bright costumes a tangle of rickrack and ribbons and wide-brimmed hats and black Mary Janes, their blue eyes still blinking, their cheeks still dewy and fresh, their hair still shiny and thick. One by one, I pulled them out—their plas­ticky scent still strong, still familiar after all these years—and read off the names of their countries, imprinted in gold on the bottoms of their shoes. Spain, Mexico, Holland, Poland, Greece, Italy, France, Sweden.

“Hello,” I said to them. “Hello,” I said.

“You're still here,” I said. “You're home.”

TOVA MIRVIS

Chanukah Glutton

T
HE CANDLES ARE LIT, THE SONGS SUNG, AND THE FRENZY IS UNDER WAY. “
P
RESENTS!” MY SONS SHRIEK.
T
HEY'VE BEEN PLANNING WHAT THEY WANT SINCE LAST
C
HANUKAH, SCRUTINIZING CATALOGS, INFORMING RELATIVES, BEGGING, PLOTTING, PLEADING.
B
Y THE TIME THE HOLIDAY HAS ACTUALLY ARRIVED, THEIR GLEE HAS REACHED TOWERING PROPORTIONS.
I
HAVEN'T EVEN SET THE GIFT-WRAPPED PACKAGES ON
the floor when they grab and tear into them with a rapacity I had forgotten they possessed. Seconds later, our living room is an orgiastic banquet of Lego and Fisher-Price, the wrapping paper and ribbons scattered like carcasses around the room.

As responsible, presumably conscientious parents, we, of course don't buy presents for every night. But in addition to the one or two we buy, there are gifts from grandparents and aunts and uncles, many of whom are at our house for this first of many nights of celebration. As best I can, I ration the presents, stagger big ones and little ones, give books even though, to my writerly embarrassment and chagrin, my older son is of the belief that books do not count as presents. I manage to hide a few gifts for a later date, to be pulled out in moments of parental desperation. I wish we had done what a circulating e-mail suggested: designate one night for big gifts, one for small, one for homemade, one for charity. We've tried to emphasize the other parts of the holiday. We've donated to local toy drives. My kids know the story of the miracle. They know the blessings and the songs, from the Debbie Friedman Chanukah CD that has played, for the past month, in a continuous loop in our car. But even so, ask my kids what their favorite holiday is, and they will scream “Chanukah!” Ask them why and they will scream the answer with glee.

As the kids construct a miniature city on our living room floor—the Playmobil police station next to the Lego firehouse and playhouse, transportation between them provided courtesy of the Fisher-Price school bus and the giant Tonka dump truck—I go into the kitchen, ready to fire up the frying pan. In this holiday devoid of much ritual, the process of calling my grandmother for her recipe (which I then lose from year to year), and then hand-grating the potatoes and onions makes me feel like it's Chanukah. But even though it's her recipe, I've never been able to master the delicate lacy latkes my grandmother produces. Mine are thick and hefty, leaving an oil slick on the paper towels where they drain.

I'm determined to eat only one. The week before Chanukah may not be the best time to join Weight Watchers, but a post-baby five pounds has bothered me for the three ensuing years since my second son was born, so long that it's getting harder to truthfully blame them on a pregnancy. Filled with optimism and resolve, and the impending holiday notwithstanding, I decided to join, bringing home from an introductory meeting and weigh-in my point-counting kit, my booklet to look up each food I ate, and a calendar in which to record every bite.

But faced with latkes, my willpower lasts briefly, and soon I've got my own feeding frenzy going on in the kitchen. I'm just tasting them, I tell myself, to make sure I've seasoned them enough. Then I'm just having my one latke now, before dinner. Then I'm just eating two, still a reasonable number. As I keep surreptitiously eating latkes, my sister, who is visiting from New York, wanders in to keep me company. We stand over the frying pan, talking and picking at the latkes. She's done well with her gift choices for the kids: Blues Clues Boogie Woogie Juke Box and Lego Blizzard Blaster have risen to the top of the pile and are being played with to great delight. Despite my misgivings, it is a nice sound to hear, their exuberant thrill, their reveling in the gifts.

In our family, gift giving tapers off by the time you reach adulthood, but my sister and I reminisce about our childhood Chanukahs. Of course, there are other things we remember besides the presents. We remember rifling through the box of candles and choosing the ones for our menorahs, either arranging multicolored patterns or opting for the seemingly righteous alternation of blue and white. And my mother playing “Maoz Tzur” on the piano, as we, in our none-too-melodious voices, sang along. But overshadowing these memories is the image of myself as a toy-crazed kid.

First there was Baby Alive, who peed, pooped, and vomited after being bottle-fed different powdered formulas. I would die, I thought, if I didn't get Baby Alive. I cried until I got it, and undeterred by the inevitable disappointment when those bodily functions didn't work as advertised, I cried for the Snow White china doll, then for the corresponding seven dwarfs. To my further writerly embarrassment, I remember my horror, one night, one year, when my mother dared give me a book for a present. Most of all, I remember the anticipatory delight when my parents went out a week or so before the holiday on a mysterious errand, and then later, knowing that the presents were hidden somewhere in the house. They were
in the house
! Not able to settle for waiting, my siblings and I would search the premises. We always found them, because though my mother went to the effort of hiding them, she usually chose the same spot, the cabinet above the washing machine, onto which we would climb to catch these sacrosanct glimpses of what was to come.

“I've got to stop eating these,” I finally say to my sister. By this point, I feel stuffed. My face feels coated in oil, as if I've not only ingested it but bathed in it. Why did I eat all these? I berate myself. In the face of such excess, the pleasure quickly fades. I've spent my Weight Watchers points not just for the day but for the week. The only way to recoup this expenditure will be to fast for the duration of the holiday.

“Do you think I could bake the rest of these?” I wonder, only halfway done with my potato mixture and already having used a whole bottle of oil, more than I usually use in a few months of cooking.

But there's no such thing as baked latkes. Well, technically there probably is. If there exists salmon gefilte fish, tricolored matzo balls, white-bean-and-lamb cholent, surely somewhere out there, in a gourmet low-fat kosher cookbook, is a recipe for baked latkes. But Chanukah commemorates not the miracle of the potato but the miracle of oil. Without an abundance of oil, doesn't a potato pancake cease to be a latke, or at least to be one that is relevant to Chanukah?

It's not only the miracle of oil that commemorates a little becoming a lot. The other, less mentioned part of the holiday is the military victory where the few Maccabees defeated the many Greeks. As long as I'm counting, it's not just the oil and the Maccabees that were scarce in number. In the Talmud, there are only seven pages that discuss Chanukah, a scant number compared to Purim, another nonbiblical holiday, which has both the Book of Esther and an entire tractate in the Talmud detailing its laws. And not to spoil the fun, but the current celebration of Chanukah itself is a case of something small becoming large, a decidedly minor Jewish holiday coming to occupy a prominent space in American Jewish life.

In those few Talmudic pages is the (relatively, I suppose) famous debate between the two rival sages Hillel and Shammai as to whether to ascend or descend in the number of candles lit each night. On most topics, Jewish law is decided according to Hillel, and in this case it is too. Shammai, who bears—perhaps unjustly—a reputation as a more curmudgeonly scholar, thought that we should begin with eight candles and reduce the number each night. The more magnanimous Hillel believed in starting with one candle and adding to that each subsequent night.

It was this debate that we learned about in Jewish day school, when it was time to turn to Chanukah. We took sides in the debate, acted it out, searched for the symbolic meanings in the two opinions. Do we look at what has passed or what is to come? Do we increase our celebration each night or decrease it? we asked, in a Talmudic version of the question about the glass being half empty or half full. But still, you couldn't fill a few weeks of class time with this. So while for Passover we filled notebooks with laws, bringing home photocopied sheets with various diagrams of the required amount of matzo to be consumed at the Seder, Chanukah was a minor blip on the calendar, a waystation between Sukkot and Pesach. These eight days didn't hold a candle to the life-halting fall holidays or to the domestic upheaval that is Passover cleaning, where running a toothpick along the grooves of a dining room chair in search of crumbs is considered normal, even required.

One can only imagine what Hillel and Shammai might say about all this gift giving: Do we add or take away, diminish the festivities or increase them? But as a relatively recent phenomenon, presents aren't mentioned in a classic rabbinic discussions. (Traditionally, Chanukah gelt was given, which evolved into the giving of chocolate coins, though I am loath to imagine what would happen if I handed my kids either a quarter or a yellow mesh bag of chocolate coins and said, That's it for tonight.) Dreidels and latkes make few appearances too. But what is discussed, and indeed required by the rabbis, is the obligation to give thanks. That, in fact, is one of the central themes of the holiday, one that is generally forgotten once the festivities are under way.

Rather than make the obligatory Christmas reference, I prefer to invoke the American celebration of Thanksgiving. There too is an abundance, with its banquetlike table crowned by a turkey and all its fixings. But even after I emerge from that table, having gorged on stuffing (it's not only latkes that are my weakness), the holiday doesn't have a particularly gluttonous feel to it. And I think it's because the abundance is tempered by gratitude, and by the realization that it didn't have to turn out this way.

Just as one vial of oil didn't have to become eight. Too little didn't have to become enough. And, in fact, it didn't, for so many generations, and still doesn't for so many people. The extra oil, the twenty-thousand-piece Lego set, even dearly departed Baby Alive should feel like a celebration of abundance. So long as the gratitude part isn't just the quick thank-you at the end of the evening but a central, defining tenet of the holiday. The menorah burns brighter when you know that you really had only enough oil for one day, when the remaining seven days of light truly feel like a gift.

Which is not to excuse commercialism or materialism, not even to justify overeating; it is hard to recognize gifts when we are so accustomed to getting them. And in what at least in my experience is the dizzyingly busy and ego-damaging endeavor called parenting, it's hard to impart this message or any message. And so, above the din of the present assembling and the searching for AA batteries to power all these new electronic toys, I hear another sage opinion. It's the voice of the Weight Watchers leader, around whom I had felt sheepish in the first place. Having heard stories of people trying to lose thirty, fifty, seventy-five pounds, these five pounds hardly seemed reason enough to be there. “Portion control,” she said, and to underscore the point, she wrote it, in all caps, on the dry-erase board. It's not that some foods are bad while others are good, she then expounded. You have to know what your body needs. Learn to recognize when you feel satisfied.

Where does that point of satisfaction lie? Somewhere between rigid limits and orgiastic frenzies, somewhere between one latke and the to-remain-untold number that I consumed. Next year, I promise myself, we will actually implement some greater present-control plan. For at least one of the nights. Or maybe for two. And when my kids do bask in the muchness that is before them, I want them to at least see it not as their due but as an abundance, for which we should be immensely grateful. Maybe next year, even if I'm no longer counting Weight Watcher points, I will find a recipe for baked latkes. Or at least oven-fry them. Meanwhile, a few days into the holiday, the frenzy has
begun to subside. At least until their birthdays, my kids are spent, sated, stuffed. As for me, I'm sick of latkes. Improbably, I think of a song from an upcoming holiday, which my kids will relearn when we switch the CD from Debbie Friedman's Chanukah to Paul Zim's Passover songs.
Dayenu.
It's enough.