How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (14 page)

EDWARD SCHWARZSCHILD

My Peaceful and
Glorious Brothers

I
DIDN'T ALWAYS THINK OF
C
HANUKAH AND VIOLENCE SIDE BY SIDE.
I
'M SURE THERE WERE PLENTY OF PEACEFUL
C
HANUKAH NIGHTS DURING MY CHILDHOOD, BUT MOST OF THEM PROBABLY OCCURRED BEFORE MY MEMORY KICKED IN AND MY BROTHERS WERE BORN.
T
HERE ARE THREE OF US AND
I
'M THE OLDEST, WHICH MEANS
I
HAD ALL THE ATTENTION TO MYSELF
f
or close to two years. Then Arthur arrived on the scene. Four years after that, Jeffrey came along. Three boys, eight nights, approximately twenty-four presents. Do the math. It added up to trouble.

No disrespect to Jeffrey, and thank God he found his way here, and I would never, ever wish for fewer brothers. Still, sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier for my parents with just two of us. As my friends with kids like to tell me, two versus three is the difference between man-to-man defense and zone defense. It's tough to stop the run or block the shot when you're outnumbered. My girlfriend, however, doesn't follow sports. When I attempt to explain, she tries to persuade me to move beyond such a competitive metaphor. She talks about yoga. She claims it's not about offense or defense, winning or losing. Like everyone in the ashram or whatever you call it isn't hoping to breathe better than the person one mat over. Get that third eye open before anyone else. Anyhow, she believes that the spacing between siblings is more important than the number of siblings. In other words, she wants a big family. A Chanukah with thirty-two or forty presents, I guess. I'll need to get a raise. I'll need to get a second job. So will she.

But, for the moment, I'm discussing the past, back when my thoughts were simply about being a kid, not about having one or seven. Before Jeffrey appeared, Arthur and I shared a room, and we seemed to get along fine. We had to turn the lights off and climb into bed by a certain hour, but as long as we kept quiet we could stay up as late as we wanted. Sometimes, we'd smell popcorn being made in the kitchen, and that usually meant we were allowed to sneak downstairs and have some. More often, though, we'd keep ourselves awake by trading the various toys we stored on the shelves by our beds. The terms of those late-night trades were vague. We softly tossed what we had—Hot Wheels, Super Balls, yo-yos—back and forth. The goal was to send the objects safely and silently from mattress to mattress. To the uninitiated, it might have looked as if we were throwing things at each other. But we were sharing.

Really.

After Jeffrey was born, my parents hired contractors to add a few rooms to the house so that everyone could have their own space. I got my parents' old room, Arthur got the room we used to share, Jeffrey got what had once been the den, and my parents got a new bedroom with a private bath, as well as a new den with plenty of room for my father's small gun collection, which he kept under lock and key. We should have all been happy, right? Well, it was complicated. Mom was disappointed because after three tries, she still didn't have a daughter (though she never would have wished for fewer sons—or at least not that often and rarely out loud). Dad wasn't thrilled because he had to cook dinner more often since Mom needed to go back to work because business was bad and the construction of the new rooms had been expensive. It didn't help that she wound up working the graveyard shift as a registered nurse. She was awake when we were asleep, sleeping when we were awake. Attention was harder to come by, and Arthur, Jeffrey, and I competed for it. Dad kept telling us to behave ourselves. He cooked a lot of macaroni and cheese with chopped-up hot dogs mixed in. Fortunately, he knew how to make a mean black-and-white milkshake. And when he heated up an apple pie, he cut it into quarters, a wise way not only to avoid leftovers but also to defuse yet another fight over who got the bigger piece.

And so our five-person family went from day to day, moving as best we could between moments of relative calm and moments of minor crisis.

Then Chanukah would roll around.

There were, weeks in advance, elaborate preparations behind closed doors. That was part of the problem. No doubt Dad had good intentions. Looking back now as a guy seriously contemplating the possibility of kids, I think I can understand some of what was going on behind those doors. First of all, my father has always been highly organized. A former paratrooper in the Air Force Reserves and an ex-scoutmaster, he believes deeply in being prepared and in packing your own bags with extreme care. (That parachute needs to open!) He tends to pack his bags several weeks before traveling out of town (he's a salesman, like his father before him). Sometimes, when he can't find a particular article of clothing, he realizes it's in a suitcase that's ready for an upcoming (i.e., a week or two away) trip. Second, my father was an only child of older parents, an experience that left him longing for siblings and for a more caring mom and dad. Combine the commitment to preparation with the desire for a larger, loving family and, apparently, you get a Chanukah full of jealousy, recrimination, and time-outs.

But before all of that, before the holiday began, there were exquisitely wrapped presents arranged on the buffet in the dining room. Each of us had our own clearly labeled stack. We were allowed to pick up our gifts and shake them, and in those moments of pure possibility—the boxes might contain anything!—we could do our best to guess the contents of each box. However, we did this guesswork at our own risk. If we broke the gift, it was our own tough luck. And there was no guarantee that we were evaluating useful information, since my father enjoyed stuffing the boxes with extraneous and noisy items—marbles, paper clips, pencils. He knew how to make a sweater sound like it might be a Pachinko game. And vice versa.

Of course, we should have been grateful for whatever we were given. Our parents hadn't had much luxury in their lives, they hadn't had the opportunity to go to college, and their short vacations consisted of little more than a crowded car ride from the Philadelphia suburbs to the Jersey Shore and back again. Year after year, they worked hard to provide better lives for the three of us. We should have unwrapped their presents and rejoiced. On every one of those eight nights we should have sprinted across the room to hug our ridiculously unselfish parents. I mean, why not? Wouldn't that have been easier and more relaxing than all the fighting and shouting? We could have adjourned to the basement playroom to test out the toys together. On the nights we found clothes or books in our boxes, we shouldn't have complained that those were the worst gifts, exactly what we didn't want more of. We should have tried on the shirts, taken turns reading aloud to each other.

But, instead, night after night, we chose to break as many commandments as possible: we dishonored our mother and father, coveted the presents we weren't given, took various names in vain, including the Lord's, treated certain toys like gods, thought murderous thoughts, lied, stole, and so on. It was as if, for us, the eight nights of Chanukah created the need for eight Days of Atonement (at least!).

G
IVEN THOSE ANNUAL
struggles, it makes sense to me that the festival of lights comes from a story steeped in violence. But I didn't know how much violence was involved in the story of the Maccabees until my father gave me a copy of Howard Fast's
My Glorious Brothers
as one of my Chanukah gifts. I don't remember which year he gave it to me—I might have been eleven or twelve. Whenever it was, I'm sure I was disappointed. I probably said something charming, like “Great, another book. Just what I need.” Still, I read it. I read almost everything he gave me.

At Hebrew school, I'd heard about the oil that miraculously burned for eight days in the reconsecrated Temple, but it wasn't until I read Fast's novel that I learned how long and how viciously the Maccabees had fought with swords and hammers and their bare hands to reach the point where they could even worry about the oil and the Temple.
My Glorious Brothers
is full of bloody wars waged around Jerusalem, full of sacrifice and vengeance and death, full of descriptions like this: “With his bare hands, Judas killed [Apelles], lifting him by the neck and snapping it suddenly, as you do with a chicken, so that the wild squeals stopped and the head lolled”; “We rolled on the ground, he trying to draw his sword, I cursing the neck plates that impeded my fingers. He half drew his sword, and I stopped trying to throttle him, but beat his face in with my clenched fist and continued to beat at the bloody face even after he was dead.” In perhaps the most brutal and memorable of the many battles, the Maccabees come face-to-face with a mercenary army equipped with tanklike elephants:

Eleazar leaped ahead and alone he met one elephant that had outpaced the others. Such a sight was never seen before then or since, for Eleazar's great body arched, the hammer swung back over his head, and then it met the elephant with a crushing thud that sounded above the screaming and shouting. And the elephant, skull crushed, went down on its knees, rolled over and died. . . . Eleazar fought with his hammer until a blow from an elephant's tusk tore it from his grasp. It was not as long as it takes here in the telling. He was dead before Judas and I could reach his side.

Howard Fast was, in many ways, a heroic figure, a prolific, hardworking, and fascinating writer who fought against HUAC and the blacklist, a man more than worthy of his own essay, but I wasn't aware of that when I read
My Glorious Brothers
as a kid. I raced through those pages the same way I raced through the stories of outer space and spies and the Wild West my father had given me over the years.

Yes, I was the kind of kid who carried a paperback book everywhere I went and, like my father, I concealed each book in a special vinyl book cover so that no one could see the title. If someone asked me, “What are you reading?” I answered the same way my father answered me: “A book.” If they stubbornly tried again, asking, “What's it about?” I had my follow-up response ready. I'd flip to the end and say, “It's about three hundred and thirty pages.”

I was, as I said, charming. The sort of kid, really, who deserved no Chanukah gifts at all. Not only did I fight with my brothers, but I was also obnoxious to relatives and strangers. At the same time, however, I remained my father's son. I carefully packed my bag for school every night before I went to sleep. And I read those paperbacks.

All that reading was surely an attempt to grow closer to my father, but it wasn't a closeness that led to in-depth discussions of what we'd read. He read to escape, not to analyze. If I asked my father what he liked about a particular book, he tended to say either that the writer was able to “paint with words” or that the story kept him “turning the pages.” Then he'd tell me that if I liked that one, he had another for me. There was, it seemed, an endless supply.

But
My Glorious Brothers
was an exception because it led to a longer conversation. When I finished that novel, my father invited me into the new den, closed the door, and told me to sit down. “I'm tired of the three of you always fighting,” he said. “You're brothers. You know I wish I'd had some brothers when I was growing up. Your mother says that someday you'll realize how lucky you are to have each other. Well, I'd like that someday to be now.”

I'd heard versions of this before—I was the oldest, so I was supposed to set an example; I was supposed to be my brothers' keeper; I was supposed to be the man of the house when Dad was away, though I found that this didn't carry much weight with my mother. In any case, I said what I usually said: “I'll try.”

“I want you to try harder this time,” my father said. “I hope you learned from this book that if you and your brothers ever truly have to fight, you should learn to fight together, like the Maccabees did.”

I couldn't imagine ever fighting like the Maccabees did. I probably couldn't even lift one of their swords, let alone brain an elephant with an enormous hammer. The truth was, I had no desire to fight against my brothers. It wasn't something I planned. In the abstract, when I was alone, I loved Arthur and Jeffrey completely. But when we were together, something else took over. I
could
try harder and, once again, I promised myself that I would. “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

At that point, I figured the conversation was over. Dad would hand me another book and I'd be on my way. Not this time, it turned out.

“I want to show you a few things,” my father said. “I think you're ready.”

In the past, when my father talked about his time in the Air Force, he was self-deprecating and vague. His love for planes had always been clear—he'd often stop in the middle of a conversation to gaze up into the sky at a passing jet, as if he expected to see one of his fellow ex-paratroopers dropping down to visit—but all he'd say about those years in the Reserves was that people called him Jew-boy. He also joked that he was much taller before the 250 jumps from twelve thousand feet compacted him.

Now, in the den, with the door closed, Dad started talking about how he'd studied hand-to-hand combat. He told me there was no such thing as a fair fight. He told me you could kill someone if you hit them hard enough in the right way on the bridge of their nose. He told me the throat was a good place to punch a person. He unlocked the cabinet where he kept his guns, but instead of pulling out a gun, he handed me another book, a small manual filled with illustrated instructions about what to do if someone attacked you with a knife, if someone was choking you, if someone attacked you with two knives.

I tried to pay attention as my father explained a few basic moves—always step away from a punch, always keep your guard up and your head down. I tried to picture myself clobbering some of my school's bullies, but I couldn't get that image to come into focus. Who was I kidding? I was a scrawny boy who read paperback books. Then my father reached into the cabinet again and pulled out a rifle.