How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (16 page)

“I've been to Paris many times,” I confessed, “and on each trip, I looked for you around every corner.” I paused. “But you weren't there,” I accused.

“Oh, yes I was,” he said. “Alors! You just weren't looking hard enough.”

That Christmas, I received a present from my editor, a young Irish-American whose parents still spoke with a brogue, a man much amused by my tales of my first-grade Catholic year. He had sent me a clear plastic Madonna filled with “genuine water from Lourdes.” For months I had been complaining that my manuscript-in-progress required divine intervention, needed a cure. I velcroed the Madonna to my computer. Two days later, an envelope arrived in the mail, postmarked Bangor. I opened it. Inside was a card. A menorah graced the cover. Silver Hebrew letters embossed the top. Stars of David marched up the sides. Eight orange candles flamed.
Happy Chanukah,
the card read. Signed underneath were these words:
I hope you have a great holiday. Shalom. With love from your French teacher, Efthim Economu.

.

ADAM LANGER

My Father's Menorah

M
Y FATHER HAD ALWAYS BEEN THE ARTIST IN OUR FAMILY, SO IT WAS NO SURPRISE WHO
I
SOUGHT OUT FOR HELP SHORTLY AFTER
R
ABBI
N
ATHAN ANNOUNCED THAT OUR
H
EBREW SCHOOL CLASS WOULD BE HOLDING A COMPETITION TO SEE WHICH ONE OF US COULD BUILD THE BEST MENORAH.

Though my father made his living as a radiologist, art was his avocation. He didn't tell me many stories of his past, but the most inspiring ones he offered were replete with tales of his own creativity. On Thirty-ninth and Drexel Avenue, on the South Side of Chicago, at S & L Beverages—his father's ill-fated soda pop factory that went out of business not long after the beginning of World War II when sugar became scarce—my dad helped to manage the factory's accounts and spent his spare time proposing new label designs. When S & L was sued by the Pepsi-Cola Company for producing a soft drink called Pep Cola, my dad proposed changing the product name to Loyal Clown Cola, a beverage that, in his vision, would have been advertised by a cartoon clown bearing a bouquet of balloons. My grandfather didn't take his son up on this proposal. While my father was still in high school, he worked part-time for the old
Chicago American
newspaper, designing layouts for Montgomery Ward advertisements. And on weekends, he took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The house on Mozart Street, on the northwest side of the city in West Rogers Park, where my parents moved shortly after the births of their first two children, was, and still is, more than forty years later, a treasure trove of my father's artistic projects—some completed, some abandoned. Most blend whimsy with practicality and demonstrate my dad's talent for finding alternative uses for common objects. In a side room in our basement, a model train set is supported by barium barrels discarded from my father's radiology practice. The cardboard barrels, often beautified with collages made from covers of my father's favorite magazine, the British humor biweekly
Punch
, serve multiple functions in the Langer basement: storage, ornamentation, furniture. In one of those barrels is the preliminary model of a fountain that my mother always wanted my dad to build for our backyard garden.

Old pairs of pantyhose also found alternative uses in our basement. Placed on the end of a stick, they could be used as nets for trapping insects for school science projects; attached to the hose running out of the back of the washing machine, they directed soapy runoff water into the industrial sink.

In the basement room known to us as “the Pool Room,” because of the regulation-size Brunswick pool table in it, all the furniture was designed by my father: pale orange, plastic chairs separated from each other by oblong tables with holes specially designed to hold ashtrays and drink cups; globe-shaped light fixtures operated by the slight turn of a golden key; a bar, which also occasionally functioned as a projection table for slide shows and eight-millimeter films that my father shot. These films were viewed on a screen that could be pulled down to conceal a compact Zenith stereo system and a collection of records—my father liked listening to bagpipe music, Peggy Lee, and, occasionally, wolf calls from an album produced by
Natural History
magazine; he once played that record at top volume with the windows open in order to scare our Orthodox Jewish neighbors into thinking that a wolf pack had moved in on Mozart Street.

Elsewhere in the house on Mozart Street are other examples of my father's artistry: a sketch he drew of my sister at age twelve seated at his desk, completing her homework; the view of Michigan Avenue from one of his office windows; sketchbooks filled with charcoal and pencil drawings, predominately cityscapes. Although my father's artistic tastes tended to be rather traditional, he did have a surrealist's penchant for framing artifacts that wouldn't typically be found in frames—an uncut sheet of dollar bills from the U.S. Treasury, a sheet of postage stamps commemorating the American bicentennial.

Few of the actual artworks on the walls of our house, save for a Ben Shahn poster in our living room, represented the work of any well-known artists. There was a painting of a school bus filled with children completed by my sister in grade school; also, photographs my brother or I had taken on various trips. Most of the original paintings were the work of Louis Katnic, one of my father's X-ray technicians, who had been wounded during World War I, and whose depictions of race cars, Mount Fuji, and one sad clown seated beside a sad, white poodle adorned our walls, not necessarily for their artistic merit but for the artist's loyalty and friendship to my father.

I don't remember much of my sister's bat mitzvah—held in my parents' basement when I was about three years old—save for some stray details, such as the fact that one of my sister's friends gave her a Blood, Sweat & Tears album featuring the song “Spinning Wheel”; also, my father went to his barber on that day and returned with an even shorter than usual crew cut, sporting an earring, and saying that he would attend the event dressed as Mr. Clean; and, most of all, the paintings my father created for our basement laundry room, which was where a good deal of the bat mitzvah action would take place.

Framing a mural depicting an idyllic picnic scene—complete with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, bumblebees with rolling eyes, and a bisected bottle of Coca-Cola, a Miller High Life can, and a coffee cup to give the mural a three-dimensional aspect—were two thick, floor-to-ceiling heating pipes that my father had adorned with paintings of cheerful animals: a monkey, an owl, a yellow fish with green scales. Whenever I think about the day that will come at some point—when my mother moves out or sells the house on Mozart—this is what I sometimes feel I will miss most: not the front stoop, where I played Pinners or Ball-Against-the-Wall after school; not my bedroom, with its aqua-colored walls; not even my mom's pristine garden or her porch or my sister's canopy or my brother's chess set or my books or my manual Royal typewriter, but these simple, joyful paintings. And I wonder if there would be a way to write into any sales contract that, no matter who takes control of the premises, these must be preserved.

And then there were the artistic projects that involved the whole family; in these, my father truly excelled. The silent Super 8 films that my father shot may lack professional performances or a concise narrative flow, but these liabilities are more than compensated for by top-notch set and costume design: my headdress-clad brother playing an Indian brave banging on an elaborately painted cardboard drum; my first forays into motion-picture acting in literary adaptations—wearing a papier-mâché tiger mask and emerging from a garbage drum while playing the title role in
The Tiger and the Teapot;
picking construction-paper blueberries off a tree painted on a basement wall while playing
The Blueberry Pie Elf
.

I needed my father's help more than anyone with these and other family art projects, for I was, without a doubt, the worst artist in my family.

I do not say this to be self-effacing; I am merely stating fact. From an early age, I could write a decent story or take a fairly well-composed photograph. I was hardly a star musician, but I could muddle along with my piano, violin, or clarinet. When it came to art, however, I was an unmitigated disaster. My sister inherited my father's skill for artistry and design. My mother could always draw a reasonable boat. My brother perfected a signature cartoon character—a smiley-faced, bow-tied gent with a squiggle of hair emerging from the top of his head. But I'd live in eternal terror of seemingly endless Sunday drives in which my father would take all of us to the sloped lawn near the Adler Planetarium to sketch the Chicago skyline.

The concept of perspective completely eluded me. I couldn't draw buildings, and when I tried to draw people, I always stumbled when it came to arms, legs, or necks. For a month, the students in Mrs. Lerman's art class painted a mural on the subject of war, and since I could not draw a tank or a gun or a soldier, I was given the only responsibility of which anyone thought me capable: drawing flags. I must have drawn hundreds—French flags, Japanese, and Italian, though not the American flag, for the proper distribution of stars and stripes was far too complicated for me. Recently, I came across an old report card; my art teacher wrote, “Adam tries very hard, but it is difficult for him to succeed in this area.”

What little success I enjoyed in art was greatly abetted by my father, who, during my early grade school years, tried to inculcate in me the dual pleasures of art and medicine. He would encourage me to read a chapter about Anton van Leeuwenhoek in Paul de Kruif's
Microbe Hunters,
and he would try to teach me to draw Chicago White Sox pitcher Bart Johnson (a figure considerably more intriguing to me than Leeuwenhoek) by viewing Johnson's photo in the
Chicago Daily News
sports section not as one image, but as many separate squares that could be copied individually. He took me to his medical office at 720 North Michigan Avenue and taught me how to recognize tuberculosis and diverticulitis. And he helped me take my useless,
Sesame Street–
inspired bottle-cap collection and turn it into something more practical; with his close instruction, I made a map of South America by pressing the bottle caps into the top of a Styrofoam container that had once held a dozen Pfaelzer's steaks.

My father helped me make a golden giraffe out of papier-mâché
, helped me script Super 8 films for a JCC filmmaking class based on shorts he'd seen produced by the National Film Board of Canada, taught me how to use his prize Exakta camera, with its special film- editing blade, and made me my very own Chicago Blackhawks jersey, with an Indian Head painted on the front and my name stenciled on the back.

During grade school and my first two years at Hebrew school, my father was Cyrano de Bergerac to my Christian de Neuvillette—hiding behind the eaves and allowing me to take credit for an artistry that was not my own. For school Halloween pageants at Daniel Boone Elementary, I had no passion for the store-bought masks of my classmates, no interest in their hackneyed ghost and warlock costumes. I wanted my costumes patterned after disguises worn by Charlie Chaplin in his early, two-reel films, which my mom and I would take out of the library and watch at home in our basement. And so my father used construction paper and paint to dress me as a totem pole and a tree, thus allowing me to take home prizes in two separate pageants.

I had an idea for a board game that I would create for a project assigned in Mrs. Kantz's reading class. The game was based on Monopoly but set in Chicago, with miniature cars used as game pieces. My father drew the game on posterboard and made the automobiles out of construction paper, thus allowing me to become one of the only students to receive a passing grade on the assignment.

I even nabbed a Certificate of Merit and Honorable Mention from Lincoln Federal Savings and the Chicago Board of Education for a poster promoting thrift, which compensated for my lousy penmanship by using cut-up words from the covers of my dad's
Americana
magazines.

“I bet your mom helped you do that,” a third-grader named Jim Kotowski told me. I could respond with absolute honesty, “No, my mom didn't help me at all.”

A
MENORAH DOES NOT
require a particularly complicated design, but the only one I knew was the one that we kept in our dining room cabinet—a dull, tarnished model about nine inches high with eight arms of equal height and a Star of David behind the
shamash
holder. The candleholders were stained black with years of accumulated burnt wicks and wax drippings. So when Rabbi Nathan made the announcement regarding the menorah competition, I was stumped—I couldn't conceive of a menorah made out of anything but metal. Maybe I could work with paper or cardboard or wood, I thought, then figured that they would all burn, and I certainly didn't have any idea how to bend or shape metal.

K.I.N.S. Hebrew School of West Rogers Park was not a lavishly funded institution. The classrooms were small and cramped, desks were lopsided more often than not, and the only field trips I remember taking were to a yeshiva in Skokie and a matzo factory on Touhy Avenue. Thusly, the prizes that were being offered for the menorah competition were predictably frugal—a gift certificate for a free pizza at the Tel Aviv Kosher Pizzeria, a record of Jewish folk songs recorded by Theodore Bikel, a plastic chess-and-checkers set. But more important than any of these prizes to me was the fact that the three top vote getters would be displayed in our classroom window for all passersby on California Avenue to see. Which was reason enough for me to attempt to coax my father into helping me with my menorah design.

Although I was not yet eleven years old at the time of the competition, the period of my artistic collaboration with my father had already entered its decline. Perhaps he sensed that I was getting old enough to complete projects on my own. Or maybe he had simply grown weary of my artistic incompetence and realized that I would never become quite the son he had envisioned—it is true that, around this time, although my brother had already entered medical school, my father stopped taking me to his office and instead began recommending that I eventually pursue a career in law, a profession for which he had little respect. Or possibly my father had problems of his own that he chose not to divulge and did not want to be bothered with my silly menorah competition. I honestly cannot say.

If I were writing a novel or a short story, I would invent some crisis or turning point here—a family argument, a profound revelation, an unmendable rift between my parents. And I would present the menorah competition as one boy's desperate effort to bring his family closer together. But the sad truth is that I don't know why my Halloween costumes stopped being fanciful creations inspired by Chaplin films; nor do I know why my father stopped shooting Super 8 films or painting the walls of our basement. And as for the menorah competition, all I remember is the fact that I wanted to win and see my eight candles lighting the way up California Avenue, and my father, though he had demurred every time I had asked him up until the night before the competition deadline, ultimately agreed.