How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (17 page)

Within a half hour of that grudgingly spoken agreement, my father created something so easy and perfect that I couldn't help but feel somewhat ashamed that I had been unable to think of it myself. The design was classic Seymour Langer—a mixture of the whimsical and the pragmatic that created new uses for found objects. From the kitchen junk drawer, where my dad kept his rubber bands, his rulers, his flashlight, and his matchbooks, he found a rectangular slab of wood and a sheet of golden tinfoil. He wrapped the slab in a section of the foil, then asked me to go to the porch, where we stored all of our board games, to find a box of old blocks. Once I had found the blocks, he selected nine wooden cylinders of differing heights. He drilled a hole in each, then wrapped them in the gold foil and glued them to the slab. Presto! A golden menorah.

The next afternoon, I brought my menorah to Rabbi Nathan's Hebrew school classroom, where a few of my classmates were already displaying theirs on the windowsill that gave onto California Avenue. I sized up the competition and declared myself an early favorite. The other constructions were either too unoriginal—menorahs made out of store-bought products such as Lincoln Logs or Tinkertoys—or too elaborate to be the work of a Hebrew school student—for instance, Yakov Golnick's twisting bouquet of soldered metal that was clearly the brainchild of his father, an engineer. What I particularly liked about my father's design was that it was creative enough to win admiration, but simple enough that an inspired student in Rabbi Nathan's
gimel
class conceivably could have devised it without any adult assistance.

After evening prayers, we carefully surveyed the menorahs with all the solemnity for a trivial cause that a group of 1950s homemakers might have brought to a blueberry-muffin-baking contest. We then ranked our top three choices on secret ballots. I was careful to put myself in first place, with my friends Avram Levine and Chaya Persky following behind, and to leave Yakov—whose father's labor seemed to be getting the most attention—off the ballot entirely.

The first sign of trouble came on the way out to recess, where we were to play Nerf football while Rabbi Nathan tallied up the ballots. Behind me, I heard one of my philistine fellow students say, in a voice that was probably not as hushed as she assumed it to be, “But it's just some wood wrapped in tinfoil.” Titters ensued.

By the time we had returned from recess, I had resigned myself to a second-place finish, understanding that, to a class of ten- and eleven-year-olds, Yakov's flashy presentation would most probably beat out my father's subtle wit. But when Rabbi Nathan announced the winners, I had trouble concealing my disbelief or sense of outrage. Yes, Yakov Golnick would be enjoying a free pizza at the Tel Aviv, but my father's menorah didn't even finish in the top three. Again, if I were writing a novel, I would invent some meaningful reason why my menorah didn't win—maybe my father had written a secret message on the base of the menorah, such as “Adam needs to grow up and shouldn't rely on his father to do his work anymore, so don't vote for the schmuck.” But nothing like that happened. I just didn't win. My classmates thought that, at minimum, three menorahs were better than my dad's.

Rabbi Nathan encouraged all of us whose menorahs wouldn't be displayed in the windows of our classroom to bring them home and enjoy them with our families, but I didn't bring mine home; I left it there on the windowsill, and at home on Chanukah, our family lit the candles using the same silver menorah as always. When I returned to Hebrew school after our winter holidays, only three menorahs remained in the classroom. Doubtless, mine was already in the trash.

Looking back on the anger and frustration I felt upon losing out in the menorah competition, I see not only the poor sportsmanship and sense of entitlement of someone who thought he needed to win at everything, but also the sadness of a boy who was seeing the slow disappearance of the one thing he shared with his father. The truth is, my dad and I never talked much. Ours was not a relationship based on games of catch and walks in the woods, of man-to-man talks and scout camp. Art was really the only area in which we collaborated, and we had lost to Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and Yakov Golnick's father.

At any rate, after the menorah competition, I remember only one other time when I called on my father's artistry to bail me out. I was in a high school history class, and my teacher, Mr. Alan Mumbrue, had xeroxed blank maps of the United States, upon which we were supposed to draw various items of historical or geographical significance. On one map, we were to draw bodies of water; on another, trails. And so on. I had procrastinated work on the assignment, and the night before it was due, I realized that I had left the blank maps in my locker at school. At which point, after observing my panic, my dad offered to draw me a map of the United States; he did it freehand on posterboard in less than hour. I stayed up past midnight drawing trails, rivers, and railroad lines, and delivered the map on time to Mr. Mumbrue, who promptly rewarded me with a C for using posterboard instead of the blank maps he had provided.

As for my father, he seemed to become less and less interested in art as the years drew on. The large-scale projects were a thing of the past. His backyard fountain remained unfinished, stored in its barium barrel. He no longer took photographs with his Exakta camera or movies with his Super 8. The only times he would draw were when my mother or sister would coax him into doing so for a birthday or some other celebration, but even then, his heart rarely seemed in the process. Shortly after I graduated from college, I took a trip to Europe with my brother. In Paris, we bought our father one hundred colored pencils and a sketchpad, but I don't believe he ever used them. Whether this was because of the beginnings of arthritis or for some more profound existential reason, the novelist in me might have an idea or two, but the son really cannot say.

Eventually, after he retired from medical practice, my father did begin to draw again—the view out our front window on Mozart Street, his own arms and hands. Most of what he drew were memories of a life that had ended long before I was born; over and over, he drew with what seemed to be crystal clarity his father's old pop factory on Thirty-ninth and Drexel and the S & L Beverages' delivery truck, which was, I guess you might say, his way of staring at a snow globe and saying, “Rosebud.”

A little more than a month and a half after my father passed away, at the age of eighty, my wife and I spent our first Chanukah with our seven-month-old daughter. We gathered around one of our back windows; I lit the
shamash,
said the
brachot
over the candles, and sang the Chanukah songs that I remembered from Hebrew school—“Maoz Tzur,” “Dreidel Mine (Spin Spin Spin),” “Who Can Retell (the Things That Befell Us).” It was my first Chanukah as a father, my first Chanukah without a father.

Not long after that Chanukah night, I was talking on the phone to my mother. She said that she had been considering buying my brother and his family a menorah for Chanukah, but that he had told her he didn't need one because he was making his own. What was he using to make it, I asked.

“Tinfoil,” said my mother.

AMY KLEIN

An Israeli Chanukah

I
T IS A COLD
D
ECEMBER MORNING IN
I
SRAEL, AND ALTHOUGH IT IS DARK IN MY ROOM FROM THE
TRISSIM,
THE BLACKOUT WARTIME SHADES,
I
KNOW IT IS LIGHT OUT, DESPITE THE RAIN PELTING AT MY WINDOW LIKE BULLETS:
RAT-TAT-TAT, RAT-TAT-TAT.
S
TEADY AND SURE, AS IF WINTER WILL LAST FOREVER.

The air is chilly and I am loath to slip my naked feet onto the frigid
balatot,
the marble tiles that are also a signature of every Jerusalem home, by regulation built out of white stone and floored with ugly speckled squares.

The radio shrieks on, bleeping eight piercing whistles to signify the news: “Kol Israel, shalom, it's eight o' clock, Sunday morning, December twenty-fifth, and here is the news . . .”

Oh God. I have to get out of bed. It's Sunday. Sunday: a working day. Sunday is a workday in Israel. I'll never get used to this, I think, but still I run out of bed and into the shower, all thoughts of cold escaping me as I hurry to get to the office, to sneak in there without anyone noticing that I am late again, hurrying to get to my work so it'll look as if I've been doing it furiously all morning.

Which is why I don't realize until much later in the day, until after I've sufficiently pounded through my work like a robot on speed, what today is. Besides Sunday. It's Sunday, December 25. Christmas.

Here we're nearing the end of Chanukah, but the rest of the world is just waking up to open presents. They are decking the halls with boughs of holly, celebrating the birth of Jesus, or twelve days of shopping or being home with the family or whatever it is people do when they celebrate Christmas. The thing is, I have no real clue.

Even though I'm twenty-five years old, I don't know much about Christmas except what I've seen on TV or in movies or in store window displays. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and all my relatives, friends, teachers, and even acquaintances were Orthodox Jews, or some maybe just Conservative Jews but religious nonetheless. No one I knew celebrated Christmas. And I mean
no one
. I'd heard of Jews who had “Chanukah bushes” or even Christmas trees, but those might have been urban legends, fabricated cautionary tales. Who knew if they were even true?

Not I. When I was growing up, December was for Chanukah. Like most of the families on the block, we placed our menorahs in the front window in order to publicize the miracle of the Temple oil that lasted for eight days instead of one, of the God that helped a small Jewish nation win the war against the powerful Hellenists.

Our menorahs stood on a rickety, old wheeled stand covered in tinfoil, tinfoil that was covered in globs of colored candle tears. By the eighth day of the holiday, our window front was ablaze in a haze of forty-five candles, a testament to the individuality of our religion, where each of us got our own menorah. My father had his oil lamp, the only one that was technically kosher, since the oil burned for an hour, as decreed by Jewish law. While he surgically squirted oil into the glass bulbs, then clumsily tried to thread the short wicks with his thick fingers, we four children squabbled over which candles to use.

“I am
not
using green,” I would say, throwing the puke-colored candles over to my poor younger brother, the fourth behind
three color-conscious girls. My older sister might do red, white, and blue, for America, so maybe I'd do blue and white, for Israel. Another night she'd do pink, orange, and red, just to flash her flair for fashion. Someone, some night, would have to use all the green candles just to get rid of the remainders, an act of charity.

We each lit our masterpieces, said the blessings aloud, and then sang Hebrew songs, jaunty tunes about war and victory, with multiple harmonies and duets. First the traditional “Maoz Tzur,” God is Our Rock, followed by “Mi Yimallel”: Who Will Speak the Powers of Israel?

Then we'd pile into the living room for an hour while the candles burned, to play dreidel; or, if my father was in the mood, he'd show us how to play marbles, like he did when he was a kid. Actually, our Chanukah, in the 1970s and '80s, was really something out of the 1950s, an anachronistic re-creation of his era. We all got Chanukah gelt
—
money—instead of presents, like the other kids in my class. Year after year, despite our complaints, we still received cash, not even one dinky gift. (Some kids got eight, one for each night!)

“Presents are for Christmas, not Chanukah,” my father insisted, and he still does, to this day.

But that's how Chanukah was in the recesses of religious Brooklyn, far away from Christmas trees and Christmas carolers and midnight Mass. It was still defined by what it was not: Christmas.

That's why the move to Israel was so refreshing for me. All Jewish holidays, all the time.

A week after my college graduation, I took off for the promised land. I figured if I was going to lead a sheltered life—with only Jews, for only Jews—I might as well do it in a Jewish state. A Jewish state whose national holidays are Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Passover, and Chanukah. In Israel, on the Jewish holidays schools are closed, and businesses often are too. Trips are taken, families gather together for a meal or two and possibly, although not usually, a religious experience.

While Israel is primarily a secular country, everyone celebrates the religious holidays, often in a watered-down way (much the way Americans celebrate Christian holidays). The Passover Seder is a boozy meal with traditional foods and readings; the High Holidays are an excuse for family, apples, and honey; and Sukkot is for nature lovers, with overnight camping trips to the desert and the lush north. And Chanukah?

Chanukah is a different kind of festival, probably because it's the one of the few that can't be celebrated with a barbecue. (If there's sunshine and a day off in Israel, it's time to bring out the burgers.) Hiking is probably out of the question, too. So the main tradition that's left? Food, of course.

By early December every kiosk and supermarket has set up a presentation of open cardboard boxes filled with an array of fresh, sumptuous doughnuts. Not exactly doughnuts.
Sufganiyot:
a mound of powdered dough, with jelly, cream, caramel, or chocolate filling gushing out like a geyser (often from the wrong end).
Sufganiyot,
like potato latkes, are fried, in order to celebrate the miracle of the oil lasting eight days.

In the center of town a giant electric menorah is “lit” every night. Throngs of powder-faced teenagers gorging on doughnuts wander through the
midrachov,
the cobblestoned pedestrian square closed to traffic, until way past their bedtime—but there is no bedtime, because it's Chanukah vacation.

After we traipse through town, my roommate and I go home and light her menorah: each candleholder depicts a synagogue from around the world. We live in a small, two-bedroom apartment centrally located in the fairly Americanized Jerusalem neighborhood called Katamon.

For us, Chanukah unearths a debate that's been going on for centuries. Yes, I'm talking potato latkes: grated or mashed?

My grandmother always peeled her potatoes, then processed them into a puree. She pan-fried the latkes on the stove in a swimming pool of vegetable oil. The latkes were thin at the edges and gooey in the middle, the insides salty and smooth, like baby food.

But my roommate, a budding chef from California, came from a long line of graters. Her latkes are also fried, but they are supple and stringy, the potato strands intertwined like pieces of a puzzle.

In the end, my roommate makes both kinds, and adds a sweet-potato variation, filling the counters with bowls of potato glop, trying to get them into the pan before they turn brown from sitting out. For days to come our apartment, our clothes, our hair, and even our books will smell like latkes, but we don't think about that as all our friends come over to sample the fare. And a yearly party is born. My roommate and I move to a larger, three-bedroom apartment, still in an American neighborhood, and invite the expatriate community for more than a latkes tasting. Fifty or sixty or seventy people arrive—Americans, Brits, Australians, South Africans, and a few French and Belgians to shake it up—and they come to expect the party each year—a tradition, like lighting the menorah.

Now that I'm not in my father's house anymore, and now that I'm not near the American frenzy of gift giving, I feel it's fine to give gifts on Chanukah. Why not? Our party has a grab bag, where each person brings a small tchotchke
—
a Krazy Straw, a yo-yo, a Super Ball—nothing that anyone would ever need, which is why half the gifts are left at our house on Saturday night.

Which is why I'm late to work on Sunday morning, because I've stayed up till three
A.M
. hosting Chanukah guests. On December 24, no less. Funny to think it was Christmas Eve. It was just another Saturday night in Jerusalem.

And now it's just another Sunday, a working day for me. Christmas is almost over, and it's a relief—liberating, actually—to have almost missed it.

It's only years later that I realize the irony: I've moved to Jesus's birthplace—I live just twenty minutes from Bethlehem, maybe an hour from Nazareth—to avoid the celebration of his birth, his life.

But I suppose this is one of the reasons I moved to Israel. No, in essence, it
is
the reason I moved to Israel. To be surrounded by my culture, to live in the majority culture.

In America, despite all the politically correct inclusiveness, “holiday” means “Christmas,” and Chanukah is relegated to being
Not That Holiday.
In Israel Chanukah isn't
That Holiday,
because there hardly is another holiday. There are no TV spots wishing people a benign “Season's Greetings,” to include everyone's holidays, even newer holidays, like Kwanzaa; in Israel there are only “Happy Chanukah” ads on television because that's the only holiday there is.

It's not really all there is. People know about Christmas here. It's called Chag Ha'molad, the Holiday of the Birth, obliquely referring to the action, not the man. (They also call New Year's Eve Sylvester, like the Germans do, although Israelis probably don't know it's named for Saint Sylvester, who was pope in the fourth century
C.E.
and allegedly cured Constantine from leprosy, after converting him to Christianity.)

Cable channels run
It's a Wonderful Life
and
Frosty the Snowman,
which must leave Israelis scratching their heads—what is this obsession with snow? We American expats watch nostalgically (although there must be another word for feeling nostalgia for a holiday you never had . . .).

And people do celebrate: thousands of tourists come in to be baptized in the Jordan River, go to midnight Mass in Bethlehem, tour the churches of Nazareth.

But for most of my seven years in Israel, I'm oblivious to Christmas and all its accompaniments.

Which is why it is such a shock for me to leave.

I leave for the summer, temporarily, but summer ends and fall begins and suddenly it is Thanksgiving and I am still in America. The radio is driving me crazy with Christmas songs, TV commercials blast ads for the best Christmas sales, and a mad spell is cast over New York City, as if, in a variation on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
all the inhabitants have been infected with the incorrigible urge to shop, shop, shop.

After seven years in Israel, I find the sight of so many stores and material goods overwhelming, especially with the advent of superstores like Costco (which could feed and clothe the entire nation of Israel, if not the Palestinians too). I come to learn that “shopping” is an activity one can spend an entire day—or week!—on, which is what everyone seems to be doing for . . . Christmas.

Okay, so it's not really the shopping that bothers me, but the sensation that there's a giant party to which everyone else but me is invited: the Christmas celebration. I no longer live in Brooklyn, solely among Orthodox Jews, and now I see how the other half lives: there are office holiday parties and media holiday parties and friends' holiday parties, all with giant evergreens in the center of the room and mistletoe hanging in every other doorway. Sure, there's a table with a lonely little menorah surrounded by a couple of puny gold chocolates and pink and purple plastic driedels, but it's off to the side, almost invisible, dwarfed by the glittering gold and blue and green ornaments and lights hanging from the tree. Christmas is everywhere. And Chanukah is, once again,
Not That Holiday.

Those were my feelings my first year back here. I've been here seven now, and I've come to accept the reordering of things. Friday is now a workday, Sunday a day off. January is the New Year and September is only the High Holidays. And come November—the minute Halloween is over, it seems—those Christmas songs will be playing on the radio.

I've learned not to let Chanukah be pushed off to the side of the dance floor. I still throw huge Chanukah parties, where people bring grab-bag prizes and eat (store-bought) latkes and doughnuts. I light the menorah each night with friends and sing the same jaunty tunes of childhood. Because it's different for me now, this time around in America. I revel in my Chanukah joys because I know that halfway around the world, come December, people are celebrating Chanukah like there's no other holiday. Because Chanukah is the only holiday there is.